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☆ Hunter Biden hires attorney Abbe Lowell to beef up legal team
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Sarah Fitzpatrick | Sarah Fitzpatrick Is A Senior Investigative Producer | Story Editor For Nbc News. She Previously Worked For Cbs News | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +2 min

Hunter Biden has added a high-powered attorney to his legal team amid an ongoing federal probe and plans by Republicans to make him a key focus of investigations when they take control of the House next month. Abbe Lowell, of the firm Winston and Strawn, will be primarily responsible for coordinating Hunter Biden’s response to anticipated congressional oversight investigations, as well advising on other legal issues and overall strategy, an attorney for Hunter Biden told NBC News on Wednesday. "Hunter Biden has retained Abbe Lowell to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” the attorney, Kevin Morris, said. "Lowell is a well-known Washington based attorney has represented numerous public officials and high profile people in DOJ investigations and trials as well as Congressional Investigations. Mr. Lowell will handle congressional investigations and general strategic advice."

☆ States Attempt to Help Americans Facing Rising Energy Costs
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Joseph De Avila | Talal Ansari | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

New York is among states tapping federal funds to provide enhanced benefits for a state energy-assistance program. State governments are trying to beef up their energy-assistance programs as rising heat costs strain more residents across the U.S. this winter. Minnesota and New York are tapping federal funds to provide enhanced benefits for their states’ programs. New Hampshire passed legislation that gives additional help to lower-income households using funds from its budget surplus. And in Connecticut, utility providers are giving ratepayers $10 monthly credits to help offset rising costs and providing discounts to low-income households.

☆ Putin vows to win in Ukraine as Russian military to reach 1.5 million
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +2 min

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the fighting in Ukraine as a “tragedy” but vowed to pursue his campaign there until its goals are reached Wednesday, while his defense chief announced a plan to increase Russia’s military from 1 million personnel to 1.5 million. Speaking at a meeting Putin held with top military brass, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the 1.5 million-member military should include 695,000 volunteer contract soldiers. Putin ordered an unpopular mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September to beef up Russia’s forces in Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western allies have rejected such rhetoric and described the Russian attack as an unprovoked act of aggression. Putin vowed that what he termed a “special military operation” would continue until its tasks are completed.

☆ Hundreds of Tyson Foods Employees Expected to Depart as Company Closes Offices
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Patrick Thomas | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Tyson Foods announced that it would be closing its Chicago office, among others, as part of an effort to consolidate its corporate staff in Arkansas. Hundreds of Tyson Foods Inc. employees from two of its largest business units plan to leave the company as it consolidates its corporate offices to northwest Arkansas next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The largest U.S. meat supplier by sales said in October that it planned to close its offices in Chicago, Downers Grove, Ill., and Dakota Dunes, S.D., which currently house many of Tyson ‘s corporate employees in its prepared foods, beef and pork divisions. About 1,000 employees total work in those locations, the company has said.

It could be the last major bill that passes this year before Republicans seize control of the House on Jan. 3. He has pressured GOP lawmakers to vote against it, forcing Democrats to supply most of the votes to pass it in the House. Capitol Hill leaders decided to attach the election bill and Ukraine aid to ease the process of passage, on the belief that the combined package has the votes to pass. For Republicans, one incentive to pass the bill now is that it funds the military at a higher level than the nondefense budget. “This is a strong outcome for Republicans,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said, arguing that the GOP persuaded Democrats to back down on their long-standing demand for “parity” between the two pots of money.

☆ It's not just you — there really are more low-budget holiday movies this year, with 150 new releases just in the past 2 months
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-20 | by ( Travis Clark | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

An original Christmas movie was one of Netflix's most popular films on Tuesday. One hundred-and-fifty Christmas movies have been released across TV networks and streaming services from November through December this year, according to Bloomberg. The streamers have also heavily embraced low-budget original Christmas movies. On Tuesday, a new Netflix original movie "I Believe in Santa" — which was also produced by Afshar's company ESX Entertainment — was Netflix's No. Other Netflix original Christmas movies have been popular recently.

