Author: Scott Davidson

NEW YORK — Yellow Corp., a once-dominant US trucking company, has filed for bankruptcy as it winds down its 99-year-old business that employs 30,000 workers. The Nashville-based logistics provider announced Sunday it had filed for Chapter 11 relief in the US Bankruptcy Court for the district of Delaware. “It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” CEO Darren Hawkins said in a statement. “Today, it is not common for someone to work at one company for 20, 30, or even 40 years, yet many at Yellow did. For generations, Yellow provided…

NEW YORK CITY — Protesters gathered Monday at Starbucks locations across New York City and all around the country for a “Day of Action.” Demonstrators are calling out what they describe as anti-union tactics from the company. The Starbucks on 5th Avenue and 47th Street is one of the 200 locations people were gathering in front of in the city. Those taking part say the day is about educating customers and people walking by about the efforts to unionize. There are about 300 out of the 9,000 locations in the United States that have voted to unionize. In the middle of…

The potential for Japanese encephalitis virus transmission and spread in the United States is the focus of a new investigation led by Natalia Cernicchiaro, Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, and John Drake, director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. With funding from and in collaboration with researchers from the USDA, National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility and the Foreign Arthropod-Borne Animal Diseases Research Unit, the team of researchers commenced the multi-year grant on Aug. 1. Researchers will model transmission dynamics in the case of a JEV incursion, integrating climatic and regional…

Newport news Shipbuilding is about to begin construction on the 29th US nuclear-powered Virginia-class attack submarine for the Navy, local broadcaster KTUL reported. The report said on Wednesday that the company kicked off the beginning of construction of the submarine with a symbolic ceremony authenticating the keel of the ship. According to the report, Newport News Shipbuilding is one of two US shipyards that can make this class of attack submarines for the US Navy. Australia is set to acquire up to five Virginia-class submarines from the United States under the AUKUS security pact, but the initiative is stuck in…

The U.S. government is ordering many U.S. embassy personnel to temporarily leave Niger amid the country’s military coup. The State Department announced Wednesday evening that it was ordering “non-emergency U.S. government personnel” and their families to leave Niger. A core group of staffers will remain, and the facility will not close. But the embassy has “suspended routine services, and is only able to provide emergency assistance to U.S. citizens in Niger.” Such orders typically apply primarily to American citizens and it was not immediately clear if it would apply to non-U.S. citizens employed by the embassy. The decision was made…

Colombo (25/7 – 30.77) In his book “Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community,” terrorism expert Dr. Rohan Gunaratna emphasizes the importance of de-radicalizing Islamic ideology to effectively combat Islamic terrorism. He identifies Wahhabism or Salafism as the root of Islamic terrorism, rapidly spreading worldwide through modern communication tools. Gunaratna warns that merely arresting perpetrators after attacks is insufficient; the focus should be on preventing radicalization in the first place. The Easter Sunday bombings in April 2019, which claimed over 200 lives, were fuelled by extremist ideologies inspired by events in the Middle East and Islamic extremists…

TREASURE is the latest K-pop artist signaling a signing between Korean and U.S. labels, marking a slew of exciting beginnings for the boy band and its Korean label and management YG Entertainment. On July 3 local time in South Korea, YG Entertainment—the longtime Korean-pop super-label that’s home to artists like BIGBANG, BLACKPINK, WINNER and AKMU—shared that their youngest boy band TREASURE have cemented a “North American partnership” with Columbia Records marking the band’s first foray towards focusing more on the west. YG Entertainment notes that the Sony Music label will provide “localized, all-round support for the 10-member boy band in…

Washington is going out of its way to accommodate Israel and is being publicly chided in return. Why is that? Long called the most special bilateral relationship, US-Israeli ties are in fact the world’s strangest. The weirdness, as we have witnessed in the past few weeks, comes in different forms – ranging from the cynical to the surrealistic. Take for example Friday’s tweet by the US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, containing a video of himself and Israeli soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanese border, wishing everyone “Shabbat Shalom”. This bizarre display of support for the Israeli military, which is de facto still at…

It’s Hard to Win Without a Plan for the Future By the summer of 2003, it had become clear to even its most ardent proponents that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had, at the very least, not gone as planned. After Washington disbanded the Iraqi military at the end of May, hundreds of thousands of armed men began protesting across the country. Fighters began regularly attacking U.S. and allied soldiers, prompting the American military to spend June carrying out a series of operations to find and kill armed groups. As the weeks went by, these groups began carrying out even…

Paris, Brussels (13/7 – 37.5) Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive Kazakh businessman, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for murder in Kazakhstan. He was also convicted for embezzlement and money laundering in Kazakhstan. In Russia, the former banker was sentenced to 15 years for embezzling nearly 60 billion rubles (est. 666 million US dollars). In the recent development in the case against him, the French authorities have demanded that Ablyazov, the former head of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, leave the country within the next 30 days. He announced this on his Facebook page. Ablyazov’s extradition includes sought by Kazakhstan, Russia, the…