#consolidated revenues

[townpostin]

Tata Steel Reports Strong Q1 Financial Results for FY 2024-25

Tata Steel’s consolidated revenues for Q1 FY 2024-25 reached Rs 54,771 crores, with an EBITDA of Rs 6,822 crores, reflecting a robust 12.5% EBITDA margin. Tata Steel today announced its financial results for the first quarter of the Financial Year 2024-25, showcasing a significant 75% year-over-year increase in consolidated net profit, which stood at Rs 919 crore. JAMSHEDPUR – Tata Steel reported…

[twnenglish]

Comparative Analysis Of Starbucks And Dunkin' Donuts

The common person likes coffee. Because coffee includes caffeine and makes you work longer, many individuals get reliant on it. Nowadays, many believe that the name "coffee" comes from substances that keep them energized and warmed up throughout the day. There is a myth behind this story, though. Because it encourages the belief that coffee "makes a person alert," coffee is not entirely healthful. The two most well-known coffee businesses should be recognized by all coffee enthusiasts: Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. Which, however, is better in comparison?

Even though it was founded 20 years after Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks developed swiftly and is now a far larger business. While Starbucks generated over $22 billion in revenue in FY 2017, Dunkin' Brands reported sales of over $860 million. With more than 28,209 outlets worldwide, Starbucks has a larger presence than Dunkin' Brands, which has more than 20,500 points of distribution. Starbucks outpaces Dunkin' Donuts, which has around 9,200 stores, with over 14,000 outlets countrywide. By building 3,400 more locations in the United States by 2021, Starbucks plans to increase its market share in places like China, while Dunkin' anticipates adding 1,000 net new locations by the end of 2020. Starbucks has a significantly greater international expansion, as of the end of 2017, with 27,339 locations across 75 different countries. Despite the fact that Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlors rather than Dunkin' Donuts locations make up the majority of Dunkin' Brands' international locations, the business has a substantial global presence. While the company only has 3,397 donut outlets outside of the United States, it operates 5,422 Baskin-Robbins locations, compared to 2,560 in the US.

Only $5.4 million, or less than 4% of Dunkin' Donuts' entire Q1 2018 sales of $139.9 million, were generated by its international businesses. Starbucks' consolidated net revenues for the most recent quarter, which ended on April 1, were attributable to markets outside of the Americas by over 30%. Dunkin' has made aggressive plans for both domestic and foreign expansion in an effort to compete with the footprint of its primary competition. Different growth techniques, however, are the cause of the magnitude discrepancies.

Comparative Analysis Of Starbucks And Dunkin' Donuts

Franchising

The majority of Dunkin' Brands' locations. Licensed Starbucks locations are disproportionately prevalent outside of the nation as corporate-owned and operated stores account for 59% of the stores in the United States and 48.6% of the locations elsewhere.

Dunkin' Donuts has a stronger exposure to the franchise and rental revenue than Starbucks, which is mostly held by owner-operators, resulting in a fundamentally different company. This has a big impact on capital expenditures, cost structures, and income streams.

In contrast to franchised locations, company-operated stores have different operational and capital expenditure structures. Starbucks' cost of goods sold (COGS) and retail operating expenditures as a percentage of sales are significantly lower than those of Starbucks. Given that COGS is so much more important in Starbucks' earnings structure, changes in coffee bean prices have a greater influence on company profitability. Starbucks also has a greater burden of capital costs because Dunkin' Donuts is not required to buy cooking equipment for franchise locations.

Food Choices

The menu selections at Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks are significantly different. Starbucks offers a variety of baked items, including bagels, muffins, scones, and sandwiches. The "bistro boxes" that Starbucks sells separately are prepackaged lunchboxes that frequently include a sandwich, some snack-size veggies, and a tiny dessert. Among other dessert treats, they also sell tarts, cookies, and cake pops. At Starbucks, a healthy menu is also offered. They provide reduced-fat turkey bacon sandwiches with egg whites, oatmeal, spinach, feta wraps, and breakfast sandwiches. The picture on the right depicts the spinach and feta wrap. Despite what it may seem like, I can tell you that it is not appetizing. with the exception of vegetarians. Starbucks has added holiday-themed items in an effort to please its consumers. For the winter holidays, Starbucks has also added new food options, such as paninis with turkey and stuffing, carved ham and egg sandwiches, croissants with pistachio honey, gingerbread loaves, penguin cake pops, and snowman cookies. For Easter and Valentine's Day, they add cake pops in the shape of ducks and hearts, respectively.

On the opposite side, you'll find bagels, muffins, croissants, sandwiches, hash browns, and wraps from Dunkin Donuts. The main distinction between Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks is that the latter sells highly favored goods like donuts and munchkins. There is a healthy menu at Dunkin. There are several types of donuts, including glazed, chocolate frosted, vanilla frosted, and boston creme. Munchkins are most frequently found in the flavours of glazed, glazed chocolate, powdered sugar, and jelly. At Dunkin, there is a nutritious menu. Oats, multigrain bagels, vegetable egg white sandwiches, turkey sausage sandwiches, and egg and cheese sandwiches are also offered. For the winter holidays, they expand their menu to include items like Santa doughnuts, Hershey kiss donuts, and cinnamon cream cheese. For Valentine's Day, they made the heart-shaped doughnuts in the picture.

