Massive cranes to be transported under Golden Gate Bridge to Port of Oakland today - KGO-TV

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OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- A special delivery is headed for the Port of Oakland today. The new cranes will allow the port to handle massive container ships.

Transporting the cranes is a delicate operation; the crane booms had to be lowered, in order to fit under the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge.

If everything goes as planned, the cranes should arrive around 8 a.m.

These new cranes will be the tallest ever at the Port of Oakland.

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Government of Canada invests in transportation infrastructure at the port of Montreal to move goods to market - Yahoo Finance

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ICE’s Jeffrey Sprecher Turns Billionaire on Eve of Wife’s Georgia Runoff

(Bloomberg) -- For a guy who turned a few dollars into a company that oversees everything from the New York Stock Exchange to Libor, Jeffrey Sprecher was remarkably unknown outside of Wall Street.And it may have stayed that way except that his wife, Kelly Loeffler, was appointed to a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia to fill a vacancy late last year.Within months, the couple faced public scorn over a series of stock trades made before the coronavirus outbreak jolted global markets. Their wealth has now become a focal point in the Jan. 5 runoff election between Loeffler and Raphael Warnock, a Democrat -- one of two Senate races that day that will determine control of the chamber.His company’s 22% rally this year has helped make Sprecher, 65, a billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and cemented Loeffler’s place as the wealthiest member of Congress.It’s another reminder of how Wall Street has done well during the pandemic while the broader economy struggles, and the latest twist to Sprecher’s improbable journey to the pinnacle of American finance. Intercontinental Exchange Inc., or ICE, as it’s called, is now a $63 billion behemoth that underpins much of the global financial system. It was built on Sprecher’s dealmaking, good timing and keen sense of where the world was headed.“I never would have thought ICE would own the NYSE, be a leading provider of fixed-income market data and seek to automate the mortgage process all at the same time,” said Rich Repetto, an analyst at Piper Sandler & Co. who has covered the company since its 2005 initial public offering.Sprecher, through an ICE representative, declined to be interviewed or comment on his net worth, which largely consists of his roughly 1% stake in the business. He hasn’t spoken publicly about his wife’s bid, but he’s donated to several Republican lawmakers and political action committees in recent years, including at least $5.5 million to a super PAC that supports her.Loeffler, 50, was an ICE executive for more than a decade and is now in a razor-thin race with Warnock amid record early turnout. Her campaign didn’t comment.Sprecher, who worked as a salesman out of college, got into the power industry in 1983. Looking for a way to hedge the price of fuels, he formed ICE in the 1990s by buying a failing Atlanta company, called Continental Power Exchange, that he modeled into an EBay for energy businesses looking to buy or sell surplus electricity. He paid $1 or $1,000 for the business -- he said two years ago he can’t recall the precise sum -- and kept it afloat with his savings.The timing was fortuitous. ICE launched shortly before its biggest rival, Enron Corp., went bust.Sprecher went on to make a dizzying number of deals. He bought rival exchanges and also expanded ICE into areas like commodity futures, fixed income and clearinghouses, which sit in the middle of each trade. The purchase of NYSE Euronext, which included the vaunted New York Stock Exchange, gave ICE control of London-based Liffe, which offered interest-rate derivatives trading.In 2014, ICE picked up responsibility for the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which is embedded in an array of financial contracts, ranging from credit-card rates to pricing of derivatives. And this year it bought Ellie Mae Inc., which processes more than 40% of all new U.S. residential mortgages, a booming business now with borrowing costs at record lows.At the heart of the company is data, which it collects from clients, sorts and analyzes, and then sells back to those same clients. It underpins benchmark indexes for everything from crude oil derivatives to interest rates.“If I were starting this company today, I would probably call it the Intercontinental Massively Scalable Network and Database Company, because that’s what we are,” Sprecher said on a February call with analysts.Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, competes with ICE in providing financial analytics, fixed-income data and information.Loeffler arrived at ICE in 2002 to lead investor relations, and later also took on communications and marketing -- responsibilities usually split among three jobs. She and Sprecher married in 2004. They are self-proclaimed workaholics and have no children.Loeffler had been active in Republican circles for many years but never run for public office. But when Johnny Isakson, the state’s senior senator, stepped down in 2019 for health reasons, she sought and won the temporary appointment from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, her gender and financial well-being likely playing roles in his decision.The couple’s wealth, laid out in a 99-page financial disclosure form that lists everything from rental properties to a private plane, came under scrutiny after she disclosed a series of stock trades that began the day she and other senators got a classified briefing on the coronavirus outbreak.Loeffler has said the couple’s independent financial advisers made the trades without their knowledge, and that the investment portfolio will be liquidated. The Justice Department dropped a probe of transactions by her and some other lawmakers and the Senate’s own ethics panel cleared her of any wrongdoing.She sits on four Senate committees including the Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The agency regulates the derivatives market, including many aspects of ICE’s growing business.Sprecher hasn’t given any inkling that he’s done building the company. In February, he gave up on an overture with EBay Inc., which had puzzled analysts. The acquisition of Ellie Mae was announced just six months later.“I really don’t know how to manage a company that isn’t growing,” he said on a podcast in May. “Part of managing a growing company is like the duck with your legs moving very quickly underneath. I wouldn’t really know how to float around.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Investigators: 'Highly likely' FBI will wrap up Nashville bombing crime scene Wednesday - WZTV

