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Rental car giant Hertz Global Holdings announced Monday it would pay $168 million to settle 364 claims that it erroneously filed criminal reports against customers who did not return vehicles on time. In February, CBS News reported that Hertz was facing lawsuits from hundreds of customers who said they were falsely arrested for auto theft. Hertz Global Holdings also operates Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental, among others. Hertz said it believes it will recover some part of the settlement amount from its insurance carriers. It said the settlements resolve more than 95% of its pending theft reporting claims.

Ron DeSantis denied a report Friday that the state was considering reversing its decision to dissolve Disney's special governing district near Orlando. "We will have an even playing field for businesses in Florida, and the state certainly owes no special favors to one company. Earlier Friday, the Financial Times reported Florida lawmakers considered keeping in place the special governing district that encompasses Disney World as Disney CEO Bob Iger returned to lead the company. But according to the FT report, state lawmakers are now working on a compromise that would allow Disney to keep the special district in place, with a few modifications. “What I can say [is] the state of Florida has been important to us for a long time and we have been very important to the state of Florida,” Iger added.

The Internal Revenue Service is alerting taxpayers about a number of changes hitting in the 2023 tax filing year. Among the most significant: Your tax refund, if you are eligible for one, may be smaller than the one you received in 2022. That's because there were no federal stimulus payments issued this year — and many taxpayers received their stimulus checks alongside the refunds they got after filing their 2021 tax returns. The average refund jumped from $2,863 in 2021 (for the 2020 tax filing year) to $3,253 in 2022 (for the 2021 tax filing year). As context, the IRS said, as of Nov. 11, it was still processing 3.7 million individual returns, including tax year 2021 returns and late-filed prior year returns.

Consumers are racking up credit card debt at a pace not seen in decades as inflation continues to pervade the U.S. economy. And while analysts say many U.S. consumers remain in good financial shape thanks mostly to low unemployment, the debt situation is growing dire. As the Federal Reserve has continued to lift interest rates to counter sky-high inflation, credit card rates have climbed to the highest levels ever measured. At just 2.1%, credit card delinquency rates remain below pre-pandemic levels. Still, said Raneri of TransUnion, as long as credit card companies are willing to continue to extend credit, credit scores will mostly remain unaffected.

Consumers took advantage of heavy discounting by online retailers to kick off the holiday shopping season in high gear. According to Adobe Analytics, record online spending on Thanksgiving and Black Friday drove Cyber Week — Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday — to $35 billion in total sales. Even with inflation looming in the background, consumers were motivated by the hunt for deals, Adobe Analytics said. While the company's figures are not adjusted for inflation, even if online inflation were factored in, there would still be growth in underlying consumer demand, it said. Consumers have shown their willingness to keep shopping, thanks in part to the resilience of their pandemic savings.

A decision by Whole Foods to pause purchases of Maine lobster has sparked outcry from the state's elected officials and the lobster industry. Whole Foods' decision, which was announced this month, was prompted by changes in sustainability ratings for Maine lobster fisheries by separate third-party seafood monitoring groups: the California-based Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch and the London-based Marine Stewardship Council. "There has never been a right whale death attributed to Maine lobster gear," they said. “Maine lobster has always been sustainable and that hasn’t changed with the recent announcement from MSC,” Steve Kingston, the owner of The Clam Shack in Kennebunk, Maine, said in a statement. The company said its stores would continue to sell Marine Stewardship Council-certified lobster caught elsewhere.

U.S. gas prices are now at their lowest level since the February start of Russia's war in Ukraine, which sent prices soaring. "However, we can be thankful that gas prices are moving in the right direction for now,” Gross said. There remains wide geographic variability in gas prices, with averages in southern U.S. states well below the national rate. As demand remains subdued and gasoline stocks grow, drivers will likely see pump prices dip through the Thanksgiving holiday, it said. Still, this year is projected to be the third-busiest for Thanksgiving travel since AAA started tracking in 2000, the group said.

Critical shortages of the ADHD drug Adderall and the antibiotic amoxicillin have left families reeling as the medicines their loved ones need become harder to find. In the case of amoxicillin, demand has become particularly acute amid a so-called tripledemic of Covid, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and the flu that are converging this season. The Food and Drug Administration's website currently lists amoxicillin and Adderall, also known as mixed amphetamine salts, as being in short supply. NBC News reached out to two of the drugmakers responsible for producing both Adderall and amoxicillin. In 2020, Congress passed the Mitigating Emergency Drug Shortages Act, which aimed to address some of these issues.