Drink Options

Small, medium and large are drinks at Dunkin Donuts sizes. At Dunkin Donuts, you may choose from a variety of hot and iced coffees, lattes, hot chocolate, iced teas, fruity iced teas, and coolatta. The coffee selection at Dunkin' Donuts includes cold brew, Americano, latte, macchiato, cappuccino, and espresso. On a hot summer day, a cool matte is a perfect beverage to sip. It is made consisting of ice, coffee, and flavoring syrup (or fruit juice, depending on the sequence). Among the flavors are caramel, mocha, raspberry, blueberry, and coconut. They added a Peeps marshmallow-flavored coffee for Easter. they added coffee with Peeps marshmallow taste. For St. Patrick's Day, they added Irish Creme coffee and espresso to their menu. Additionally, they provide peppermint mocha hot chocolate and almond joy coffee throughout the winter holidays. The word "joy" is added to Dunkin' Donuts' updated cups along with pictures of certain Christmas trees. During the fall, they provide pecan, maple, and pumpkin-flavored coffees as well as lattes.

Read This Full ARTICLE, Click Here

[aqlstar]

JVP and Cair Background - Holy Land Foundation

Okay Jumblr- are we familiar with the Holy Land Foundation and the case of USA v. HLF?

The Holy Land Foundation was the undisputed single largest Islamic charity organization in the USA, until it was shut down in 2001 after Bush added it to the list of designated terrorist organizations. It was a big deal.

Fast forward to 2007, and the US government is prosecuting a criminal case against them.

The US Court of Appeals 5th Circuit issued an opinion that summarizes the jist of the case more clearly than I can-

In this consolidated case, we address the appeals of five individuals and one corporate defendant convicted of conspiracy and substantive offenses for providing material aid and support to a designated terrorist organization. The terrorist organization at issue is Hamas, which in 1995 was named a Specially Designated Terrorist by Presidential Executive Order pursuant to authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq. Hamas was further designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, as contemplated by 18 U.S.C. § 2339B.

Although this case is related to terrorism, it does not involve charges of specific terrorist acts. Instead, it focuses on the defendants’ financial support for terrorism and a terrorist ideology. The defendants were charged with aiding Hamas by raising funds through the corporate entity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based, pro-Palestinian charity that the Government charged was created for the sole purpose of acting as a financing arm for Hamas. Although the charged conspiracy began in 1995 when Hamas was first designated as a terrorist organization, the defendants’ connection to Hamas arose much earlier. Established in the late 1980s, the Holy Land Foundation held itself out as the largest Muslim charitable organization in the United States. It raised millions of dollars over the course of its existence that were then funneled to Hamas through various charitable entities in the West Bank and Gaza. Although these entities performed some legitimate charitable functions, they were actually Hamas social institutions. By supporting such entities, the defendants facilitated Hamas’s activity by furthering its popularity among Palestinians and by providing a funding resource. This, in turn, allowed Hamas to concentrate its efforts on violent activity.

The results of the case were as follows:

Shukri Abu Baker, 50, of Garland, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted of 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering; one count of conspiracy to impede and impair the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); and one count of filing a false tax return.

Mohammad El-Mezain, 55, of San Diego, California, was sentenced to the statutory maximum of 15 years in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Ghassan Elashi, 55, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted on the same counts as Abu Baker, and one additional count of filing a false tax return.

Mufid Abdulqader, 49, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 20 years in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, one count of conspiracy to provide goods, funds, and services to a specially designated terrorist, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Abdulrahman Odeh, 49, of Patterson, New Jersey, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was convicted on the same counts as Abdulqader.

HLF, now defunct, was convicted on 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; and 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering.

The Court reaffirmed the jury’s $12.4 million money judgment against all the defendants, with the exception of El Mezain, who was not convicted of money laundering.

Here's the full press release from the US DoJ-

I promise I'll get to the part where this has anything to do with CAIR or JVP in the next post.

[ms-m-astrologer]

Transiting Sun enters Scorpio

Tuesday, October 22 - Thursday, November 21, 2024

Scorpio the Scorpion*:

• Water (emotional and soul - feeling, nurturing, hidden, sensitive)

• Yin (gravity - ingoing, receptive, intuitive, right-brained)

• Fixed (stabilizing security - concentrating, consolidating, focused, persevering, stubborn)

• Interpersonal (social - focused on others

• "I transform"

• Ruler - Mars (traditional), Pluto and the rest of the TNOs (modern); exalted - Uranus

• Color: deepest blue, so dark you can barely tell it’s blue and not black

*Gleaned almost completely from the book Astrology for Yourself by Bloch and George; the rulerships and color are my own theory/belief.)

===***+++***===

Not a pleasant, smooth, and tranquil transit - after all, it’s Scorpio! Bring on the drama and the feels.

And after all the drama and feels of Libra season, we’re all due for some self-analysis and introspective soul-searching. We may not always be comfortable with what we discover, but that’s part of the Scorpio process - becoming comfortable with the darker issues.

Try not to isolate yourself during this time. Scorpio tends to brood, and really needs others’ perspectives to keep it in line.

Allow a day or so on either side of these aspects:

Sunday, October 27 - Monday, October 28:

Sun/Scorpio inconjunct North Node/Aries, semi-sextile South Node/Libra, 4°57’

Sun/Scorpio (5°42’) sesquiquad Jupiter Rx/Gemini (20°42’)

And we’re off to a somewhat uncomfortable start. Perhaps we took on more than we can do? Asking for help is allowed!

Friday, November 1, 12:47 UT - New Moon, 9°35’ Scorpio. Xx

Monday, November 4:

Sun/Scorpio (12°26’) sesquiquad Neptune Rx/Pisces (27°26’)

Sun/Scorpio trine Saturn Rx/Pisces, 12°47’

Election Eve in the US. Don’t believe the Neptunian hype - the media wants ratings and revenue, and will do whatever it takes (including obfuscate or outright lie) to acquire them. Thank goodness for that steadying Saturn trine!

