The White House is expected to inform Gov. Cuomo of Trump’s bailout support Friday afternoon.

Bill Beaumont has been re-elected as the chairman of World Rugby, the governing body has announced.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services insisted the contract with BYD does not have to be made public.

Democrats aim to approve new spending for states, individuals and testing in the next coronavirus relief bill.

Times columnist Bill Plaschke is joining the airwaves with a morning show that kicks off this week on all-sports radio station the Beast 980 AM.

The White House is expected to inform Gov. Cuomo of Trump’s bailout support Friday afternoon.

Elizabeth Warren touted her own “universal workers’ bill of rights" and said of New Yorkers, "I’m glad to see people who are picking up this idea at the state level."

The White House is expected to inform Gov. Cuomo of Trump’s bailout support Friday afternoon.

The Jets will start their 2020 campaign on the road against the Bills.

The Jets will start their 2020 campaign on the road against the Bills.

The founder of the Museum of California Design organized shows related to women in design and California pottery.

Bill Withers, known for acoustic soul hits "Lean on Me" and "Ain't No Sunshine," died Monday of heart complications, his family said Friday.

The attorney general suggests that he's in sync with Trump's 'liberation' tweets.

The Bill will amend the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO) and will provide greater clarity on the additional areas which fall to the responsible person or duty-holder for multi-occupied residential buildings

Tourism officials estimate 75% of Los Angeles travel-related workers have been furloughed.

What will Joaquin Phoenix say? What will Billie Eilish and Janelle Monáe sing? Five questions ahead of the 2020 Oscars.

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In his first in-depth interview as Academy Museum director, Bill Kramer talks budget, construction time lines and, most important, what you'll see inside.

Newly minted Grammy-winner Billie Eilish will perform live at the Oscars ceremony next month.

Goldberg, the grandson of Romanian and Russian immigrants, had his bar mitzvah in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma.

CEO Mary Barra hopes to invigorate investor interest in GM's stock with an aggressive electric vehicle strategy.

California's stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus reduced vehicle collisions on roadways by roughly half, saving taxpayers an estimated $1 billion.

Bill Gardner's "Rhapsody in Black" show has been a staple of L.A. radio since the early 1980s, airing classic R&B. But its future is in peril due to the coronavirus.

VIRGIN Media and O2 are to merge to create a £31billion media and telecoms giant, their parent firms have announced. Liberty Global and Telefonica - the owners of Virgin Media and O2 respectively - had confirmed on Monday that they were in discussions over a possible combination.

A SURGE in bitcoin prices has seen the cryptocurrency market jump by over $13 billion overnight.

Bill Beaumont has vowed to make massive changes to the look of rugby if he is re-elected as chairman of World Rugby.

GRANT SHAPPS announced the Government is introducing a £2 billion travel scheme to encourage Britons to use alternative transport as the UK slowly relaxes lockdown measures.

On 23 September 2019, we published an article headlined 'Labour's tax bombshell: Corbyn's benefits splurge plot would cost taxpayers £520 billion' the article focused on Labour's potential objective of introducing a universal basic income and its associated costs.

STEPH MCGOVERN - who fronts her self-titled show The Steph Show on Channel 4 - made a cheeky admission on Twitter as her former BBC Breakfast co-star Bill Turnbull reacted to the presenter's "drunk" confession.

A “JAW-DROPPING” 1.6 million lost pension pots worth nearly £20 billion are being left unclaimed, according to estimates from an insurance industry body. Savers are losing track of their pension stash due to job changes or moving house, with future retirees potentially missing out on staggering sums for their golden years.

Carmel is spending too much taxpayer money building expensive roundabouts when simpler ones would be enough, a letter to the editor says.

John and Tucker Hartung of Lamar Advertising removed an Indianapolis 500 billboard along Lafayette Road, April 7, 2020. The race is delayed to August.

Sen. Mark Stoops' bill would block schools from shaming students to get their parents to pay for lunch.

The cost of Britain's controversial new aircraft carriers is set to rise by at least £1bn, and perhaps almost £2bn, as a result of the government's decision taken last October to make them compatible with different aircraft than those originally envisaged.

