Free Republic

The buck stops with them. North America’s second-largest supermarket chain is warning its suppliers that it won’t allow price hikes due to President Trump’s tariff spree. Albertsons, which operates over 2,200 grocery stores — including Balducci’s, Kings and Acme in the New York area, blasted out a missive to its suppliers late last month, explaining that suppliers must get authorization for significant price hikes. “With few exceptions, we are not accepting cost increases due to tariffs,” stated the letter, first uncovered by American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller.

At least she ate well. An Idaho woman was caught stealing over $170,000 from her employer — and blew most of it ordering food from delivery apps. Charlene Smith, formerly an office manager for a now-defunct tractor supply company out of Nampa, was caught embezzling the six-figure sum from 2021 to 2022 before the company closed its doors around 2023, the Idaho Tax Commission found.

Michigan’s Democrat Senate candidate, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), remained silent as President Joe Biden declined to impose sanctions in 2021 on Nord Stream 2 AG, the company behind the Russian gas pipeline to Germany, which a donor to one of Slotkin’s Congressional campaigns lobbied for. In May 2021, Biden waived sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG’s pipeline despite the State Department concluding the company, owned by a consortium of shareholders including Russian energy company Gazprom, was complicit in sanctionable activity and criticism that the pipeline would hand Russia a “major geopolitical prize,” as the BBC put it. However, it appears...

Shares of electric vehicle charging company EVgo Inc. jumped by the most in over three years after securing a major financing deal from the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Helene victims are suffering in the face of paltry FEMA aid. Bloomberg reports that in a significant boost to its expansion plans, Los Angeles-based EVgo Inc. announced on Thursday that it has received a conditional loan guarantee of up to $1.05 billion from the US Department of Energy (DOE). The news sent the EV company’s stock soaring by 64 percent, marking its biggest single-day gain in more than three years. As one of...

Hunter Biden sought the State Department’s help for a Ukrainian energy company while President Joe Biden was vice president, according to the New York Times, which obtained the information from the agency via a FIOA request dating back to 2021. The release of the document is significant for three reasons. First, the agency released the document after Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, underscoring concerns among Republicans that the Biden administration covered up Hunter’s foreign business dealings that enriched the Biden family while Joe Biden was vice president. Second, Hunter did not register as a foreign agent for...

When a person wants to get a loan from a bank, they are first evaluated on whether or not they will be able to pay off the loan. The bank looks at the person’s credit score, and the person either receives the loan or is denied the opportunity.Most of us have gone through the process once or twice.But did you know that companies have their own “credit scores” that lenders look at?Securing additional funds is critical for some companies. And if they can’t, it can eventually result in bankruptcy.So knowing a company’s financial situation is key to being a good...

A major insurance company used keystroke technology on an employee’s work laptop to test whether she was working her designated hours — and it ended terribly for her. The Fair Work Commission (FWC) has rejected an unfair dismissal application brought by former Insurance Australia Group (IAG) consultant Suzie Cheikho, finding she was fired for a “valid reason of misconduct.” According to the commission’s published finding, Cheikho was responsible for creating insurance documents, meeting regulatory timelines, and monitoring “work from home compliance,” among other significant roles. Ironically, her own work-from-home performance marked the end of her 18-year career with the company....

President Biden frequently extolled an electric vehicle company — in which his energy secretary heavily invested — before it declared bankruptcy on Monday. Bay Area-based electric bus and battery maker Proterra filed for Chapter 11, with CEO Gareth Joyce citing “various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to efficiently scale.” The EV firm, which sold more than 1,300 electric buses to public transit systems in the US and Canada, was valued at $1.6 billion when Biden, 80, took office in January 2021 — but closed with a market value of $362 million, according to Reuters.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former White House adviser Neil Patel are seeking to raise funds to start a new media company that would potentially use Twitter as its backbone, according to people familiar with the matter. The new company would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos that Carlson has been posting regularly on Twitter since shortly after his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions, some of the people said. Carlson and Patel are looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the company, the people said. Users...

Sen. Bob Casey’s campaigns have funneled more than half a million dollars to a printing company owned by his sister and brother-in-law, raising ethics questions about a family business arrangement spanning more than 20 years. Casey (D-Pa.), 62, has spent more than $500,000 on services from Universal Printing Company over the course of his nearly three-decade political career — more than $200,000 of which was paid between 2005 and 2022 by Bob Casey for Senate, Inc., according to Federal Election Commission filings. Universal Printing’s owner and CEO, Margi McGrath, is the oldest sister of the Democratic senator, has also donated...

Alex Green, Chief Investment Strategist of The Oxford Club, explains how the majority of investors fundamentally misunderstand when and why corporate officers and directors sell or buy their own shares… And this consistently leads to huge misses on investor profits left and right. Read on to see whether this error applies to you. – Kyle Wehrle, Assistant Managing Editor Finance professors who study insider transactions often issue a warning sign about the market when they see corporate officers and directors selling more shares than they’re buying. But this is entirely misguided, not least of all because corporate insiders almost always...

A major donor of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) received a million-dollar grant from the Department of Energy, as the Biden administration looks to ensure the passage of the $2 trillion infrastructure bill that includes various parts of the left’s agenda, according to a report.

Bitcoin is a company whose goal is to make it easy for people around the world to buy, sell and manage various cryptocurrency accounts. As such you might assume it would be a pretty progressive place. But recently there has been some discontent at the company. Back in June when large tech companies were posting black squares on Facebook to show their solidarity with Black Lives Matter, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong refused to jump on the bandwagon. And that led to a walkout at the company. Many of his engineers just refused to work because the CEO wouldn’t issue...

RALEIGH — Imagine getting paid time off from work to be an activist. For Bandwidth employees, it’s not a dream. It’s their new reality. After global protests over police brutality and racism erupted in June, Raleigh-based communications software company rolled out a new work policy supporting individual activism and community service. Called “Go and Do,” it gives employees paid leave to support the causes of their choice. “Each year, it’s a full day for you to go wave a flag, fly a banner, contribute, protest; don’t care,” said Bandwidth founder and CEO David Morken during a virtual seminar conducted as...

Baltimore’s Rats Are in the Spotlight Posted on: February 7, 2018 Baltimore has been seen on television and the silver screen for decades, from The Wire to Hairspray. The latest movie putting Baltimore in the spotlight isn’t about crime, it’s all about Baltimore’s rat problem.The Film’s Inspiration Theo Anthony, a Baltimore filmmaker, found his inspiration in an unlikely place—his trash can. One night he arrived home to loud sounds in his trash can and found a rat trying to jump out without much success. He never planned to have his first film center around the city’s most well-known pests,...

All Erika Zak wants to do is play with her daughter on the playground. Take her to the zoo. Walk her to school. She's never been able to be the mother she longs to be. At 38, Erika is dying. Her battle to live began almost as soon as her daughter, Loïe, was born four years ago, when Erika was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer that had spread to her liver. The cancer was removed from her colon and, her doctors say, she responded well to treatment. But a microwave ablation surgery last year to remove two tumors...

You would think some VP of communications somewhere would read my columns from time to time, so they could encourage senior management never to speak on any political topic, or even mention a political issue indirectly. The reason is that it guarantees that 40% to 50% of the country will disagree with the issue or opinion under discussion, and boycott that company’s products.

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...