The attack, which occurred around midnight Saturday, left "a total of 10 dead and one injured," a local police official told reporters via messaging service WhatsApp.
An armed attack has killed 10 people in an Ecuador port Guayaquil, which is under a state of emergency due to rising drug violence, police said Sunday.
The attack, which occurred around midnight Saturday, left "a total of 10 dead and one injured," a local police official told reporters via messaging service WhatsApp.
When we lose small businesses, we lose MORE than tax revenues.
Small businesses receive plenty of lip service but very little appreciation--until they're gone. By then it's too late to do anything but mutter, "you don't know what you've got until it's gone."
Small businesses aren't just sources of tax revenues, they're sources of a wide range of jobs that can't be replaced by Corporate America or the government. Just as importantly, small business owners and entrepreneurs are advocates for the neighborhoods, districts and cities they depend on for customers and suppliers.
The livelihoods of the owners and their employees depend on maintaining the viability of their neighborhood / district / city, which includes public safety and services such as transportation and trash collection, and a minimum density of other private-sector services and amenities which provide residents a safe, appealing atmosphere worth visiting.
59.9 million Americans work at small businesses across the nation. An estimated 47% of Americans shop at small businesses at least twice a week, generating about 45% of the nation's economic activity. According to the most recent available numbers from the U.S. Census, approximately 47% of U.S. employees work for small businesses, compared to 54.5% in 1988.
Small business entrepreneurs are risking everything they have to open and operate a business. They have far more skin in the game than city functionaries tasked with enforcing regulations and collecting business-related fees or their employees, who have the freedom to quit and seek employment elsewhere.
Residents tend to feel powerless to stop the decay of their neighborhood safety, services and amenities. They tried contacting their elected officials or municipal functionaries and were given a meaningless feel-good reply which everyone involved knows is empty.
Small business owners are more willing to apply meaningful pressure because they know the decay follows a sobering slide in which incremental declines pile up and eventually trigger a phase change in which the character of the neighborhood / district / city goes over a cliff no one discerned: petty crime increases, paving the way for more serious crimes to proliferate; customers thin out and then become scarce, and the zeitgeist goes from friendly to wary to unpredictable or even dangerous.
The core characteristic of of neofeudal economy and society is that it's two-tier: there are two tiers of "criminal justice," one of wrist-slaps and vast white-collar crimes ignored for elites and the wealthy, and another far more brutal and Kafkaesque for the rest of us.
In terms of commerce, Big Tech is free to establish monopolies and Finance escapes all the supposed regulatory safeguards, while small business is throttled with endlessly multiplying petty regulations that have little or nothing to do with public safety or employee labor rights. Corporate America has the immense wealth and power to gut any regulations it finds onerous, but small business struggles to pay the soaring costs of compliance and the tripling of junk fees such as business license renewals.
City-provided services degrade but the costs for the privilege of doing business triple.
The majority of small businesses are sole proprietors. (see chart below) Many of these are online or at-home enterprises that are invisible to residents walking down the sidewalk. The 5.4 million small businesses with less than 20 employees are visibly consequential to the viability of bricks-and-mortar neighborhood commerce.
Demographics play a large role in the viability of small businesses. About 40% of all small businesses are owned by Boomers nearing retirement or already past the age of typical retirement. It won't take much in the way of losses or stress to nudge these owners into selling or closing the business.
But if conditions are decaying, who's going to buy a struggling business? The grim reality is "no one." Owners are already working long hours and enduring high levels of stress. This self-exploitation can only go so far before the owners' health and/or finances break down in burnout or losses.
Municipal bureaucracies tend to see small business tax donkeys as something they can count on much like a gushing spring. Should one tax donkey collapse and close a business, another tax donkey will magically appear to pick up the self-exploitation harness and start a new business in the same space.
Local-economy boosters love to cite the flood of new business applications as proof the spring is still gushing, but many of these new enterprises are sole proprietorships with no storefront presence and no employees. Many new businesses that thrived in the post-pandemic boom will soon encounter the headwinds of recession for the first time, and many will find their enterprises blown onto the unforgiving rocks of financial losses.