I have learned that the working assumption of the contractors on the project, which are BAE Systems, Thales UK and Babcock, is that the carriers will now cost taxpayers some £7bn in total, compared with the £5.2bn cost disclosed by the Ministry of Defence last autumn - and up from the £3.9bn budget announced when the contract was originally signed in July 2008.

One defence industry veteran said the final bill was bound to be nearer £10bn, though a government official insisted that was way over the top.

The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury believe that total final costs could be nearer £6bn, if only one of the carriers is reconfigured to take the preferred version of America's Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.

An MoD official said no final decision had been taken on whether the first carrier to be built, the Queen Elizabeth, or the second carrier, the Prince of Wales, or both would be reconfigured.

He said it would probably be the case that changing the design specification for the Prince of Wales would be the cheapest option. But if that happened, it is not clear when - if ever - the Queen Elizabeth, due to enter service in 2019, would actually be able to accommodate jets (as opposed to helicopters).

Whatever happens, the increase in the bill will be substantial - and is only regarded by the Treasury as affordable because the increment is likely to be incurred later than 2014/15, when the expenditure constraints put in place by the Chancellor's spending review come to an end.

The Treasury is adamant that the MoD will receive no leeway to increase spending before then.

An MoD spokesman sent me the following statement late last night:

"The conversion of the Queen Elizabeth Class...will allow us to operate the carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter that carries a greater payload, has a longer range and is cheaper to purchase. This will give our new carriers, which will be in service for 50 years, greater capability and interoperability with our allies. Final costs are yet to be agreed and detailed work is ongoing. We expect to take firm decisions in late 2012."

The disclosure of the rise in costs is bound to reopen the debate about whether the UK really needs new carriers, especially since the UK will be without any aircraft carrier till 2019, following the decision to decommission Ark Royal.

British Tornado jets are currently active in Libya, flying from a base in Italy, without the use of a British aircraft carrier.

The latest increase in likely expenditure on the enormous carriers - which are almost the size of three football pitches - stems from the decision of the Ministry of Defence in October to change the design one or both of them so that they can be used by the carrier version of America's Joint Strike Fighter.

This would mean they have to be fitted with catapults and traps - or "cats and traps" - rather than ramps.

The likely final cost will depend on whether the cats and traps are cheaper traditional steam devices, or newer-technology electromagnetic ones - and also whether the cats and traps are fitted to both carriers or just one.

Industry and government sources tell me that even if the MoD goes for the cheaper option, and even if the cats and traps are fitted to only one carrier, the additional bill will still be of the order of £1bn.

The hope however would be that in the longer term savings could be achieved because the maintenance costs of the more conventional Joint Strike Fighter should be lower.

One of the reasons the refit could be relatively more expensive is that for one of the carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, there would have to be a retrofit - because so much work has already been done on it.

"Retrofitting is always very pricey" said a senior defence executive.

The carrier project has been beset by controversy and cost increases.

In June 2009, I disclosed that the carrier costs had soared by more than £1bn as a result of a decision taken by the previous government to delay their entry into service.

Then last October the government, in its Strategic Defence and Security Review, came close to cancelling one or both carriers.

In the end, it committed to build both, but with the strange caveat that it might end up using only one of them. This was the reason given by the Prime Minister David Cameron in the Commons for building both:

"They [the previous government] signed contracts so we were left in a situation where even cancelling the second carrier would actually cost more than to build it; I have this in written confirmation from BAE Systems".

However in a memo to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Ministry of Defence estimated that cancelling both contracts would have saved £2bn and cancelling just one would have saved £1bn.

The MoD told MPs that "as the cancellation costs would have had immediate effect, the costs in the short term would have been significantly higher than proceeding with both carriers as planned; nearly £1bn more in financial year 2011/12 if both carriers had been cancelled".

The MoD was also concerned that cancelling the carriers would have undermined British capability and know-how in the manufacture of complex warships.

The carriers, called Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers, are being built by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, whose members are the UK defence giant BAE systems, the British engineering group Babcock, and Thales of France. The Ministry of Defence is also described as both a member of the Alliance and a customer.

Update 15:06:It has been pointed out to me, by what you might term a grizzled sea dog, that the UK does still possess two ships that can take aircraft. They are HMS Illustrious and HMS Ocean (which is a commando carrier with a flat top).

