Day: June 27, 2024

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• Housing markets in Louisiana, Florida, and Texas are the country’s “coldest,” Realtor.com says.
• These cold locales are seeing inventories rise and prices fall amid a lack of buyer interest.
• Gulf-region housing also faces rising insurance costs, a challenge worsened by the climate. 

Housing markets in three Gulf states are the country’s “coldest,” with inventory moving up as prices fall lower, Realtor.com reported.

To determine the hottest property markets in the US, the real estate firm examines factors such as a listing’s length, number of page views, as well as regional inventory and price fluctuations.

Based on these metrics, 15 out of the 20 lowest-scoring markets were located in Louisiana, Florida, and Texas: Lake Charles, Panama City, and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission were the coolest metros in each state, respectively.

Quieter corners of US housing could mean bargain deals for potential buyers, Realtor.com said, as rising unaffordability has priced out many in the broader national market. While a pandemic buying boom is partially to blame, stubborn mortgage rate highs and a shortage of available properties have only added to the problem

But conditions are different in the South. After remote workers rushed to Texas and Florida in preceding years, the construction wave that followed has left these two states with an oversupply of homes, Redfin previously reported.

That’s helped prices tumble in certain metros. In fact, Miami notched the country’s biggest year-to-year decline, falling 11.2%.

According to Realtor.com, the South generally leads the Northeast and Midwest in the construction of single family homes. Once made, builders are applying affordability adjustments such as buy-downs, adding more of a cooling effect.

“For homebuyers looking for comfort, Southern markets offer up much-needed hospitality,” Realtor.com economist Ralph McLaughlin said in the new report. “Inventory — especially of entry-level homes — is growing, they are moving slower, and listing prices are actually down compared to last year.”

Adding to the mix of cooldown factors are rising housing insurance costs, a challenge that’s unique to the Gulf region. As climate change amplifies extreme weather risks, owners are facing higher and higher coverage costs. Some insurers are even leaving, weighing on household options.

Cohen was accused of insider trader and misleading investors after making $60 billion on Bed Bath & Beyond stock in 2022.

Courtesy of Chewy.com

• Bed Bath & Beyond board members were concerned Ryan Cohen was getting insider information.
• Sue Gove, the company’s CEO, said in a deposition that she was concerned about Cohen’s relationship with board members.
• “I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust what was taking place,” Gove said of Cohen in her testimony.

Bed Bath & Beyond board members were concerned Ryan Cohen received insider information before making $60 billion selling the company’s stock, according to a deposition by CEO Sue Gove.

“I certainly had questions about that,” said Gove, who was named CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond in October 2022. “Probably most” other board members were also concerned that some on the board were funneling insider information to Cohen, Gove added in her testimony as part of a shareholder lawsuit against the activist investor, who is the current CEO of GameStop.

Ben Rosenzweig, one of the directors on Bed Bath & Beyond’s board, was known to have private contact with Cohen, the deposition said. Their conversations revolved around the personalities of other board members and whether Cohen’s nominees for Bed Bath & Beyond’s board were let in on calls, according to the testimony.

In a conversation with Gove, Rosenzweig indicated he was “representing Ryan,” Gove said. She believed Rosenzweig’s conversations with Cohen were inappropriate due to his role as an “independent director.”

Gove said she did “not completely” trust Rosenzweig or Cohen. In particular, she said she was in a “concerned state” when Rosenzweig suggested he was acting as “Ryan’s agent.”

“I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust what was taking place,” Gove added of Cohen. “There was a lot of things that had taken place between, you know, him and … and Ben and the whole process that always left me uncomfortable. We were very careful with our conversations with him.”

Rosenweig and other directors, though, have said in their testimonies that they’ve never given insider info to Cohen. Cohen was given non-public information on one occasion but under an agreement that prevented him from trading on it, Rosenzweig said in his deposition.

Lawyers for Cohen and Gove did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Cohen was accused in a shareholder lawsuit of insider trading and misleading Bed Bath & Beyond investors after making a fortune on the stock in 2022, when he sold his stake in the struggling retailer before the stock tanked. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023.

(NewsNation) — The trial for Bryan Kohberger, accused of killing four students at the University of Idaho, is expected to start next June.

Kohberger faces four murder charges in connection with the November 2022 stabbing deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves in their off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho.

The anticipated date for the trial was announced at a court hearing for Kohberger Thursday. A location for the trial has not yet been confirmed.