Sunday, November 10 - Monday, November 11:

Sun/Scorpio (19°12’) sesquiquad North Node/Aries (4°12’), semi-square South Node/Libra (4°12’)

Sun/Scorpio inconjunct Jupiter Rx/Gemini, 19°33’

Sun/Scorpio inconjunct Chiron Rx/Aries, 19°59’

And we return to biting off more than we can chew, except this time our health is involved. We have to be honest about our capabilities - and willing to “let go and let God/dess” when necessary.

Wednesday, November 13 - Sun/Scorpio sextile Ceres/Capricorn, 22°13’. Very domestic. We can find solace in our “families.” Maybe some holiday planning happens. We’re happy to putter. Take Grandma out for lunch!

Friday, November 15 - Saturday, November 16:

Full Moon, 24°01’ Taurus (21:28 UT)

Sun/Scorpio semi-sextile Pallas/Sagittarius, 24°09’

Sun/Scorpio (24°16’) semi-sextile Vesta/Libra (9°16’)

Sun/Scorpio inconjunct Eris Rx/Aries, 24°39’

Sun/Scorpio opposite Uranus Rx/Taurus, 25°14’

Disruptions and eruptions during this Full Moon! It’s weird energy. Something illumined that’s really surprising and extreme - while the inconjumct and oppositon are crackling around us, we’re using those semi-sextiles to try to figure out what to do.

Monday, November 18 - Sun/Scorpio trine Neptune Rx/Pisces, 27°13’. A nice way to finish Scorpio Season. If there are things we need to let go of, this energy helps with that. Spiritual vibes of forgiving and of being forgiven.

———————————

Venmo Mary_Brack

PayPal MaryVBrack

Thank you!

[thoughtportal]

Big Media’s lobbyists have been running a smear campaign trying to paint the Internet Archive as a greedy big tech operation bent on stealing books—which is totally absurd. If you’ve ever used the WayBack Machine, listened to their wonderful archives of live music, or checked out one of their 37 million texts, it’s time to speak up. With publishing revenues approaching 30 billion per year in the US and monopolistic consolidation among publishing corporations, the publishing industry is incredibly powerful and moves aggressively to silence dissent. 

The Internet Archive’s determination to keep fighting is a big deal! 

Here are ways to support:

Sign the petition above.

Join 25+ major civil and human rights organizations in calling for a congressional investigation into surveillance and erasure in digital books—efforts that the Internet Archive is actively fighting against—at https://www.battleforlibraries.com/congress/ 

Sign the Internet Archive’s petition calling on publishers to restore 500,000 books that have been removed from the Archive due to the lawsuit: http://letreadersread.com/

Share your story about how having half a million books removed from the Internet Archive has impacted your reading or research—either on X or via this form.

Post about why you love the Internet Archive and give them a tag. Please share with your community why this institution is important to you. Use the hashtag #DigitalRightsForLibraries!

Invite your friends here, to BattleForLibraries.com, and ask them to sign the petition, too!

Help spread the word! Click on any of the images below to download and set as a temporary profile picture.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Vittoria Elliott at Wired:

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn. On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media. This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics. “It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so. “He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.” Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread. “There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says. Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

Ever since Elon Musk gotten ahold of X (formerly Twitter), he has turned it into a playground for far-right extremism.

[whencyclopedia]

Siege of Charleston

The Siege of Charleston (29 March to 12 May 1780) was a major military operation during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Hoping to establish a foothold in the American South, British commander-in-chief Sir Henry Clinton led an attack on Charleston, South Carolina, capturing the city after a six-week siege. It was one of the worst American defeats of the war.

Background: Britain Invades the South

For the first three years of the war, British strategy had focused on the northern United States, with most of the fighting taking place in the New England colonies and Middle Colonies. But after several British campaigns in the north met with failure, Britain shifted its attention to the American South. The south was supposedly bursting with Loyalists, who were awaiting the arrival of a British army to revolt en masse and cast off their revolutionary governments. Additionally, the south produced most of the profitable cash crops of the United States, including indigo, rice, and tobacco. The Americans were using the revenue from these crops to purchase war supplies. If the south were to fall under British control, therefore, the Americans would be less capable of funding their war effort.

Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of the British army in North America, decided to probe the American defenses in the south before committing to a full-scale invasion. In November 1778, he dispatched a small expeditionary force of 3,500 men to seize control of Savannah, Georgia. On 29 December, after a brief skirmish with the Americans, the British captured Savannah before consolidating their foothold in the south by occupying the surrounding towns. But their control of Georgia would not go unchallenged, as Major General Benjamin Lincoln, commander of the Southern Department of the Continental Army, was determined to prevent the state from falling back under British subjugation. After joining forces with 4,000 French troops under Charles Henri Hector, Comte d’Estaing, Lincoln laid siege to Savannah on 16 September 1779. But the siege took longer than anticipated and d’Estaing, anxious that his fleet was left vulnerable to British attack, grew impatient and ordered a direct assault. However, the Franco-American assault on Savannah, which took place on 9 October 1779, was bloodily repulsed. The dispirited allies abandoned the siege of Savannah shortly thereafter, leaving Georgia in British hands.