However they can't accommodate jet airplanes, only helicopters - so for veteran sailor it was a terrible error for the government to scrap the illustrious Harrier jumpjet.

He also takes the view, which I've heard from many other military personnel, that it would be bonkers to convert only one of the new carriers to take the carrier version of the Joint Strike Fighter - because if that were to happen, one of the carriers would be an enormous white elephant, and the other would not be able to provide a service for 100% of the time (it would need periodic servicing).

That said, the cost of retro-fitting the first carrier being built now and also redesigning the other one would certainly be nudging £2bn, maybe more.

He believes there is powerful strategic logic to building two new huge ships able to handle jets.

The problem for David Cameron is that he may find it hard to make the strategic case, since last autumn he justified building the two on the basis that it would not save any money to cancel one - which is not the most positive case for what turns out to be a very substantial public investment that anyone has ever advanced.

I can't recall a flotation like it, in terms of the sheer number of executives emerging as wealthy beyond most people's wildest dreams or expectations - not even the conversion of Goldman Sachs into a public company or the listing of Google.

When Glencore publishes its full flotation prospectus later this morning, it will show that there are four billionaires working for the world's leading commodities, minerals and energy trader.

These are led by the chief executive Ivan Glasenberg, who will be shown to be worth around $10bn.

But it is the quartet of billionaires, plus many others worth more than $100m each, and hundreds who are millionaires, that makes Glencore quite extraordinary.

Now all the top executives are saying they won't sell any of their shares for five years at least - that they won't use the flotation to cash in. As for Glasenberg, he's pledging not to sell even a single share till he steps down as chief executive.

Even so, the stock market listing converts their stakes into currency. These are not paupers.

Is there a price for them of this remarkable valuation of their respective Glencore holdings?

Well their company is already receiving vastly more public scrutiny - for it's environmental record and tax practices, for example - than it did as a pretty secretive private company over the last 20 years or so.

It won't like all this attention - such as claims in this morning's Daily Mail of how Glencore's copper mining operations in Zambia are doing too little for that country.

And it certainly didn't enjoy the furore sparked by remarks of the new chairman, Simon Murray, about how women's desire to have babies prevents them rising to then top in business.

But some of you might feel that whatever embarrassment is caused to Glencore's bosses will be softened by all that personal wealth.

Update 16:44: Oh dear. There’s another billionaire at Glencore I somehow missed.

The prospectus – which is longer than Proust, and racier than Proust in parts – shows that the chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg is worth just under $10bn.

Also, two of his lieutenants are each worth around $3.7bn, one other has a $3.2bn holding and the fifth in this billionaire quintet has a $2.8bn stake.

The poor finance director, Steven Kalmin, is worth a mere $610m.

As the FT points out, each one of these has a holding worth more than what the famous (some would use a less flattering epithet) founder of Glencore, Marc Rich, pocketed when he sold the business to management less than 20 years ago.

I don't like to reduce the hard work of the much respected Institute for Fiscal Studies and Morgan Stanley to a single number. Their annual Green Budget is after all 299 pages long. (It is nothing to do with environment...

Holcomb's veto, only his second as governor, provides a win to hundreds of advocates who had all but begged for his support in recent weeks.

Indiana businesses are receiving a second round of payroll protection loans to assist with the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up." On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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velocityconf: RT @courtneynash: Bill Scott's #fluentconf keynote theme also rings true re #velocityconf: tech change is really about people/culture change

Some House Democrats have decided that the COVID-19 pandemic is an appropriate time to implement a key plank of the campaign of former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — who make up the…

The post ‘The Squad’ Pushes for Huge Student Loan Cancellation in Next Relief Bill appeared first on The Western Journal.

Despite strong growth, D2C companies are facing more headwinds   April 2, 2020 (New York, NY) — For the first time, we are breaking out direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce sales. We define […]

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The post JUST IN: Actress and leader of #MeToo movement accuses Bill Maher of sexually harassing her appeared first on Dennis Michael Lynch.

12 March 2015 , Volume 91, Number 2

Viviane Baladi and Mark F. Demers
J. Amer. Math. Soc. 33 (2020), 381-449.
Abstract, references and article information