The Spanish government estimates that the EU grants and loans will on average add 2.6 percentage points to gross domestic product annually through 2031. Calvino said the EU soft loans would be channelled through state-linked investment vehicles so as not to inflate Spain's debt burden. In total, Spain is seeking to mobilise 160 billion euros. It has so far received 31 billion euros from the pandemic package, deploying around 22 billion, Calvino said. However, a recent study by consultants EY and the ESADE business school estimated that just 9.3 billion euros had reached the real economy.

☆ Lab-grown meat could be served up for dinner soon. What does it taste like?
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-19 | by ( Julia Horowitz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

It has a capacity of 600 liters, or 159 gallons, allowing the company to produce 6,000 pounds of cultivated meat per year. Right now, Singapore is alone in allowing the sale of cultivated meat to consumers, having issued a green light in late 2020. Yet delivering on the promise of lab-grown meat won’t just come down to regulators. CNN“The promise of cultivated meat [is] to bring forth a taste and texture component, and to deliver sustainability,” said Gautam Godhwani, managing partner at Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that has invested in eight cultivated meat startups. “I think the whole of the cultivated meat industry will go hybrid first,” Ivy Farm’s Dillon said.

☆ Elon Musk responds to a Twitter user saying Jeff Bezos copies every business move the billionaire makes: 'Maybe it's a coincidence'
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-18 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Elon Musk has stoked his ongoing rivalry with Jeff Bezos. Responding to a tweet suggesting the Amazon founder "copies" every business move he makes, Musk said, apparently sarcastically: "Maybe it's a coincidence." Musk has been feuding with Jeff Bezos for some 15 years and regularly accuses him of being a copycat. The Amazon founder has long had an interest in space exploration, starting up spaceflight firm Blue Origin in 2000. Musk founded his own commercial space firm SpaceX two years later.

☆ Chaos cooking is taking over the dining room as restaurants unleash ambitious culinary concoctions from Big Mac pizzas to masala mac & cheese
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-17 | by ( Nancy Luna | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

But now restaurants and TikTok are elevating food mashups to a level dubbed chaos cooking. Ambitious culinary concoctions range from Big Mac pizzas to curry-fajitas sold at TGI Fridays. Indie restaurants and chains are unleashing ambitious and improbable culinary concoctions, from Big Mac pizzas at a Washington DC restaurant to curry fajitas at TGI Fridays. On Instagram and TikTok, chaos cooking is showing up in different forms: a pizza slathered with refried beans, zucchini fettuccine, and a vegan peppermint pattie cake. The article asked: Is chaos cooking a pathway to inner peace?

☆ Tyson Foods stock slips to lowest levels since November 2020 in three-day losing streak
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Rebecca Picciotto | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

A package of Tyson Foods Inc. chicken is arranged for a photograph in Tiskilwa, Illinois. Tyson Foods hit a 52-week low on Friday in a third-straight down day, a sign that investors are losing confidence in the company amid growing margin pressure and operational issues this year. The food processor's stock declined more than 4% this week to trade around $61 per share, its lowest levels since November 2020 and well under its 52-week high of $100.72, notched in February. Deflating prices of beef and chicken in recent months coupled with rising feeding costs have put broader pressure on the livestock industry. The firm maintains a "hold" rating on the stock with a price target of $68 per share.

☆ The only victim in Elon's beef with journalists is Twitter
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Twitter itself knows news and journalists are major drivers of user engagement on its platform. By barring journalists, Musk is openly demonstrating his resentment towards one of Twitter's most active and important userbases, hurting the platform further. Journalists depend on Twitter, and Twitter depends on them tooBy Twitter's own estimates, journalists count for a lot on its platform. Users "regularly follow news-related Twitter accounts, and around 4 in 5 young journalists rely on the platform for their jobs. Journalists use Twitter more than any other social media platform, according to research from Pew in June, treating it as a real-time source of information.