When Clinton heard the news of the British victory at Savannah, he was elated, referring to it as “the greatest event that has happened in the whole war” (Boatner, 988). The Savannah experiment having proved successful, Clinton immediately turned his attention toward a larger prize: Charleston, South Carolina. Boasting a population of 12,000 residents, Charleston was one of the four most important cities in British North America (the others being New York, Boston, and Philadelphia). It was the largest city in the south, its bustling port the center of much of the region’s wealth. Clinton himself had tried to capture it three years earlier but had been defeated at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island (28 June 1776); he was not about to let the city defeat him a second time. On 26 December 1779, Clinton placed German General Wilhelm von Knyphausen in charge of British-occupied New York City, leaving him with 10,000 men. Clinton, his second-in-command Lord Charles Cornwallis, and the remaining 8,500 British and German soldiers then boarded a fleet of 90 transport ships sitting in New York Harbor. Escorted by 14 Royal Navy warships under Vice Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, the transports then weighed anchor and set sail for Charleston.

Continue reading...

[mariacallous]

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn.

On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media.

This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics.

“It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so.

“He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.”

Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread.

“There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says.

Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

The actual composition of the site’s user base has changed, with people who had been kicked off the platform for violating Twitter’s community standards being let back on under Musk. Trump himself was famously unbanned, but a wide array of avowed white supremacists, conspiracists, and neo-Nazis also flooded back onto the platform, including far-right pundit Nick Fuentes, QAnon proponent Liz Crokin, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and election denier Mike Lindell.

The platform’s new blue check system, which allows anyone willing to purchase a subscription to get a marker that previously confirmed they were who they claimed to be next to their name, has also contributed to the growing misinformation problem. While the system used to be free and reserved for verified public figures, politicians, and journalists, anonymous accounts like @Sprinter99800 and @ShadowofEzra are now able to use the algorithmic boost offered by the subscription model to spread misinformation about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, respectively. Blue check accounts are, further, incentivized to spread outrageous claims because they can be paid based on how much engagement their posts get.

“He has a very obvious political agenda,” says one former member of Twitter’s policy team. Looking back at the last few years, they referred to Musk’s release of what he dubbed the “Twitter Files,” a cache of internal documents. The documents, according to Musk, revealed the political biases of the platform’s previous leaders—according to others, they showed mundane interactions with researchers and government employees—but also led to the doxing and harassment of former trust and safety employees and misinformation researchers.

Musk has also used the platform to put his thumb on the scale of politics outside the United States.

Last year, after Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection, his supporters stormed the country’s legislature, in an echo of January 6, 2021. In April, Musk defied an order from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to remove the accounts of far-right actors who, the court said, violated the country’s laws by undermining confidence in the country’s electoral processes. X then released the court’s confidential orders to the Congressional Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which then made them public. Experts and government officials at the time said the move was a deliberate attempt by a foreign billionaire to undermine the country’s democratic institutions.

While Musk has repeatedly asserted that he took over Twitter to preserve its commitment to free speech, the company has complied with censorship from right-leaning governments. Last year, the company complied with an order from Turkey’s authoritarian government to censor content ahead of the country’s elections and blocked a BBC documentary about India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi.

Instances like this, the first former employee tells WIRED, show that Musk is an entirely different actor than other tech CEOs, unbothered by the kinds of laws or norms that could be used to reign in another company. Musk doesn’t appear to be cowed by penalties like fines for spreading misinformation that are meant to keep billionaires and companies in check to protect the public interest.

“Regulation is not written for overtly malicious actors,” says the first former employee. “We don't have good regulation anywhere in the world that thinks about corporate entities like that … and it’s certainly not how we are used to treating a man who owns multiple companies.”

Because Musk’s own politics and priorities appear so clear, even decisions made seemingly without a political agenda can be interpreted as part of one. Last week, the X account for White Dudes for Harris was booted from the platform, causing many supporters of the vice president to wonder if this was Musk’s own political preferences playing out on X in real time. But a third former Twitter trust and safety employee who spoke with WIRED says it appears to be a pretty standard suspension that can happen when someone who has been banned from the platform in the past makes a new account. “Whoever set up the account most likely had an email address, IP address, or phone number that matched an account that had previously been banned on the platform. That would automatically be a penalty.”

The former employee says that the fact that people could not be sure if it was the result of Musk’s politics, or just a good old-fashioned moderation snafu is the real problem: “The fact that we have to ask those questions just shows the trust is gone. The misinformation has won.”

In an interview with the Atlantic, Musk said he would accept the results of the election should Harris win. But whether that will hold true in November is still cause for concern. Last week, after the Venezuelan elections wrapped in what experts said appeared to be a stolen victory for the country’s current president Nicolás Maduro, Musk railed against Maduro on X, even challenging him to a physical fight.

“What does it look like if this same sort of advocacy happens come November or December, in which he really believes that the election has been stolen or the vote counts aren't there?” the former employee says. It’s the same type of question that the former trust and safety teams were asking themselves about Trump during the 2020 presidential election. “It's very eerily kind of the same situation, except it’s the CEO and owner of the platform making those decisions, who also has the final say in content moderation decisions.”

[markrosewater]

More a note and I don't even know if there is a solution to my problem: I am a 100% limited player with a tight budget. With play boosters being more expensive then draft booster, due to budget, this just leads to me playing less. Also inflation is additional stress on my budget. I feel, that I'm getting less and less enfranchised and engaged because now I do less drafts. I fear loosing MTG as a hobby. I mostly play in my LGS and don't have a private playgroup, where we could play cheaper options like cube. I know WotC is a company and has to show growing revenue but it just sucks, that I may loose this great hobby and game because of monetary aspects.

I hear your frustration. The popularity of set boosters meant when we consolidated draft boosters and set boosters, they were crafted more to match set boosters. We essentially made set boosters draftable.

I will note that the price of boosters didn't go up. Play boosters cost the same as set boosters, and, like set boosters, you do get a higher amount of rares/mythic rares, on average, to match the higher price point. But yes, if all you do is draft, the individual drafts got more expensive.