For 70 years, Veselka has been serving up authentic Ukrainian cuisine in New York City, and its legacy lives on in their new Williamsburg location.

In 1954, the New York City staple was brought to life by Volodymyr and Olha Darmochwal, grandparents of current owner Jason Birchard, in the East Village.  

“So you might consider our early days sort of like the Ukranian bodega, Jason’s grandparents immigrated to the United States, fleeing Russian oppression in the 50s, settled in the East Village, which is Little Ukraine,” said Justin Birchard, Director of Development at Veselka. “Veselka started as a kind of newsstand/coffee shop and slowly over time, expanded the menu and food offerings and also the physical footprint of the restaurant and building it into what it became today.”

Tom Birchard, Jason’s father and Justin’s uncle, took over for the Darmochwals several years later, with Jason taking the reins in 2020 and Justin joining in 2022. The team has since opened a kiosk in Grand Central Terminal and has found great success in an e-commerce platform.

Photo by Emily Davenport

Veselka has been well-known over the years for serving delicious, authentic Ukrainian food. Among the more popular items on the menu include the pierogi/varenyky, which come with a variety of fillings such as the classic potato, cheese, and braised beef, but also take a modern twist with the bacon, egg and cheese dumpling.

Some other go-to items for the Veselka menu include chicken noodle soup, beef stroganoff, borscht, and potato pancakes.

“It’s hearty, stick to your ribs, homemade like your grandma used to make kind of food,” said Birchard. “It’s a place that people have, have fond memories of from their youth, maybe early morning breakfast or late night lunch dinners, whatever the case may be.”

At the beginning of June, Veselka opened up its first Brooklyn location in the heart of Williamsburg. Located at 646 Lorimer St., the new Veselka location serves up the same classic fare that customers know and love from the brand’s East Village store.

 For the Veselka team, taking the brand to Williamsburg was a no-brainer.

Potato pancakes from Veselka.Photo by Emily Davenport

“We have seen other restaurant concepts that are neighbors of ours in the East Village move over to Williamsburg and have a lot of success. We always felt that Veselka was bigger than just the East Village and wanted to branch out,” said Birchard. “It’s a neighborhood that Jason and I both like a lot, and I happen to live here so I know it well.”

To celebrate the opening of the new store as well as Veselka’s 70th Anniversary, the store teamed up with Katz’s Delicatessen to create two new items, starting with the Pastrogi. This limited-edition menu item 

“We wanted to do a special collaboration with an iconic New York brand. Jason happens to know the owner of Katz’s from some previous TV engagements. When we reached out, we came up with the idea of doing a pastrami-filled pierogi, which we are dubbing ‘the pastrogi,’” said Birchard. “We serve it fried or boiled with a side of Bavarian mustard and it’s been a huge hit.”

The pastrogi at Veselka

The pastrogi is available for dine-in or take-out and is also available for nationwide shipping. Veselka and Katz also created The New York Classics Package featuring Veselka, available on Katz’s website. The package includes one dozen of Veselka’s classic potato pierogies, Katz’s hand-carved pastrami and all the classic fixings. 

The team behind Veselka hopes to be able to continue and grow the brand’s legacy for years to come, keeping Slavic food as a prominent player in New York City’s food industry.

“I think Slavic cuisine traditionally is a little underrepresented in America. We’re looking to launch a line of frozen pierogies, and our hope is that it will be available in grocery stores locally, regionally, and maybe one day nationally,” said Birchard. “We love the brand and its legacy that it had through the generations in our family and the lives that it’s impacted in New York. We want to spread that as much as we can.”

For more information, visit veselka.com. 

Dessert Pierogis at VeselkaPhoto by Emily Davenport

It’s no secret that many progressives are furious at President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Eight months of horrifying images, death tolls, and accounts of human suffering, combined with US support of the war (including weapons sales, vetoes of UN resolutions, and political cover), have caused many on the Left to declare that they cannot vote for Biden this year.

I am not here to argue with any of those moral or political beliefs. But recently, I’ve heard  another story from several progressives: that Donald Trump would not be any different. 

And that is clearly wrong. 

Donald Trump was and would be an utter catastrophe for Palestine and the Palestinian people. And if solidarity with those people is your ideological commitment, if you care about the seven million people whose lives are at stake, then you must do everything in your power to keep Trump from returning to office. Including, if you live in a competitive state, voting for Joe Biden.

