Category: News Daypop

More than 16,000 pounds of ground beef sold at Walmart stores nationwide were recalled due to potential E. coli contamination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced the recall on Wednesday; according to the release, approximately 16,342 pounds of six different types of raw ground beef products sold by Cargill Meat Solutions were recalled. The products were produced April 26-27, 2o24 under a variety of different labels, the release said (see HERE for labels.). Consumers are urged to check their fridge or freezer and immediately dispose of the product or return it to the place of purchase.

According to the agency, the ground beef may have been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, a “bacterial strain that is an important food and a waterborne pathogen that causes diarrhea, hemorrhagic colitis, and hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) in humans,” according to StatPearls, an online library published in the National Library of Medicine.

All products contained the establishment umber “EST. 86P” printed on the back of the label, and the products were then shipped to Walmart retail locations nationwide. According to the release, the producer flagged the issue after it was discovered that the impacted products, which had previously been segregated, have been “inadvertently utilized in the production of ground beef.”

No confirmed reports of adverse reaction has been reported, the release added. For more information about the recall, head here.

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Peloton announced on Thursday that CEO Barry McCarthy will be stepping down as the company, and that it is also cutting 15% of its staff worldwide (or about 400 employees).  Karen Boone and Chis Bruzzo, Peloton’s current board chair and director, respectively, will temporarily handle the CEO duties until a new leader is chosen. Another board director, Jay Hoag, has been named the new chair, and McCarthy will stay with Peloton as a strategic advisor for the rest of 2024.

The announcement was made ahead of revealing its 2024 third-quarter financial report Thursday morning, after which shares slid 12%, to $2.81. The job cuts are just the latest round for the company, which announced in October 2022 that it was cutting about 500 jobs on top of the nearly 800 layoffs it made in August of that year. Peloton also said it will also close some retail showrooms while it consolidates resources.

Peloton said in a letter to shareholders: “Today we are announcing a new restructuring program to reduce annual expenses by more than $200 million. The objective of the cost reductions is to align our cost structure with the current size of our business and position Peloton to generate sustained and meaningful positive free cash flow, which is a top priority for us.”

In a message to employees, McCarthy said the layoffs were unavoidable in streamlining costs and making Peloton profitable again. The statement said in part: “Hard as the decision has been to make additional headcount cuts, Peloton simply had no other way to bring its spending in line with its revenue. The company had to do that in order to generate sustainable positive [free cash flow]. Achieving positive FCF makes Peloton a more attractive borrower, which is important as the company turns its attention to the necessary task of successfully refinancing its debt.”

The New York-based fitness company experienced incredible sales growth during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with shares multiplying by more than five times in 2020 amid lockdowns. However, sales began to slow in 2021 as vaccines allowed people to come out of quarantine and begin to visit gyms and exercise establishments outside of the home.

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College protests continued across the country, resulting in escalating violence between pro-Palestinian encampments and counter-protesters. The movement calling for universities to divest financial support for Israel, which has affected dozens of campuses across America, has gone on for over two weeks now. Hundreds of arrests have been made and skirmishes have broken out between police and demonstrators, causing graduation ceremonies to be canceled, and universities forced to switch to remote learning, with access to campuses being restricted.

The Los Angeles Police Department said it has bene responding to UCLA at the ‘university’s request’ due to multiple acts of violence, with the university cancelling all classes until further notice.  Protest encampments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yale University and the University of Connecticut were also cleared out as of Tuesday, but encampments remain at more than 40 colleges nationwide.

At The City College of New York and Columbia University, the NYPD made at least 282 arrests, stemming from the breach of special police units at the now-occupied Hamilton Hall. Columbia has asked police to maintain a presence on campus until May 17, two days after commencement. The school said on Wednesday afternoon that all academic activities, including finals, for schools on the Morningside Heights campus will be fully remote for the remainder of the semester.  New York Mayor Eric Adams said in a briefing that while some students were involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia, they were “led by individuals not affiliated with the university.”

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On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve voted to keep interest rates steady and postponed anticipated rate cuts stemming from elevated inflation across the U.S., which remains above the central bank’s 2% threshold.

The Federal reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement that the central bank left interest rates for overnight bank borrowing within a range of 5.25%-5.5%: “The economic outlook is uncertain, and the Committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks.”  In addition, with CPI inflation at 3.5%, the FOMC said, “In recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the Committee’s 2% inflation objective.”