The phase-change shift in the character and zeitgeist of neighborhoods, districts and cities is difficult to reverse. Once people no longer feel safe, they won't come back. Once the empty storefronts and homeless encampments dominate the landscape, they won't come back. Once services deteriorate and trash accumulates, they won't come back.
Municipal bureaucracies are largely staffed by people who have never experienced what a real recession (such as 1981-2) can do to commerce, tax revenues and small businesses struggling to survive. They're confident that history demonstrates any downturn will be brief and the tax donkeys will appear as usual to fill the empty storefronts, lofts and offices.
But this time will be different. No new tax donkeys will appear to gamble their fortunes and lives on starting a stupidly expensive-to-operate business, pay prevailing wages and benefits and all the taxes, licenses and junk fees municipalities have piled on small business.
When we lose small businesses, we lose more than tax revenues. We lose the engines of employment and the commercial foundation of neighborhoods and districts. When these foundations crumble, those residents who see the slide down the slippery slope of decay sell their homes and get out while the getting's good. Those who remain will regret their inaction.
Tax donkeys don't appear by magic. There has to be an infrastructure in place that allows a real opportunity to scrape out a living despite the high costs and formidable challenges. If the infrastructure and character of a place decay, so does the opportunity, and small businesses melt into air when it's longer worth the struggle.
The Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the elderly and the sick in this country. It inspired or terrified us into huge social, governmental, and economic experiments. “Lockdown” stopped being just prison jargon. We have long since entered an appropriate period of reflection and investigation. Fights about masks, social-distancing, quarantines, and closures of churches, parks, and other amenities disfigured the normal rhythm of human life, marring funerals and delaying weddings. We are now uncovering years of learning loss and missed developmental milestones in children who were deprived of needed socialization, structured play, and face-to-face learning for speech development.
These particular maladies and the way America was an outlier in them are at the feet of our institutions and their leaders. Which is why they are lying so much about their records.
This week in his interview with the New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID and the most prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, gave his latest assessment of the efficacy of masks. “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent,” he explained. “But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”
Maybe 10 percent? That’s it? That is what justified years of miserable public-policy fights, and of impaired schooling? He then blamed the “culture wars” —New York Times code for “intransigent conservatives” — for the fights and agonies about masks and mask mandates.
In fact, it was the contradictory, dishonest, and — as it turns out — entirely false assurances of public-health authorities that made masks into such a controversy. America became a global outlier for masking young toddlers and children during the pandemic, and was for years, based on falsehoods and sometimes outright lies. Lies Fauci told.
To review: In March of 2020, on 60 Minutes, Fauci said, “Right now people in the United States should not be walking around with masks.” This was a defensible suggestion according to the best studies available. But later, he explained this and other mask-denigrating statements in his emails were noble lies meant to protect supplies. As a pro-masking consensus formed, Fauci claimed implausibly that the science had changed. By October of 2020, Fauciwas back on 60 Minutes to say that meta studies had changed his mind. “It became clear that cloth coverings, things like this here” — he pulled out a jersey mask to demonstrate — “and not necessarily a surgical mask or an N95. Cloth coverings work.” He would continue to say in interviews that “if CDC says they are effective, in fact they are” until January of 2022. Public-health officials knew the truth the whole time, and Fauci sometimes inadvertently betrayed this in statements in which he referred to masks as a “symbol” rather than as a tool of mitigation. But this knowledge also makes them culpable. Once it was clear that the spread in schools where cloth masks were the norm was an acceptable risk, public-health officials could have justified moving to maskless schooling, as much of Europe did by that time. They didn’t.
Fauci defied anyone to prove that he closed down a single business or school. But, in fact, he is on the record as having told President Trump to “shut the country down.” He went on television countless times to warn against red states reopening their schools too soon or at the wrong time. He went on television to condemn people attending Texas Rangers baseball games, or SEC football — outdoors when Covid was in seasonal decline. His words and his position carried weight with the public, but they seem to have made no impression on him, as he tossed them away the moment they became inconvenient.
