"As the coronavirus pandemic leads to the collapse of one retailer after another, Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Spruengli has been gaining US market share and rival Laederach is opening its biggest store yet in New York. Chocolate has emerged as one product that consumers won’t do without in trying times. Laederach is opening a 2,500-square-foot shop on Fifth Avenue in New York Thursday near Rockefeller Center. The family-owned brand is known in Switzerland for plates of fresh chocolates that have a shelf life of just a few weeks."
I'm sorry, they are stale by now!
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"With on-demand delivery service goPuff, consumers can order eggs, chips, hard seltzer, dog food, or toothpaste to their doorstep in under an hour — now they can add a COVID-19 test kit to the bag, too. GoPuff plans to begin delivering test kits by partnering with New York-based Purlab, a company that makes saliva-based COVID-19 tests in collaboration with Rutgers University that are authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration. According to Philadelphia-based goPuff, the partnership makes it the first company in the nation to offer “instant” delivery of at-home COVID-19 test kits, and they will be available in several Massachusetts neighborhoods....."
Sorry for laying another egg and getting you caught in the trap of a rabbit hole, dear readers.
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"CDC director allegedly ordered deletion of email that sought to interfere with coronavirus guidance" by Lenny Bernstein and Lena H. Sun Washington Post, December 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allegedly ordered the destruction of an e-mail written by a top Trump administration health official who was seeking changes in a scientific report on the coronavirus’s risk to children, the head of a Congressional oversight subcommittee charged Thursday.
In a letter to CDC director Robert Redfield and his superior, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, expressed ‘‘my serious concern about what may be deliberate efforts by the Trump Administration to conceal and destroy evidence that senior political appointees interfered with career officials’ response to the coronavirus crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.’’
Clyburn cited an interview three days ago with the editor of the CDC’s most authoritative publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Charlotte Kent, editor in chief of that report, told investigators that while on vacation in August, she received instructions to delete the e-mail written by Paul Alexander, a senior adviser to Azar.
When Kent went to locate the e-mail, it had already been deleted, she said, according to a transcript of the interview provided by Clyburn. When she inquired about who had ordered its deletion, she was told that the instructions had come down from Redfield through the chain of command.....
Sorry, I stopped eating that one because it was too bitter and the Globe swallowed it whole after that.
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"The European Central Bank delivered another dose of stimulus to the eurozone economy on Thursday, warning that the economic crisis caused by the pandemic is likely to linger well into 2022 despite the rollout of new vaccines. A second wave of coronavirus cases is causing the eurozone economy to contract again in the final months of the year, Christine Lagarde, the central bank’s president, said during a news conference to explain the rationale behind the decisions. The eurozone will not achieve herd immunity to the virus until the end of 2021, and the economy will not regain its pre-pandemic strength until the middle of 2022, central bank economists said on Thursday....."
What a $weet jolt, huh?
What's even more, they are paying less than the US for many coronavirus vaccines as the head of the UN stresses the need of the vaccine for all with nearly 2 billion doses already lined up as they embark on a high-stakes coronavirus vaccine rollout from Stockholm to Athens to Lisbon to Warsaw because of the potentially deadly virus that is rapidly petering out.
Speaking of petering out, where exactly is the brave Mugafali of Africa?
Being given the Mugabe treatment, is he?
Of course, the Wuhan virus outbreak was a tragedy — until Beijing changed the narrative of history.
It's like robbing a bank, jacking a car, being a snitch, or burning down a building as part of a false opposition.
It's all in the genes and is inherited. Isn't that part of the reckoning we have to do regarding history and why the EU reversed itself under protest from Russia, a sudden and embarrassing U-turn that makes them look appeasing in the face of naked aggression.
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"The Kansas City Star’s top editor has apologized for past decades of racially biased coverage and the newspaper has posted a series of stories examining how it ignored the concerns and achievements of Black residents and helped keep Kansas City segregated. The newspaper said a detailed examination of its past coverage and that of its longtime sister newspaper, the Kansas City Times, documented how they often wrote about Black residents only as criminals or people living in crime-plagued neighborhoods and ignored segregation in Kansas City, Mo., and its public schools. “It is well past time for an apology, acknowledging, as we do so, that the sins of our past still reverberate today,” Star President and Editor Mike Fannin wrote. The Star’s apology and its lengthy series of stories, posted on its website Sunday, followed a Los Angeles Times editorial in September apologizing for past racially biased coverage. The Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser in 2018 apologized for “shameful” decades of coverage of lynchings, and National Geographic magazine apologized the same year for its past racist coverage. Fannin wrote that The Star had reinforced segregation, “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations” of Black residents and for decades “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”
Related:
"The Supreme Court suggested it will let the Federal Communications Commission ease limits on the ownership of local media outlets, giving the broadcast industry and President Trump’s administration a mostly favorable reception in a long-running fight. Hearing arguments by phone Tuesday, the justices questioned a federal appeals court decision that blocked the changes. The appeals court told the FCC to first study the potential impact on female and minority ownership in the media industry. Republicans and the broadcast industry have been seeking to relax the ownership limits for decades, saying the restrictions are badly outdated given the proliferation of new information sources. Easing the rules could mean a wave of consolidation affecting TV stations nationwide."