None of this change was done to somehow squeeze extra money out of people. We just took the most popular booster product and sold it at the same price, but with added value (more cards per booster and made it draftable).

[fatehbaz]

Scientific knowledge and technology played a significant role in the expansion of colonial rule in India and the consequent incorporation of the Indian sub-continent into the [commercialized, imperial] world-system [...]. The colonization of nature, territory and people in British India led to a mutually constitutive interplay [...].

By the time the East India Company managed to establish a foothold in Bengal in 1757, [...] [a]fter the acquisition of the formal rights to collect revenues in the states of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the issue of obtaining accurate information about the extent of the produce, the population and other social statistics assumed significance. The detailed scientific surveys [...] were possible due to the large number of amateur scientists employed by the Company. Over time, these surveys played a major role in the transformation of a trading company into a colonial state [...] and the incorporation of India into the modern world-system. [...]

---

Considered the founder of British geography, James Rennell arrived in India in 1760 barely three years after the decisive battle of Plassey. Rennell’s cartographic skills caught the attention of the governor of Bengal presidency, who was ‘anxious to inaugurate some system for correcting and revising the geography of Bengal’ [...]. Rennell’s mapping out in great detail the area under the Company was indispensable for the rationalization of the extraction of surplus, administrative strategies and techniques of control. [...] In 1777 he left for England, and two years later he published the Bengal Atlas that led to his election to the Royal Society. [...] With reference to the ‘science wars’, [...] Rennell’s work was also incorporated in the key text[s] of the time, C. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) [...] [and] the work of [...] Humboldt and Carl Ritter. Rennell’s surveys contributed to the organized [...] surveys [across wider regions of India] that followed after the defeat of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799. [...] [Mysore's] sustained resistance to British power had a major impact on the general consciousness in Britain. [...]

Thomas de Quincey extolled the virtues of the ‘British bulldog’ against [...] the tyrannical ‘Bengal tiger’ [...]. The scientific knowledge that emerged as a consequence of the surveys of Mysore contributed [...] to the consolidation of administrative power [...]. The key figures associated with the surveys [included] Colin Mackenzie [...]. Mackenzie’s ethnographic notes contributed to imperial perceptions of the [...] [people of South Asia] and the grid of anthropological knowledge through which administrative power was deployed. [...]

---

Nature, culture and colonial power were inextricably implicated in the production of scientific knowledge and of colonial society. [...] The establishment the Public Works Department in 1854 provided fresh impetus for the deployment of science and technology in grappling with problems precipitated by colonial rule. Declining revenues for the Company focused attention on gigantic irrigation and other public works projects. [...]

The irrigation projects were expanded to include the railways (1849), the telegraph (1852), and the postal system (1850). Together, they represented the largest state-sponsored enterprise undertaken anywhere at that time. Lord Dalhousie, under whose tenure these projects were inaugurated, declared the railways, the telegraph and the postal system as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’.

His predecessor William Bentinck had already termed the railways ‘the great engine of moral improvement’ in a country ‘cursed from one end to the other by the vice, the ignorance, [...] the barbarous and cruel customs that have been the growth of ages under every description of Asian misrule’ [...]. Later observers were to wax ever more eloquent on the role of the railways in the modernization of India. For W. A. Rogers of the Indian Civil Service, railways ‘are opening the eyes of the people … they teach them that speed attained is time, and therefore money, saved or made’ (Adas1989: 226). The importance of a network of railways, connecting the cotton plantations of the Deccan region to the ports became significant especially during the 'cotton famine' of 1846 [...].

---

Almost immediately after Dalhousie left India, secure in the belief that the double engines of moral improvement and legitimacy were at work, the rebellion of 1857 put an end to such expectations. The rebellion was partly triggered in response to the wide-ranging transformations [...] triggered off by the introduction of [these] new [colonial infrastructures] [...].

In the end, the rebellion was violently suppressed by the very technologies that had precipitated it in the first place. [...]

---

All text above by: Zaheer Baber. "Colonizing nature: scientific knowledge, colonial power and the incorporation of India into the modern world-system". British Journal of Sociology 52(1), pages 37-58. April 2001. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[probablyasocialecologist]

Over the past decade, deregulation and the growing dominance of streaming video have laid the groundwork for a media landscape where just three companies—Disney, Amazon, and Netflix—are poised to be the new gatekeepers. This report from the WGAW details how these three companies have amassed power through anticompetitive practices and abusing their dominance to further disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and push down wages for the creative workforce. Pay and working conditions for writers have become so dire, and media conglomerates so unresponsive, that 11,500 writers went on strike in May 2023. Without intervention from antitrust agencies and lawmakers, consolidation will continue to snowball, leaving the future of media in peril. These new gatekeepers have amassed market power through mergers and other anti-competitive practices, offering an alarming window into the future of media. Disney has grown through a series of multibillion-dollar acquisitions, using its power to reduce film output, shut down competing studios, foreclose independent content from its distribution networks, expand control of the labor market, and force creators to give up financial participation in future licensing revenue. Amazon has gained a sizeable footprint in media in a short time by utilizing the well-documented playbook critical to its ascendance as a tech company. Though anticompetitive behavior and vertical integration, Amazon has harmed competitors, privileged its related business, and abused employer leverage to underpay writers. Netflix was once an innovative competitor, but is now using its position as the largest streaming service in the world to abuse its leverage as an employer, decrease innovative content spending and raise prices for consumers. The company has cut out independent producers and severely underpaid writers in multiple areas, and a series of recent acquisitions signal its intent to further increase dominance and market power in order to reduce innovative content investment.