Fauci is not alone. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers,in testimony before Congress, is also rewriting her part. “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” she said. “We know that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”
To put it mildly, this is not true. In the fall of 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Every few days during the spring and summer of 2020, Weingarten would give more reasons why schools must remain closed. Affiliated unions said even more bizarre things. The Chicago Teachers Union, in December of 2020, said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
The AFT aggressively lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even suggested language for the agency’s influential school-reopening guidance, language that would make it easier to seriously delay or halt reopenings. Two of the union’s suggested emendations were adopted verbatim.
That a union head like Weingarten relentlessly advocated for the narrow interests of dues-paying members should not surprise us. It should only warn the public against ever again treating her as an authority on what’s best for students or schools as institutions.
The shocking thing is that Dr. Fauci, head of NIAID and one of the nation’s most celebrated physicians, acted in much the same way — tirelessly torturing the available evidence to protect the day-to-day, hour-by-hour reputation of public-health agencies, rather than the long-term reputation of publicly funded science, and scientific expertise itself. His unwillingness to accept responsibility for public confusion on masks is lamentable and discredits his reputation as a leader. His calculation that blaming half the country for noticing his contradictions is probably shrewd, but definitely shameful. Physician, heal thyself.
Hundreds of Americans fleeing two weeks of deadly fighting in Sudan reached the east African nation’s port Saturday in the first US-run evacuation, completing a dangerous land journey under escort of armed drones.
American unmanned aircraft, which have been keeping an eye on overland evacuation routes for days, provided armed overwatch for a bus convoy carrying 200 to 300 Americans over 500 miles to Port Sudan, a place of relative safety, US officials said.
The US, which had none of its officials on the ground for the evacuation, has been criticized by families of trapped Americans in Sudan for initially ruling out any US-run evacuation for Americans who wanted out, calling it too dangerous.
US special operations troops briefly flew to the capital, Khartoum, on April 22 to airlift out American staffers at the embassy and other American government personnel.
More than a dozen other nations had already been carrying out evacuations for their citizens, using a mix of military planes, navy vessels and on-the-ground personnel.
A wide-ranging group of international mediators — including African and Arab nations, the United Nations and the United States — has only managed to achieve a series of fragile temporary cease-fires that failed to stop clashes but created enough of a lull for tens of thousands of Sudanese to flee to safer areas and for foreign nations to evacuate thousands of their citizens by land, air and sea.
Since the conflict between two rival generals broke out on April 15, the US has warned its citizens that they needed to find their own way out of the country, though US officials have tried to link up Americans with other nations’ evacuation efforts.
Since the conflict between two rival generals broke out April 15, the US has warned its citizens that they needed to find their own way out of the country, though US officials have tried to link up Americans with other nations’ evacuation efforts.AP
But that changed as US officials exploited a relative lull in the fighting and, from afar, organized their own convoy for Americans, officials said.
Without the evacuation flights near the capital that other countries have been offering their citizens, many US citizens have been left to make the dangerous overland journey from Khartoum to the country’s main Red Sea port, Port Sudan.
One Sudanese-American family that made the trip earlier described passing through numerous checkpoints manned by armed men and passing bodies lying in the street and vehicles of other fleeing families who had been killed along the way.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the convoy carried US citizens, local people employed by the US and citizens of allied countries. “We reiterate our warning to Americans not to travel to Sudan,” he said.
From Port Sudan, away from the fighting, the Americans in the convoy can seek spots on vessels crossing the Red Sea to the Saudi port city of Jeddah.
US officials also are working with Saudi Arabia to see if one of the kingdom’s naval vessels can carry a larger number of Americans to Jeddah.
US consular officials will be waiting for the Americans once they reach the dock in Jeddah, but there are no US personnel in Port Sudan, officials said.
Two Americans are confirmed killed in the fighting that erupted April 15.
One was a US civilian whom officials said was caught in crossfire.
The other was an Iowa City, Iowa, doctor, who was stabbed to death in front of his house and family in Khartoum, in the lawless violence that has accompanied the fighting.
In all, the fighting in the east African country has killed more than 500 people.