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Investigators: 'Highly likely' FBI will wrap up Nashville bombing crime scene Wednesday  WZTV

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Port: In 2021, let's stop being offended so much - The Dickinson Press

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Those are the words of Henry Miller. Or, at least, a fictionalized iteration of Miller as portrayed on the series "The Durrells in Corfu," which I took to watching during my recent coronavirus-caused convalescence (it's a wonderful show for lovers of campy British drama).

In the episode, Miller spoke in the context of one of the other characters being persecuted for his sexual orientation. The words, though, struck a bell in my mind.

People really do love being offended.

Why?

I'm not sure we can underestimate how central this "ignoble pleasure" is to the way we live our lives. In politics, President Donald Trump has exploited it over the last several years with no small amount of success. During the 2016 campaign, his candidacy drew attention far in excess of what his fundamentally unserious campaign warranted because many Americans, perhaps especially those who would never cast a ballot for the man, couldn't help but tune in to see what offensive thing he would say next.

The social media giants — Facebook, Twitter, etc. — would never admit it, but much of their business model is built to exploit the world's unquenchable appetite for being offended.

Scroll through your feeds and count how many of the posts are an exercise in umbrage. Somebody didn't get good service at the local burger barn. Somebody didn't like what a certain politician said on a talk show. Somebody else, still, is upset about what Uncle Frank had to say at the Christmas dinner table.

So many offended.

So many certain that their state of being offended must be fired out into the world where it will, inevitably, offend someone else.

Miller's character was probably referring to Aristotle's thoughts about pleasure. "Ignoble pleasures," the great philosopher believed, are sought by those "who are stunted in their capacities for higher activities, having failed to develop the intellectual and moral virtues needed to use these well, and consequently fall short of the highest natural human fulfillment and goal," as MIT professor Leonard Katz put it.

In other words, there is no virtue in virtue-signaling. There is not much that is honorable in your outrage.

In a few days, we will be beginning a new year. A year I think we are all hoping is significantly different from the one we just lived through.

Perhaps we could resolve to revel less in grievance.

This isn't to say that we should never be offended. Only that we should pick our spots and save our outrage for moments where it truly matters. These are not the social media antics of our neighbors, the bloviations of some pundit, or the inanities perpetrated by the political class.

Those situations would be improved if they were a bit more starved for attention.

To comment on this article, visit www.sayanythingblog.com

Rob Port, founder of SayAnythingBlog.com, is a Forum Communications commentator. Reach him on Twitter at @robport or via email at rport@forumcomm.com.

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‘We’re not here to hurt you’: SWAT scene video captures deputies making negotiations with shooting suspect - KPRC Click2Houston

HOUSTON – A SWAT team is surrounding an east Harris County home after deputies said they received a call about a woman being shot.

Deputies said they were dispatched to the 14300 block of Lourdes Drive after receiving reports of a shooting.

When deputies arrived at the scene, they began to approach the residence and an unknown suspect fired at them, investigators said.

According to HCSO, the suspect has barricaded himself inside the residence. Deputies at the scene can be heard on a megaphone saying, “Louis, come out of the house. We’re here to help you, not hurt you.”