☆ ChatGPT got all the buzz, but beneath it is a $1B developer framework that's quietly fueling the new era of lifelike AI at OpenAI and beyond
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Matthew Lynley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Beneath the buzz, the next-generation developer framework Ray was key in the viral model's training. "ChatGPT combined a lot of the previous work on large language models with reinforcement as well. Before deploying Ray, OpenAI used a hodgepodge set of custom tools built on top of "neural programmer-interpreter" model. All these tools, Ray and JAX included, are in service to a new generation of combustion engines for the internet called large language models. Multiple companies, both startups and giants, are building their own large language models including Meta, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Google.

☆ Where Walmart CEO Doug McMillon expects inflation to stick around into 2023
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-15 | by ( Frank Holland | In | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Retail sales slumped on Thursday even though the latest data on consumer prices earlier this week showed a cooling. Grocery sales, responsible for 56% of Walmart's revenue, is a key inflation read for the McMillon and company. McMillon's comments came after November CPI report that showed consumer prices rose 7.1% year over year, which was below estimates, but before the retail sales decline posted on Thursday. "But dry groceries, consumables is where we're seeing the most stubborn and persistent inflation, mid double-digit inflation. McMillon said Walmart is continuing to look for new technology to maintain inventory and increase the speed of its e-commerce business.

☆ How Long Until Christmas? Check the Beef Jerky Advent Calendar
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Kathryn Dill | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Around 10 a.m. each day in December, Emma Lord goes into her New York City kitchen and, brimming with anticipation, plucks a one-ounce jam jar with a gingham-print lid from a tiny cardboard window. Will today’s flavor be strawberry-rhubarb? Or dragonfruit? Could it be honey? “The honey day is always an extremely controversial day for me,” said Ms. Lord, who along with tens of thousands of other Yuletide preserves enthusiasts counts down the days to Christmas each year with food-maker Bonne Maman’s Advent calendar.

☆ What Guns Did to My Childhood
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Mitchell S. Jackson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +10 min

Isn’t a part of childhood feeling insecure and divining ways to resolve those feelings or else abide them? From Mitchell S. JacksonThe presence of gangs — mind you, a predictable symptom of poverty and neglect — led to the prevalence of guns that shaped much of the normal childhood maturing around me as a kid. It surprises me little to none that Black boys are the likeliest to die by guns. These guns alter their lives in significant ways, not in the least by nullifying the childhood grace of feeling the greatest distance from death. Amen, I’ve never had to sit him down for a stern talk on guns or the violence and grieving they reap.

☆ Taco Bell may add fries to its menu permanently to compete with McDonald’s
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Danielle Wiener-Bronner | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

To compete with rivals such as McDonald’s during lunchtime, the chain is considering permanently adding fries to its menu, Taco Bell CEO Mark King said during an investor event Tuesday. Taco Bell has put nacho fries, its take on French fries, on the menu periodically as a limited-time offering since the item launched in 2018. Taco Bell is considering adding fries to the menu permanently. Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Taco BellBut by keeping fries on the menu year-round, Taco Bell could potentially steal some of its rivals’ customers. In the past, Taco Bell has tested nacho fries topped with steak and ranch sauce, and is currently offering seven-layer nacho fries loaded with beef, black beans, guacamole and more.

Then, pick a high-yield savings account, and consider a CD ladder for cash you can store safely away. "This can help you ‌get through tough times without having to rack up high interest rate debt," she says. Choose an account that pays moreIf you're the most comfortable keeping your cash liquid, certified financial planner Charles Thoman III says that's fine, but consider a savings account that's offering a high interest rate. "Find one that has a high interest rate, FDIC insurance, and low or no fees." However, she does recommend always shopping carefully and reading the fine print to understand terms, penalties, and FDIC coverage of a CD you're considering buying.

☆ SEC Chair Gary Gensler tees up changes to how the stock market operates
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-13 | by ( Bob Pisani | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +8 min

These wholesalers may send the orders to exchanges, but often match the orders against their own internal order flow. However, Gensler has claimed that pension funds and other institutional investors are not able to interact with that retail order flow. Execution quality disclosure Market participants are required to submit monthly reports indicating how well they are executing client orders. Gensler has said investors today need a better understanding of how well their trading orders are being executed. Gensler's broad agenda The proposals on market structure are part of a broad agenda Gensler has undertaken this year.