The holiday shopping season is in full effect as Thanksgiving week begins, and retailers are nervous. Data from the research group Factset show inventory levels among retailers including Walmart, Target, Amazon and Best Buy remain significantly above pre-pandemic levels. But those sales events are also coming at a time of a slowing economy and the ongoing weight of inflation, retail executives say. Despite the mixed economic signals, the U.S. Census Bureau reported unexpectedly strong retail sales for October. The National Retail Federation said earlier this month that it expects annual holiday sales growth to hit between 6% and 8%.

As questions swirl about how much cryptocurrencies will be worth in the wake of the spectacular collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and other major platforms, a key question has emerged: Who will keep your crypto safe? Prior to its collapse, FTX was the world's fifth-largest cryptocurrency exchange, according to data from the crypto group CoinGecko cited by Reuters, processing $627 billion in trading volume year-to-date. But as cryptocurrencies broadly became more mainstream, companies and exchanges sprang up that allowed people to buy crypto without those steps. Today, platforms seemingly untouched by the FTX collapse, like Coinbase, have sought to reassure their users that their assets remain safe and, in some cases, are not subject to lending. Instead, there are growing calls for increased regulation that would force crypto exchanges to keep customers' money firewalled so that it cannot be repurposed for other uses.

☆ Former Twitter engineer compares company's current state to Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-19 | by ( Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Twitter may have functionality issues after 1,200 employees resigned Thursday, NYT reported. One former engineer described the company like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. Making good on his promise to investors to cut staffing by 75%, Musk initiated layoffs immediately following the completion of the deal. One former engineer told The New York Times the company's current situation is similar to when the Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff — continuing on in midair for a moment and plunging like a rock once he looks down. Musk and representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, the failed blood-testing company at the center of her downfall, will be sentenced Friday. Holmes was convicted in January of four counts of fraud for misleading Theranos investors about the company's technology and its financial health. Theranos had simply repurposed commercially available blood analysis technology to run on smaller amounts of blood, The Wall Street Journal revealed in October 2015. During Holmes’ trial, former employees testified that Theranos would also frequently delete erroneous results from its tests to make its machines appear more accurate. Holmes said Balwani lied to her about the company's financial models and subjected her to intimate partner abuse.

That plan quickly falls through — and Twitter decides to adopt a poison-pill strategy to fend off a hostile takeover from Musk. At this point, shares in Musk's automotive company, Tesla, began to decline; by mid-November, they will have lost close to half their value. “Musk’s conduct simply confirms that he wants to escape the binding contract he freely signed, and to damage Twitter in the process,” Twitter says. In the meantime, Musk and Twitter jockey for position ahead of the October trial — with Judge Kathaleen McCormick increasingly siding with Twitter in key pre-trial motions. Within 48 hours, the site was flooded with users who bought blue checkmarks only to turn around and impersonate official accounts, including Musk's.

Elon Musk has fired a group of Twitter engineers, some of whom posted critical comments either on the social network or on its internal Slack messaging system, according to one current Twitter employee and two former employees familiar with the situation. Some of the newly fired engineers spoke out on Twitter, others in a widely accessible internal Slack channel called “social watercooler.”Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Musk’s decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs. Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts. “I can’t begin to describe the institutional knowledge they’re taking with them," the current employee said.

#TaylorSwiftTix” one fan wrote, echoing the frustration of thousands of “Swifties,” the nickname for diehard Swift fans, vying to see their favorite artist in her first concert tour since before the pandemic. Backlash against the ticketing companies has also grown: When a major artist announces a tour, fans inevitably complain on social media about Ticketmaster’s high fees and unchecked scalping. Users shared screenshots of emails from Ticketmaster that said “Your invitation to TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan.” “You’ve been selected!” the email reads. As for the Swift ticket sales chaos on Tuesday, Ticketmaster urged fans on Twitter to avoid going through its homepage to get tickets. "If you received a code to the TaylorSwiftTix Presale, please login and access the queue through the link you received via text rather than entering through the Ticketmaster homepage," Ticketmaster tweeted.

Frontier Airlines leads the list of airlines targeted by the DOT, with the Denver-based carrier set to pay $222 million in refunds and an additional $2.2 million fine. “When a flight gets canceled, passengers seeking refunds should be paid back promptly," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, said in a statement. "Whenever that doesn’t happen, we will act to hold airlines accountable on behalf of American travelers and get passengers their money back. Those dismal rates are largely a consequence of the pandemic and the airlines pivoting to respond to travel restrictions and lockdowns. And as the pandemic waned, airlines were caught flat-footed by the soaring demand from travelers eager to get out of town.