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-fi prompt from @thisarenotarealblog:

There's a street near me that has eight car dealerships all on the same lot- i counted. it mystifies me that even one gets enough sales to keep going- but 8?? is there something you can tell me that demystifies this aspect of capitalism for me?

I had a few theories going in, but had to do some research. Here is my primary hypothesis, and then I'll run through what they mean and whether research agrees with me:

Sales make up only part of a dealership's income, so whether or not the dealership sells much is secondary to other factors.

Dealerships are put near each other for similar reasons to grouping clothing stores in a mall or restaurants on a single street.

Zoning laws impact where a car dealership can exist.

Let's start with how revenue works for a car dealership, as you mentioned 'that even one gets enough sales to keep going' is confusing. For this, I'm going to be using the Sharpsheets finance example, this NYU spreadsheet, and this Motor1 article.

This example notes that the profit margin (i.e. the percentage of revenue that comes out after paying all salaries, rent, supply, etc) for a car dealership is comparatively low, which is confirmed by the NYC sheet. The gross profit margin (that is to say, profits on the car sale before salaries, rent, taxes) is under 15% in both sources, which is significantly lower than, say, the 50% or so that one sees in apparel or cable tv.

Cars are expensive to purchase, and can't be sold for much more than you did purchase them. However, a low gross profit margin on an item that costs tens of thousands of dollars is still a hefty chunk of cash. 15% gross profit of a $20,000 car is still $3,000 profit. On top of that, the dealership will charge fees, sell warranties, and offer upgrades. They may also have paid deals to advertise or push certain brands of tire, maintenance fluids, and of course, banks that offer auto loans. So if a dealership sells one car a day, well, that's still several thousand dollars coming in, which is enough to pay the salaries of most of the employees. According to the Motor1 article, "the average gross profit per new vehicle sits at $6,244" in early 2022.

There is also a much less volatile, if also much smaller, source of revenue in attaching a repairs and checkup service to a dealership. If the location offers repairs (either under warranty or at a 'discounted' rate compared to a local, non-dealership mechanic), state inspections, and software updates, that's a recurring source of revenue from customers that aren't interested in purchasing a car more than once a decade.

This also all varies based on whether it's a brand location, used vs new, luxury vs standards, and so on.

I was mistaken as to how large a part of the revenue is the repairs and services section, but the income for a single dealership, on average, does work out math-wise. Hypothesis disproven, but we've learned something, and confirmed that income across the field does seem to be holding steady.

I'm going to handle the zoning and consolidation together, since they overlap:

Consolidation is a pretty easy one: this is a tactic called clustering. The expectation is that if you're going to, say, a Honda dealership to look at a midsize sedan, and there's a Nissan right next door, and a Ford across the street, and a Honda right around the corner, you might as well hit up the others to see if they have better deals. This tactic works for some businesses but not others. In the case of auto dealerships, the marketing advantage of clustering mixes with the restrictions of zoning laws.

Zoning laws vary by state, county, and township. Auto dealerships can generally only be opened on commercially zoned property.

I am going to use an area I have been to as an example/case study.

This pdf is a set of zoning regulations for Suffolk County, New York, published 2018, reviewing land use in the county during 2016. I'm going to paste in the map of the Town of Huntington, page 62, a region I worked in sporadically a few years ago, and know mostly for its mall and cutesy town center.

Those red sections are Commercially Zoned areas, and they largely follow some large stroads, most notably Jericho Turnpike (the horizontal line halfway down) and Walt Whitman Road (the vertical line on the left). The bulge where they intersect is Walt Whitman Mall, and the big red chunk in the bottom left is... mostly parking. That central strip, Jericho Turnpike, and its intersection with Walt Whitman... looks like this:

All those red spots are auto dealerships, one after another.

So zoning laws indicate that a dealership (and many other types of commercial properties) can only exist in that little red strip on the land use map, and dealerships take up a lot of space. Not only do they need places to put all of the cars they are selling, but they also need places to park all their customers and employees.

This is where we get into the issue of parking minimums. There is a recent video from Climate Town, with a guest spot by NotJustBikes. If you want to know more about this aspect of zoning law, I'd recommend watching this video and the one linked in the description.

Suffolk county does not have parking minimums. Those are decided on a town or village level. In this case, this means we are looking at the code set for the town of Huntington. (I was originally looking on the county level, and then cut the knot by just asking my real estate agent mom if she knew where I could find minimum parking regulations. She said to look up e360 by town, and lo and behold! There they are.)

(There is also this arcgis map, which shows that they are all within the C6 subset of commercial districting, the General Business District.)

Furniture or appliance store, machinery or new auto sales - 1 per 500 square feet of gross floor area

Used auto sales, boat sales, commercial nurseries selling at retail - 5 spaces for each use (to be specifically designated for customer parking) - Plus 1 for each 5,000 square feet of lot area

This is a bit odd, at first glance, as the requirements are actually much lower than that of other businesses, like drive-in restaurants (1 per 35 sqft) or department stores (1 per 200 sqft). I could not find confirmation on whether the 'gross floor area' of the dealership included only indoor spaces or also the parking lot space allotted to the objects for sale, but I think we can assume that any parking spaces used by merchandise do not qualify as part of the minimum. Some dealerships can have up to 20,000 gross sqft, so those would require 40 parking spaces reserved solely for customers and employees. Smaller dealerships would naturally need less. One dealership in this area is currently offering 65 cars of varying makes and models; some may be held inside the building, but most will be on the lot, and the number may go higher in other seasons. If we assume they need 30 parking spaces for customers and employees, and can have up to 70 cars in the lot itself, they are likely to have 100 parking spaces total.