Mercedes CEOOla Källenius has rejected an economic disengagement from China. Europe, the United States and the People's Republic are so closely intertwined that this would not make sense, the manager told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. In this way, both sides could win in terms of growth and climate protection.
Addressing China's threats against Taiwan, Källenius said, "We are not naive." There are differences and tensions, he said. The Corona period showed how fragile supply chains are, he said. "We have to become more resilient here and more independent of individual states in the case of lithium batteries, for example. But: unbundling from China is an illusion and also not desirable."
In 2014, current CIA directorWilliam Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein when Burns was Obama's deputy secretary of state, and after Epstein had been convicted of child sex exploitation, the Wall Street Journalreports.
Burns and Epstein first met in Washington prior to Burns visiting Epstein and his Manhattan townhouse, according to a trove of leaked documents that include Epstein's schedules which were not contained in Epstein's "black book" of contacts or flight logs.
Burns, who became CIA Director under Biden in 2021, met with Epstein while he was preparing to leave his position in the government, according to agency spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp.
"The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector," she said, adding "They had no relationship."
Mr. Burns, 67 years old, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, had meetings with Epstein in 2014 when Mr. Burns was deputy secretary of state.
A lunch was planned that August at the office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr. Burns at his townhouse, the documents show. After one of the scheduled meetings, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr. Burns to the airport.
Mr. Burns recalls being introduced in Washington by a mutual friend, and meeting Epstein once briefly in New York, said Ms. Thorp. “The director does not recall any further contact, including receiving a ride to the airport,” she said. -WSJ
One month after meeting with Epstein, in October 2014, Burns stepped down from this role at the State Department to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. He ran it until he was nominated by Biden to serve as CIA director in early 2021.
Epstein’s former residence on a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Photo: Emily Michot/TNS/Zuma Press
Epstein also had dozens of meetings with then-Obama White House attorney Kathryn Ruemmler, who went on to become Goldman Sachs' top lawyer in 2020. Epstein also planned for her to join him in 2015 on a trip to Paris, and in 2017 to visit his private island in the Caribbean.
According to a spokesman for Goldman, Ruemmler had a 'professional relationship' with Epstein tied to her role at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP, and did not travel with him.
"I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein," she said.
According to the documents, however, they knew each other wellenough... following Epstein's 2006 conviction for sexually abusing girls in Florida as young as 14-years-old.
He asked for avocado sushi rolls to be on hand when meeting with Ms. Ruemmler, according to the documents. He visited apartments she was considering buying. In October 2014, Epstein knew her travel plans and told an assistant to look into her flight. “See if there is a first class seat,” he wrote, “if so upgrade her.”
Kathryn Ruemmler had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs. Photo: William B. Plowman/NBCUniversal/Getty Images
Within weeks of Ruemmler's 2014 departure from the Obama White House, Epstein planned an August lunch at his townhouse, followed by a series of meetings to introduce her to his acquaintances.
The two first met when Epstein called her to ask if she would be interested in representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - a relationship which never panned out.
Epstein and his staff discussed whether Ms. Ruemmler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show. Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Ms. Ruemmler was there. Epstein told one of the women he didn’t want her around, and another that it wasn’t a problem, the documents show.
Ms. Ruemmler didn’t see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn’t express any concern, the Goldman spokesman said. -WSJ
Epstein also connected Ruemmler with Ariane de Rothschild, current CEO of the Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group. Ruemmler's law firm was hired by the bank to help them with US regulatory matters, according to the bank and the Goldman spokesman.
De Rothschild, who married into the famous banking family, met with Epstein over a dozen times.
In September 2013, Epstein asked Mrs. de Rothschild in an email for help finding a new assistant, “female…multilingual, organized.”
“I’ll ask around,” Mrs. de Rothschild emailed back.
She bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein’s behalf in 2014 and 2015, the documents show.
Mrs. de Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in January 2015. That October, she and Epstein negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein’s Southern Trust Co. to provide “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms” for the bank, according to a proposal reviewed by the Journal.