Before turning to actual policies, let me make what should be an obvious point: The Israeli right loves Donald Trump. Miriam Adelson, who with her late husband Sheldon Adelson has massively funded the Israeli Right, destabilized Israeli democracy, and underwritten settlements and other extremist projects, recently announced that she is committing $100 million to electing Trump president. Does anyone think for one moment that she is doing this to promote peace between Israel and Palestine?

Obviously not. She and other pro-Israel donors are supporting Trump because he will support a “strong Israel” and allow it to continue its de facto annexation of the West Bank (and perhaps Gaza). According to The New York Times, she said that people who criticize Israel or offer only qualified support are “dead to us” and considers “land for peace” deals to actually be “land for war.” This is who is spending $100 million to defeat Joe Biden.

But it’s not just extremists like Adelson. 

I wish a progressive reader of this column could sit next to a centrist or center-right reader of it. Because many supporters of Israel are also furious with Biden, but for the opposite ideological reasons: for putting too much pressure on Israel, forcing Israel to scale back its military operations and increase humanitarian aid, failing to clamp down on pro-Palestine protests, and undermining the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. For many people, including perhaps many readers of these words, Biden has not been pro-Israel enough. 

So, if you’re more on the progressive side, don’t take my word for it: Watch how Republicans line up behind Netanyahu, how Israel’s more conservative supporters criticize Biden, and how every right-wing politician in Israel, from sane security hawks to insane messianic racists, yearns for the return of Donald Trump.

Now let’s look at some specific policies.

The first Trump administration was the friendliest towards Israel’s far right in American history. He gave the far right everything they wanted: a total freeze on all peace negotiations with the Palestinians, a blank check to increase the construction of settlements in the West Bank, and the once-unthinkable symbolic act of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 

Moreover, Trump’s key advisors on Israel were, themselves, part of the American-Israeli right wing. David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has deep ties to the settlement movement. If you want to talk about colonialism, Israel’s settlement project certainly qualifies, and Friedman was, himself, a longtime participant in and supporter of it. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to Israeli-Arab relations, but even there, his single greatest achievement during his time in the White House was decoupling Palestinian rights from the “Abraham Accords” signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

We don’t know for sure what a Trump administration would have done after Oct. 7 — but we can imagine. There is not a single action that Trump took between 2016-2020 that improved the lives, or even considered the lives, of Palestinians. Would he have acted any differently in 2023 and 2024? 

Of course not. Trump would not have forced Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. Trump would not have forced Israel to the negotiating table. Trump would not have delayed (some) weapons sales to Israel. Trump would have written more blank checks to Bibi Netanyahu — both literally, in the form of increased aid, and figuratively, in the form of permission to do whatever Bibi’s government wanted to do in Gaza, up to and including the Israeli right’s plan to occupy the territory in perpetuity.

Indeed, all Trump has really said about the Gaza War was (on April 4 of this year) that Israel should “Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people… They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to — you have to get back to normalcy and peace.” 

 “I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory,” he continued. “You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time.”

In other words, Trump isn’t saying there should be a ceasefire; he’s saying there should be a rapid, decisive Israeli victory. And the only way to “get it over with fast” is to increase the bombardment, displacement, and civilian deaths. He’s not calling for peace; he’s calling for more war that can lead to peace.

I’m not defending Biden’s policies from a left-wing perspective; I do not believe they can be defended in that way. His policies towards Israel have been centrist, perhaps center-left, and have balanced support for Israel with attempts to mitigate the suffering of innocent Palestinians.

But Trump’s policies would be nothing like that. They were, and would be, supportive of the extreme right-wing version of Zionism. Trump would never have pressured Israel the way Biden did — on the contrary, he would have urged them to bomb more. It’s hard to imagine the scale of the disaster Gaza would have seen as a result — and that Palestine will see, should Trump be elected again.

Voting is not the expression of support for everything a candidate does. It does not make one complicit in their every action. Rather, in competitive states, it is a tactical choice between one of two outcomes — namely, one of the two main candidates becoming president. Sometimes we vote out of wholehearted support, but other times we vote out of harm reduction. 

And if the rights and well-being of seven million Palestinians are important to you, there is no comparison between the extreme shortfalls of Biden and the extreme catastrophe of Trump.

The post What would Donald Trump do in Gaza? appeared first on The Forward.