That's a lot of parking.

Other businesses that require that kind of parking requirement are generally seeing much higher visitation. Consider this wider section of the map:

The other buildings with comparative parking are a grocery store (Lidl) and a post office (can get some pretty high visitation in the holiday season, but also just at random).

Compare them, then, to the "old town" section of the same town.

There are a handful of public parking areas nearby (lined in blue), whereas the bulk of the businesses are put together along this set of streets. While there is a lot of foot traffic and vehicle passage, which is appealing for almost any business, opening a car dealership in this area would require not only buying a building, but also the buildings surrounding it. You would need to bulldoze them for the necessary parking, which would be prohibitively expensive due to the cost of local real estate... and would probably get shot down in the application process by city planners and town councils and so on. Much easier to just buy land over in the strip where everyone's got giant parking lots and you can just add a few extra cramped lanes for the merchandise.

Car dealerships also tend to be very brightly lit, which hits a lot of NIMBY sore spots. It's much easier to go to sleep if you aren't right next to a glaring floodlight at a car dealership, so it's best if we just shove them all away from expensive residential, which means towards the loud stroads, which means... all along these two major roads/highways.

And if they're all limited to a narrow type of zoning already, they might as well take advantage of cluster marketing and just all set up shop near each other in hopes of stealing one of the other's customers.

As consumers, it's also better for us, because if we want to try out a few different cars from a few different brands, it's pretty easy to just go one building down to try out the Hyundai and see if it's better than a Chevy in the same price group.

(Prompt me on ko-fi!)

[silvermoonphantom]

A Miko Ban in the Meji era, Kagura dances, and other such things.

Miko traditions have been around in Japan since before 300 B.C. Early miko would go into trances and convey the words of the gods, perform ritual dances, and a variety of other religious and political functions. 

Pre-Meji (300 BC - 1868 AD), there were Miko who worked at shrines, and there were also wandering Miko who performed prayers and invocations for a payment, independent of a shrine.

In the Edo period, some of the wandering miko became indentured, like geisha or prostitutes, and the revenue they made went to their masters. They gained a reputation for also offering prostitution services. 

During the Meji Restoration, the Japanese government went HARD on revamping the Shinto shrine system, and demanding its religious services would support the imperial regime. It wanted to separate Shinto practices, asserting that shinto was a secular thing - a matter of the state. It tried to separate Shinto from folk religions and Buddhism. In 1873, the Miko Ban was put into place.

This ban heavily restricted what services a miko could offer. It prohibited wandering miko from engaging in anything that resembled Shinto practice - including prayer. After this ban, ALL wandering miko were now found to be on the wrong side of the law, and state-sanctioned shrine-miko could not perform any duties which implied she was being an oracle for a spirit, or being possessed by one.

Mikomai (miko dances) including Kagura dances, originally implied that the miko was posessed by a spirit/kami, or was inviting a spirit/kami to be present and watch. These dances were also banned, except at certain state-sanctioned shrines, where they were still heavily restricted to eliminate the appearance of possession.

Mitsuyoshi Tomita of the Kasuga Taisha shrine, along with many other miko, used pleading, protesting, and outright defiance of the law to convince the government that traditional miko dances, music, and performances like Kagura were cultural practices worth preserving - for the sake of history and national pride, if not for faith. 

After decades of the miko ban, (and decades of miko doing these songs/dances/performances ANYWAY) the Ministry of the Imperial Household accepted their assertion of cultural significance, and allowed the miko dances & songs to be performed again.

In 1900, the Shrine Bureau was created, as the Meji government attempted to reduce the political influence of Shinto, by bringing the remaining shrines under government jurisdiction and make them easier to control. They worked to abolish smaller Shinto shrines, and consolidate their functions with larger regional shrines.  

The Meiji government ascribed to a ‘Secular Shrine Theory’ which proposed that the shrines weren’t religious in nature, but just a sect of Japanese traditions. The government argued that Shinto was a non-religious moral tradition and patriotic practice, to give the impression that they supported religious freedom. Therefore, since it was a public space for the purpose of rituals of the state, the state ought to be able to change and rearrange the shrines, like they would with roadways. 

By 1914, 70,000 shrines (out of about 200,000) were demolished across Japan, under this policy. In particular, the Mie Prefecture had about 90% of their shrines abolished.  On November 10th 1940, after a lot of coordination and training to ensure a perfect performance, kagura dances were performed simultaneously in every shinto shrine in Japan. This was to celebrate that they were allowed to dance again.

Read more about restrictions to Miko in the Edo period, heading into the Meji Restoration:

--

Listen. This started as a research project for Demon Slayer (Set at the start of the Taisho Era, (in 1912-1915). This was supposed to be for a little 'fun fact!', a slight fleshing out of a single character's background.

The fool's crown sits ever-shining upon my brow.

[treethymes]

“In his study of [the international coffee] market, scholar Joseph Nevins finds that the big changes occurring between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s are related to the “longer-term struggle over the distribution of income related to the crop.” In the early part of this period, growers pulled in an average of around 20 cents for every dollar of coffee revenue. They were aided by an agreement called the International Coffee Accord (ICA) of 1962, which acted as a sort of cartel plan, constraining and arranging supply. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration supported the ICA and its concessions to Third World workers as a Cold War tool to head off communist onshoring in the Western Hemisphere. But as the U.S. strategy changed, the country and its free-market Latin American proxies abandoned the ICA in 1989. The results were quick: By the mid-1990s, the grower share was down from 20 to 13 percent. Roasters, traders, and retailers in the drinking countries improved their share from 54 to 78 percent. That big, fast shift was partly thanks to repressed grower wages, partly thanks to repressed domestic service wages in the West, partly thanks to consolidation in the industry, and partly thanks to new high-priced coffee drinks. Starbucks went public in 1992, and if it seemed to be growing like a tech company in the ’90s, that’s because both thrived on the same social changes.