Inflation has dropped dramatically from a high point of 9.1% annually to 2.7% as measured by the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE index. However, it remains more than a percentage point higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2%.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a press conference in Washington D.C. on Wednesday: “So far the data has not given us that greater confidence. It is likely that gaining such greater confidence will take longer than previously expected.” While the possibility of an interest rate hike in the coming months was raised (before the central bank moves forward with cuts), Powell said: “It is unlikely that the next policy rate move will be a hike.”

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Additional details have been revealed by authorities in North Carolina after 4 law enforcement officers were killed, and four others were wounded, in shooting in Charlotte while trying to serve a warrant Monday afternoon. , Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings said at a press conference that the suspect left the house while armed, and officers opened fire and shot him in the front yard, where he was pronounced dead. He was identified by police as Terry Clark Hughes Jr., 39.

Jennings said that the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force, comprised of officers from multiple agencies, was attempting to serve an arrest warrant on a man for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in east Charlotte when the shooting began. Jennings said that when officers approached a house to arrest the suspect, they were immediately met with gunfire and they returned fire.

CNN reported that an internal law enforcement memo shows officers are looking for the person who bought the firearm used in the shooting to potentially bring federal charges. Evidence from the residence is still being processed, and the amount of evidence that will be collected is expected to be “well over 100 rounds of gunfire of projectiles and casings.”

During a Tuesday news conference, Jennings called the shooting “an absolute tragic day for the city of Charlotte and for the profession of law enforcement,” and added that the investigation is active and ongoing. Jennings said: “We saw officers going into the line of fire to save their brothers in blue who have gone down in an act of trying to keep our community safe. To me, that’s truly heroic. When you hear the gunshots and the rapid fire and they are running directly into it because they know there are people who need help – they risked their own lives to do that.”

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Donald Trump was held in contempt of court Tuesday and fined $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order that barred him from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and some others connected to his New York hush money case. Trump must pay the fine by the close of business on Friday, and the former president has since deleted, as ordered, the offending posts from his Truth Social account and campaign website on Tuesday.

New York Judge Juan M. Merchan found nine violations by Trump, and warned if he continues to violate the gag order he could be jailed. Merchan wrote that Trump “is hereby warned that the Court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders and that if necessary and appropriate under the circumstances, it will impose an incarceratory punishment.”

In detailing the violations, Judge Merchan ruled that a Trump post quoting Fox News host Jesse Watters’s claim that liberal activists were lying to infiltrate the jury “constitutes a clear violation” of the gag order. Merchan noted that the words contained within the quotation marks in Trump’s April 17 post misstated what Watters actually said.

The ruling from Merchan came at the start of the second week of testimony, with Manhattan prosecutors alleging that Trump and his associates took part in an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 presidential campaign by burying negative stories.  The former president has pleaded not guilty.

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Per ABC NEWS, Pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University occupied a hall on campus early Tuesday, hours after school officials ordered the dispersal of a protest encampment. Videos appear to show protesters creating a barricade with metal chairs outside Hamilton Hall after midnight. The campus newspaper Columbia Spectator reported that those inside were working to block the building’s exits with tables, chairs and zip-ties.

Despite warnings from Columbia University (and after the school’s president said it would not divest from Israel), students who defied Columbia’s orders to vacate their pro-Palestinian protest by 2 p.m. on Monday have begun to be suspended. Ben Chang, vice president for communications and a spokesperson for Columbia University, said around 5 p.m. on Monday, about three hours after the deadline passed: “We have begun suspending students .. University representatives engaged in good faith dialogue with the organizers and maintain that dialogue. We were hopeful and we were disappointed when the student protesters couldn’t reach consensus on the issues under discussion.”

Columbia had issued notices to students on Monday in protest camps saying that if protesters left by the 2 p.m. deadline and signed a form committing to abide by university policies through June 2025 or an earlier graduation, they could finish the semester in good standing. If not, the letter said, they would be suspended, pending further investigation, and barred from completing the spring semester.  However at the encampment, protesters voted nearly unanimously to stay put, and around 2:45 p.m were seen marching on the quad, chanting “Disclose! Divest! We will not slow, we will not rest!’”

In a statement, University President Minouche Shafik had asked the protesters to voluntarily disperse, saying the demonstration had created “an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty, adding that “external actors have contributed to a hostile environment” around university gates, and that it had become a “noisy distraction” for students. Shafik also cited the May 15 commencement, saying, “We also do not want to deprive thousands of students and their families and friends of a graduation celebration.” A portion of the encampment has been cleared to make space for the upcoming commencement ceremony for graduates, and picketers are largely sticking to the perimeters of the encampment.