At this point, what difference does it make?
TV is terrible and this box of Globe chocolates is $tarting to ta$te like $hit.
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"Texas software mogul Robert Brockman has an unusual defense against charges that he used an arsenal of code names, untraceable phones, and an “Evidence Eliminator” to sock away $2 billion in the largest tax-fraud case in US history. Lawyers for Brockman, 79, claim that even though he ran a multibillion-dollar software company until last month, he suffers from dementia so advanced that he’s unable to stand trial. Prosecutors warn that Brockman might be engineering an infirmity defense to avoid justice. Brockman faces a 39-count indictment that accuses him of tax evasion, money laundering and other crimes involving a vast fortune he earned investing in Vista Equity Partners and secretly stashed in offshore tax havens. Weeks after his Oct. 1 indictment, he stepped down from his longtime position as chief executive officer of Reynolds and Reynolds, a giant in the market for software used to manage auto dealerships. His lawyers now assert that Brockman’s intellectual capacity has steadily eroded in the past two years and he scored an 87 on an IQ test — far below the expected level of a man who holds several patents and historically paid great attention to the details of his business. They say he’s mentally unfit to aid in his defense. Prosecutors suspect he may have a “motive to malinger,” and that “his claims are deserving of healthy skepticism.”
They then bundled him up and put him on a plane for Europe via FedEx.
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The tears are flowing after nearly choking:
"Shares in Waters Corp. rose 8 percent Tuesday after a fourth-quarter earnings report showed strong signs of a turnaround taking hold at the Milford-based lab products manufacturer under new chief executive Udit Batra. The company reported earnings and revenue for the quarter that well exceeded Wall Street’s expectations: $787 million in sales, up 10 percent in the past year, and $218 million in net income, a 9 percent increase. Batra started in the job in September and immediately looked for places to improve. Among them: reaching out to hundreds of customers about replacing older lab instruments that had reached the end of their life cycle. Because of a weaker first half of the year, total revenues at Waters were down 2 percent for 2020, but Waters is now on track for revenue to increase by 5 to 8 percent in 2021, which would be its strongest growth since at least 2017. In an interview, Batra was quick to credit his 7,300-person workforce for collaborating effectively with him, particularly during a pandemic. Waters is among the many local companies meeting the demand for COVID-19 related products; many vaccine and treatment developers use Waters products in their labs."
Oh, trick candy in a pretty wrapper:
"Bumble, the dating app where women make the first move, is targeting to raise as much as $1.8 billion from its US initial public offering after boosting the size of the deal. The company plans to sell 45 million shares for $37 to $39 apiece, it said in a filing Monday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Bumble previously indicated it would look to sell 34.5 million shares at $28 to $30."
Aren't they the $ame $ite that co$t hundreds of Massachusetts residents a total of $8 million last year in romance scams targeting people on dating websites, apps, and other electronic forums?
In any event, you gotta love the fact that big Tech companies and banks helped power a broad rally on Wall Street on Tuesday after Walgreens Boots Alliance agreed to sell its wholesale drug business to AmerisourceBergen in $6.5 billion cash and stock deal and UnitedHealth agreed to purchase Change Healthcare Inc. in a deal that values the health technology company at more than $13 billion and will offer software, data analytics, technology, and other services to the health care industry in order to improve health outcomes and lower costs as they lead the way on American corporate board diversity and can move out of the YWCA.
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"Fund manager Neil Woodford plans to start a new firm, as the once-feted investor looks to bounce back from a dramatic fall from grace. Woodford will be the chief investment officer of Woodford Capital Management, according to an emailed statement from a spokesperson. The firm will not serve mom-and-pop investors and will focus on the biotech sector, including investments that were once held in his now shuttered flagship fund. “The assets will form the cornerstone of a new strategy to rebuild the Woodford investment operation under the WCM brand, serving institutional and high net worth investors,” the spokesperson said. The firm will be based in the U.K. island territory of Jersey and in London. Once celebrated as the Oracle of Oxford for his investing skills, Woodford’s reputation was tarnished in 2019 after he was forced to close his flagship fund to redemptions. Rather than investing in blue-chip firms, where he made his name while picking stocks at Invesco Ltd., Woodford made bets on small and even unlisted companies, leaving him unable to pay back investors who wanted out. The affair shook retail investors’ confidence in stock pickers, prompted questions in parliament and is the subject of two books. Any comeback is subject to an ongoing investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority, which could forbid him from managing money for certain investors....."
Time to choose a different chocolate and not white chocolate -- at least in Bo$ton (see where doing jail time for bribery can get you). If you are lucky, you can rise to the level of Kay Bourne, the George Shultz of Bo$ton in her day and model of managerial dependability: pragmatic, low key, unflappable -- as well as an environmentalist and technologist ahead of his time (a forerunner for the World Economic Forum and its Great Re$et that the Globe toasts), but they can easily be replaced as they become part of the archives.
If not, I'm sure it is racism or sexism (ignore the ads) and the case will be thrown out. What's even better, you can bank the jail time for future crimes.
Because, and I quote, “hope or no hope, it must be done” in an attempt to shine a light on and bring us all together in the concern for the fight against pure evil and a cancer on humanity.