“Worsening conditions for workers in Mexico and in the rest of the Americas pushed people north, rapidly increasing the undocumented immigrant population in the United States. The Bracero program was over, but the jobs still needed doing. Caught in between employers who were hiring migrants and nationalist restrictionists, the Reagan administration legalized a few million undocumented workers while increasing border enforcement. Even though the vast majority of narcotics came into the country via legal ports of entry, conservatives and liberals alike framed border enforcement as a central front in the war on drugs. Increasing the costs of crossing couldn’t stanch the increase of people—they were responding to larger factors: Out-migration from Mexico’s coffee-producing areas increased after the dissolution of the ICA, for example. This tendency intensified after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, pushing Mexico further toward cheap manufacturing exports and cheap imported American corn.

“The glut of cheap labor and commodities in this period undermined labor protections in the center as well as on the periphery, and the United States lost union jobs at a rapid clip. Reagan undermined the bulwark of government jobs by bringing Boulwarism to the White House. His signature incident occurred in his first year, when he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers and decertified their union. To the press, the president quoted an air traffic controller who quit the union and reported to work as ordered: “How can I ask my kids to obey the law if I don’t?” Once again, questions of individual criminality put the Reaganites on firm ground. Organized labor took to rearguard action, holding on to its institutions by agreeing to two-tiered contracts that reduced benefits and protections for new or future members. Capital shook off the midcentury labor agreement like a bad habit, reducing its accountability to its own workers the way it previously reduced accountability to the broader communities. The second part didn’t require as many votes.”

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sam Levine at The Guardian:

A judge dismissed a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit on Wednesday, saying the far-right outlet did not file the case in good faith. The ruling from US bankruptcy judge Mindy Mora in the southern district of Florida comes as the outlet faces significant defamation cases from two Georgia election workers and a former Dominion Voting Systems employee who say the site spread false claims about them after the 2020 election.

Calling the site’s assets “eye-catching”, Mora noted that they were 22 times the size of its liabilities. The company reported nearly $3.1m in revenue in 2023. “TGP remains both balance sheet and cash flow solvent. There is no present financial distress, no looming foreclosure sale, no prospect of a market crash. There is only the State Court Litigation in which TGP must defend itself. That’s not a basis for bankruptcy relief; it’s the justice system in operation,” Mora wrote. The proceedings had also revealed that the company may have been operating in Florida for three years without a proper business license and could owe back taxes to the state, Mora wrote in her 28-page ruling. The Gateway Pundit declared bankruptcy on 24 April saying it was doing so as a litigation strategy in the defamation cases filed against it. Filing for bankruptcy pauses all civil proceedings against a business. The bankruptcy dismissal means the defamation cases can probably continue.

The bankruptcy filing came as lawyers representing Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers, were completing discovery in their defamation case and had informed the company it intended to take depositions of the Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and his twin brother, Joe Hoft, who is a contributor. “This is a common tool for reorganization and to consolidate litigation when attacks are coming from all sides. It allows TGP to consolidate this lawfare in one court for ultimate resolution,” Jim Hoft wrote at the time. “While we greatly appreciate the Judge’s careful consideration of the facts of this case, we believe some of the findings are not supported by the existing law or underlying circumstances presented at the hearing or otherwise contained within the record. The Debtor continues to consider its options and will move forward in its legal and business path,” Bart Houston, a lawyer representing the company, said in a statement.

The defamation cases are being closely watched because they are testing whether US libel law can be an effective tool to combat misinformation. The collateral bankruptcy cases are seen as an effort to try to avoid accountability for lying. A judge earlier this month also dismissed a bankruptcy case filed by Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay the two Georgia election workers $148.1m for defaming them last year. After the 2020 election, the Gateway Pundit published several articles falsely saying that Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, both election workers in Fulton county, Georgia, were involved in a plot to scan ballots multiple times and steal the election. The claims were immediately debunked and both women have been cleared of any wrongdoing. The false claims were amplified by Giuliani and other Trump allies and became central to their efforts to overturn the election results. When Trump called Georgia’s top election official and asked him “to find 11,780 votes”, he mentioned Freeman by name.

Judge Mindy Mora dismissed far-right propaganda outlet The Gateway Pundit’s bankruptcy filing on Wednesday because the company filed it for bad faith reasons.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Why Lula is suddenly concerned about Brazil's public spending

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is reinforcing Brazil’s commitment to fiscal consolidation in response to investors' concerns.

During a prime-time speech that was widely broadcast on Sunday, Lula said, "I will not abandon fiscal responsibility. Among the many life lessons I received from my mother... I learned not to spend more than I earn." 

After taking office in January 2023, Lula repeatedly promoted increased public investment to boost growth. However, investors have raised concerns as higher spending could create inflationary pressure.

"From the beginning of the Lula administration, domestic investors were suspicious that the government's fiscal strategy was limited because it anchored the debt reduction to an increase in revenue from tax collection and not a reduction in expenses. Now, this strategy is also being doubted by international investors, who have taken resources out of Brazil because of an increase in risk perception, which forces the government to adopt a more assertive tone in relation to its fiscal commitment," Luciano Rostagno, chief strategist at EPS Investimentos, told BNamericas.

Continue reading.