Columbia was the first elite institution struck by protests in support of the Palestinian cause, with students demanding that the school divest from investments that support weapons manufacturing and Israel; protests spread quickly last week on campuses across the U.S.

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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Elon Musk over the terms of a settlement agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (‘SEC’) that requires him to get approval in advance of some social media posts that relate to Tesla, the electric vehicle company he leads. Musk was seeking to overturn restrictions imposed on him by the SEC following a 2018 post on Twitter (now X). The high court rejected Musk’s appeal without comment.

An appeals court’s rejected Musk’s bid last year for the so-called “Twitter sitter” provision to be modified, complainingn that the requirement amounts to “prior restraint” on his speech, violated his First Amendment rights and was “unenforceable.” Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, and filed a petition with the Supreme Court in December 2023 seeking to undo the agreement, claiming it was an unconstitutional infringement of his right to free speech.

Tweets that Musk had posted in 2018, in which he claimed he had secured funding to take Tesla private, had caused the company’s share price to jump and led to a temporary halt in trading. The tweet was ruled to be “false and misleading” and shareholders accused Tesla of securities fraud. The settlement with the SEC included a requirement that his tweets be approved first by a Tesla attorney, and also called for Musk and Tesla to pay civil fines over the tweets in which Musk said he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 per share (the funding wasn’t secured, and Tesla remains public).

The SEC’s initial enforcement action against Musk alleged that his tweets about going private violated antifraud provisions of securities laws. The agency began investigating whether Musk violated the settlement in 2021 when he did not get approval before asking followers on Twitter, now X, if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.

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Pope Francis made his first trip outside Rome in seven months on Sunday, visiting a prison for women in Venice ahead of a mass in the city.  The Pope has not travelled since visiting the French city of Marseille in September 2023.

Amid concerns over his health, the 87-year-old pontiff arrived by helicopter at 8:00am local time to the courtyard of the women’s prison on the island of Giudecca, and greeted one by one the approximately 80 inmates, staff and volunteers. The pope met with female prisoners who are stars of the Vatican’s pavilion at the Biennale contemporary art show, urging the women to rebuild their lives in the first ever papal visit to one of the world’s biggest art gatherings.

The pope encouraged the women to reconstruct their lives “brick upon brick, together, with determination” during their time in prison, saying: “Prison is a harsh reality, and problems such as overcrowding, the lack of facilities and resources, and episodes of violence, give rise to a great deal of suffering there. But it can also become a place of moral and material rebirth.”  The Pontiff called on the prison system to “offer detainees the tools and room for human, spiritual, cultural and professional growth, creating the conditions for their healthy reintegration”.

Pope Francis also toured an art exhibition housed at the prison which examines the daily lives of the inmates through the work of 10 different artists. The exhibit is the Vatican’s entry for this year’s Biennale festival of art, which began last weekend.

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Authorities confirmed on Sunday that a four-month-old baby was among two people killed in Oklahoma, in the wake of severe storms and multiple tornadoes that spread across four states. The Oklahoma tornadoes Saturday night were the latest in a series of tornadoes that have battered the Midwest beginning last week and into the weekend.

According to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, at least 30 people were injured and one remains unaccounted for as authorities continued a search and rescue mission Sunday. Emergency officials in Hughes County, Oklahoma, said the baby was one of two people killed in storms that struck Holdenville.

Sunday marked the third day of the severe weather outbreak across the heartland states, with more than 22 million people under threat of violent storms in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Illinois. A powerful pair of twisters that touched down in Nebraska, officials said. Twenty-seven million people remain at risk of severe weather into Sunday, including wind gusts, hail, flood risk and potentially more tornadoes.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement Sunday: “My prayers are with those who lost loved ones as tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma last night. Thank you to Oklahoma Emergency Management and those who have worked through the night to keep Oklahomans safe and have worked to clear debris and assess damage.”  Stitt declared a state of emergency in a dozen counties.

A destructive tornado also hit Sulfur, Oklahoma, in Murray County, destroying buildings and scattering debris for miles with at least four other people injured in the area.  Tornadoes were also reported Saturday across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Nebraska, officials said, and according to the National Weather Service there were nearly 120 tornado reports in the last two days.

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