Officials at the crypto giant FTX have moved all digital assets offline as they investigate possible theft of crypto assets following their bankruptcy filing, their general counsel announced late Friday. That followed an earlier tweet from Miller that said officials were "investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of ftx balances across exchanges — unclear facts as other movements not clear." “FTX has been hacked,” an account administrator in the FTX Support Telegram channel wrote in a message, according to CoinDesk. The announcement followed the news that FTX and its affiliated companies have started the process of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with founder Sam Bankman-Fried stepping down as CEO. Founded in 2019, FTX had within two years grown to 1 million worldwide users, with an average of $10 billion in daily trading volume.

The crypto giant FTX and its affiliated companies have started the process of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with founder Sam Bankman-Fried stepping down as CEO. Bankman-Fried sent out a series of tweets on Friday stating his hope that FTX would be able to continue as a going concern following its bankruptcy. Media outlets have reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department are now investigating FTX. In the days following the report, rival crypto exchange Binance announced it was liquidating its FTT holdings. Unable to find an out, FTX announced its bankruptcy filing Friday morning.

Mockingbird is recalling approximately 149,000 of its single-to-double strollers after receiving reports that they can break and cause children to fall. According to a release posted to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's website, Mockingbird has received 138 reports of cracks in the frame that have led to eight injuries involving cuts, scratches or bruising to children in the strollers. The New York-based company said the strollers are manufactured in China. Mockingbird said people who own the strollers that have a lot number between 20091 and 22602 on the product label should immediately stop using the strollers and contact Mockingbird to receive a free frame reinforcement kit. The kit includes two frame clamps that attach to the sides of the stroller to reinforce the frame.

Consumer price increases eased to 7.7% in October, a sign that the persistent inflation that has plagued the U.S. economy is showing glimmers of cooling off, even as it remains near four-decade highs. By raising interest rates, the central bank hopes it can make it more costly to borrow and invest, thereby cooling off further price increases. Data show that both home prices and rents are on the decline, though there are often lags before they show up in official data. But the inflation rate remains far above the Fed's 2% target, meaning aggressive actions by the central bank are likely to continue. He added: “Despite a half-dozen interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, any broad-based, significant, and sustained easing of inflation pressures remains elusive.”

With nearly one-third of midterm election voters indicating inflation as their top concern this year, attention now turns to what the new political alignment in Washington D.C. will mean for tackling the issue. Were they to gain full control of Congress, Republicans have pledged to roll back the Biden administration’s spending efforts, which opponents of President Joe Biden blame for inflation. Inflation remains largely a consumer-driven phenomenon because it is propelled in large part by household spending. "In the event of recession, divided governments generally deliver only limited and late fiscal support," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients. Meanwhile, much of the spending laid out in the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act has already been distributed, the analysts said, noting that, in any case, congressional legislation would be subject to a veto by President Biden.

Less than 24 hours after implementing new gray "official" checkmark tags to some prominent Twitter accounts, platform owner Elon Musk has decided to remove them. But by noon on Wednesday, Musk tweeted to a user that he had decided to “kill” those checkmarks. The "official" checkmarks quickly disappeared. Crawford then clarified that the "official" checkmarks would still be used in the future but that they would be initially focused on adding them to "government and commercial entities." “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months,” Musk tweeted Wednesday.

The cost of carrying a balance on your credit card is now the highest it's been in more than 30 years. According to survey data from Bankrate.com, the average credit card interest rate has climbed to 19.04%. "Bankrate has been surveying credit card rates since 1985, and this eclipses the previous all-time high of 19.00% from July 1991," Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride wrote on Wednesday. The new average represents a substantial increase from the 16.3% average rate for credit cards seen at the beginning of the year. Yet even as racking up large credit card balances can ultimately affect credit scores, and as the total amount of all credit card balances in the U.S. remains at record levels, delinquencies remain low, Rossman said.

A federal judge has denied Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes' request for a new trial, setting the stage for her sentencing on fraud charges later this month. U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila issued a ruling late Monday stating Holmes failed to establish that government misconduct had occurred during her trial. Davila delayed Holmes' sentencing and granted an emergency hearing last month after a visit to Holmes' residence by a key witness came to light. The witness, former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff, had allegedly told Holmes' current partner, William “Billy” Evans, that he had “done something wrong” during the trial with respect to his testimony. Holmes, 38, has been out on bail; according to the Associated Press, when asked after the October hearing if she was pregnant, Holmes didn’t respond but smiled warmly.

Airbnb users will soon be able to see the total cost of booking a stay before they check out, a reversal of the platform's longstanding policy that had peeved many users. Starting in December, guests will have the option to view the total price of a booking, including all fees, before taxes. Users will also be able to view a full price breakdown that shows Airbnb’s service fee, discounts, and taxes. The change means total price, instead of nightly price, will be prioritized in its search ranking algorithm. Guests are still charged an Airbnb service fee, a cleaning fee, an extra-guest fee if applicable, plus any taxes and deposits.

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