Brazil has yet to publish its official annual figures for Cerrado deforestation, based on satellite analysis by the government's space research agency Inpe. The Cerrado neighbors the Amazon, occupying more than 2 million square kilometers in central Brazil – larger than Mexico. FARM-DRIVEN DEFORESTATIONThe Brazilian savanna is now a major concern for top grains traders, who have broadly pledged to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains by 2025. The sources discussed Cerrado deforestation data from Brazil's PRODES program, which produces annual data that is far more accurate than rapid alert data published on a weekly and monthly basis. An Inpe official said earlier this year that Brazil would soon stop publishing PRODES Cerrado data due to lack of funding.

☆ Inflation may be easing, but grocery prices are still way up
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-13 | by ( Danielle Wiener-Bronner | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Flour prices jumped 24.9%, bread went up 15.7%, milk was 14.7% more expensive and coffee prices rose 14.6%. Uncooked beef roasts fell 8.1%, and uncooked beef steaks dropped 7.4%. In restaurants, where traffic has been slowing as consumers tighten their belts, menu prices went up, but not by much. At limited-service restaurants, menu prices rose 0.6%, while prices at full-service restaurants ticked up 0.4%. Uncooked beef roasts fell 1.3% and uncooked ground beef dropped 0.9%.

Russia and Ukraine are not currently engaged in talks to end the fighting, which is raging in the east and south and reached Kyiv again on Wednesday. Zelenskiy said this week Russia should start withdrawing by Christmas as a step to end the conflict, Europe's biggest since World War Two. Moscow rejected the proposal outright, saying Ukraine must accept the loss of territory to Russia before any progress can be made. [1/5] Rescuers and police officers examine parts of the drone at the site of a building destroyed by a Russian drone attack, as their attack on Ukraine continues, in Kyiv, Ukraine December 14, 2022. DRONES STRIKE KYIVViolence returned to Kyiv, with the first major drone attack on Ukraine's capital in weeks.

☆ Institutions are charging forward in crypto, even in the industry's darkest days
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Tanaya Macheel | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

After years of pooh-poohing cryptocurrency, institutions finally entered the crypto market last year and fell straight into crypto winter. "Right now [investors] are going back to basics, doing their homework, finding out what this means," said Lyn Alden, founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy. Near-term risk Institutions often look at big crashes like this one as opportunities , Alden said. "FTX destroyed trust in the industry and may delay traditional finance institutions that haven't already committed to digital assets to invest," Belshe said. However, for "institutions and brands that are already building products in crypto and Web3, we have not seen a slowdown of interest to build, grow and invest."

☆ Animals Are Running Out of Places to Live
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Catrin Einhorn | Lauren Leatherby | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +17 min

In many places, poverty, powerful interests and a lack of law enforcement make habitat loss especially hard to address. Because animals there often have smaller ranges to begin with, habitat loss hits them especially hard. “That's the ultimate challenge of forest conservation globally.”Source: Map of Life | Photo: Chien C. Lee MOZAMBIQUE Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Est. habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR MOZAMBIQUE Estimated habitat in 2001 MADAGASCAR Source: Map of Life | Photo: Chien C. Lee MOZAMBIQUE Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCAR MOZAMBIQUE Habitat loss in 2021 MADAGASCARThis is the 2001 habitat of the white-headed lemur, a primate that eats fruit and flowers. Of the many targets being negotiated, the one that has gotten the most attention seeks to address habitat loss head on.

☆ Exclusive: Canada's critical-mineral strategy aims to accelerate permitting
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Steve Scherer | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Critical minerals are key elements in EV batteries, electronics and solar panels and play a crucial role in the transition to the green economy. China now dominates the market for critical minerals used in EV batteries. Ottawa will seek "regulatory harmonization" with the United States on critical minerals, the document reads without elaborating, as part of the strategy. Canada has signed similar critical minerals cooperation agreements with Japan and the European Union. On Thursday, Canada said it would beef up rules around foreign investment, in the critical minerals sector and others.

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