In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said that Mrs. de Rothschild never met with Epstein and it had no business links with him. -WSJ
The bank admitted to the Journal that it lied in its earler statement, and that Mrs. de Rothschild and Epstein met as part of her normal duties at the bank.
Other notables in the new report include;
Leon Botstein, president of Bard College
Noam Chomsky, who was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at the pedophile's Manhattan townhouse in 2015
Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who says she 'didn't have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, "But I remembered it because of his spectacular house and because of the six young women."
Joshua Cooper Ramo, then co-chief executive of Henry Kissinger’s corporate consulting firm.
Harvard professor Martin Nowak
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
More on Ehud Barak, given rumors that Epstein was running a Mossad honeypot operation;
Mr. Ramo also was invited to a breakfast at the townhouse in September 2013 with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, another regular guest, the documents show.
...
Mr. Barak also met Epstein in 2015 with Mr. Chomsky, now 94, a linguistics professor and political activist who has been critical of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy.
Mr. Chomsky said Epstein arranged the meeting with Mr. Barak for them to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.”
Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. “He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy,” Mr. Barak said.
When asked about his relationship with Epstein, Noam Chomsky said: "First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally."
Noam Chomsky, a professor and political activist, said he discussed political and academic topics when meeting with Epstein. Photo: Alejandro Acosta/Agencia EL UNIVERSAL/Zuma Press
After Epstein donated $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and $9.1 million to Harvard between 1998 and 2008, Chomsky said in a 2020 interview that people 'worse than Epstein' had donated to MIT. He didn't disclose their friendship at the time.
Chomsky said that at the time of their meetings, "what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate."
The search for a Texas man who allegedly shot his neighbors after they asked him to stop firing off rounds in his yard stretched into a second day Sunday, with authorities saying the man could be anywhere by now.
Francisco Oropeza, 38, fled after the shooting Friday night that left five people dead, including an 8-year-old boy. San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said Saturday evening that authorities had widened the search to as far as 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.
Investigators found clothes and a phone while combing a rural area that includes dense layers of forest, but tracking dogs lost the scent, Capers said.
Police recovered the AR-15-style rifle that Oropeza allegedly used in the shootings but authorities were not sure if he was carrying another weapon, the sheriff said.
“He could be anywhere now,” Capers said.
The attack happened near the town of Cleveland, north of Houston, on a street where some residents say neighbors often unwind by firing off guns.
Capers said the victims were between the ages of 8 and 31 years old and that all were believed to be from Honduras. All were shot “from the neck up,” he said.
Capers said there were 10 people in the house — some of whom had just moved there earlier in the week — but that that no one else was injured. He said two of the victims were found in a bedroom laying over two children in an apparent attempt to shield them.
A total of three children found covered in blood in the home were taken to a hospital but found to be uninjured, Capers said.
FBI spokesperson Christina Garza said investigators do not believe everyone at the home were members of a single family. The victims were identified as Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 8.
The confrontation followed the neighbors walking up to the fence and asking the suspect to stop shooting rounds, Capers said. The suspect responded by telling them that it was his property, Capers said, and one person in the house got a video of the suspect walking up to the front door with the rifle.
The shooting took place on a rural street where single-story homes sit on wide 1-acre lots and are surrounded by a thick canopy of trees. A horse could be seen behind the victim’s home, while in the front yard of Oropeza’s house a dog and chickens wandered.
Rene Arevalo Sr., who lives a few houses down, said he heard gunshots around midnight but didn’t think anything of it.
“It’s a normal thing people do around here, especially on Fridays after work,” Arevalo said. “They get home and start drinking in their backyards and shooting out there.”
Capers said his deputies had been to Oropeza’s home at least once before and spoken with him about “shooting his gun in the yard.” It was not clear whether any action was taken at the time. At a news conference Saturday evening, the sheriff said firing a gun on your own property can be illegal, but he did not say whether Oropeza had previously broken the law.
Capers said the new arrivals in the home had moved from Houston earlier in the week, but he said he did not know whether they were planning to stay there.
A few months ago, Arevalo said Oropeza threatened to kill his dog after it got loose in the neighborhood and chased the pit bull in his truck.