The status of the woman is currently unknown. Expect a large police and deputy presence in the area.

arrived began to approach the residence and an unknown suspect fired at Deputies (none injured). The suspect has barricaded himself in the residence. The status of the female is unknown. Expect a large police presence. #HouNews

— Ed Gonzalez (@SheriffEd_HCSO) December 30, 2020

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New stimulus gives Philly's struggling music scene a boost - WHYY

Ask us about COVID-19: What questions do you have about the current surge?

On Sunday night, Sean Salm could see the stage at Voltage Lounge lighting up again, with guitarists, singers and even professional wrestlers performing in front of a live audience after months of silence.

Not literally, of course.

But for the live venue manager, President Donald Trump’s decision to sign the $900 billion second coronavirus stimulus bill was enough to make him dare to dream. The Voltage, like most other hospitality businesses, has been devastated by the occupancy restrictions brought by the pandemic. The 350-capacity venue near Center City hasn’t been able to pay rent since March, Salm said.

“I think [Philadelphia’s] eviction ban has saved us, otherwise we would be out by now” said Salm, who is currently making ends’ meet by working a sales job at a New Jersey glitter company.

The latest stimulus bill earmarks $15 billion for the shuttered venues, museums, theaters, and other arts organizations. The money will be a lifeline for the roughly 225 independent venues in Pennsylvania — many of which have been in a coma since spring.

“We are [now] in communication with our landlord in hopes of working something out,” Salm said. “[This] has been huge in the process of saving our venue.

Grants designed with venue operators in mind

The funding for venues will be distributed directly by the federal Small Business Administration. To qualify, venues must have less than 500 employees, have opened before the pandemic, and have lost at least 25% of their revenue in 2020. Venue operators will be able to apply for initial grants of up to 45% of their 2019 revenue and will have broad discretion over how to spend that money.

That’s a major departure from the Paycheck Protection Program, which many venues turned to out of desperation in the spring. That program offered businesses loans that could be forgiven if they spent the majority of the money on payroll — something that was feasible for some bars and restaurants, but impossible for most venues, which either did not reopen at all or did so with far fewer employees.

Scooter Best, who owns The Grape Room in Manayunk, plans to make his pitch to the SBA. He said most of his revenue came from bar sales before the pandemic, but he’s struggled to replicate those sales without consistent indoor live acts. The Grape Room is in “terrible” financial shape, Best said, and he’s had to take a second job as a mason to keep his family afloat.

“It’s the Grape Room — you come for an experience,” Best said. “You can’t take that experience out.”

The details of the new pot of venue stimulus came out of a massive lobbying effort by independent venue operators, said Kerri Park, chief operating officer at the World Cafe Live and an organizer with the National Independent Venue Association.

“It has been quite a long road to get to this point,” Park said. “But all along the way we felt very much that once people heard our story, and understood how unique our situation was compared to other industries, they would really understand.”

Industry-wide, Park said the loss of employment has been “massive.”

The World Cafe went from about 100 employees to 10 on March 13. Those 90 employees were initially furloughed, Park said, but the cafe made the difficult decision to lay them off permanently in November. The remaining employees are receiving reduced salaries.

Parks celebrated when the stimulus bill passed with bipartisan support on Dec 21. But she spent the week in anxious suspense after Trump publicly declared he would not sign it without major changes. Only now, she said, is she relaxed enough for her ringtone — the 1988 Bobby McFerrin classic “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” — to not bother her.

“I think at this point everyone exhaled a little bit, and can finally see that breathing room on the horizon,” Park said.

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When will the money flow?

The question now? Timing.

A spokesperson for the Small Business Administration (SBA) was not able to comment on when venue operators will be able to begin to apply for grant funding, or when those grants will start hitting bank accounts.

The National Independent Venue Association is working with the SBA on the grant’s application, Parks said. She expects the application portal to go live by late January, and disbursements to begin by late February.

The hardest-hit venues will get priority at first: The law limits the first two weeks of the application period to venues that lost at least 90% of their revenue during the pandemic. It also sets aside $2 billion for venues with 50 employees or less.

It still comes too late for the Boot and Saddle, the South Philly venue which closed permanently in November.

“We stretched it out as long as we could,” said Sean Agnew, whose R5 Productions company owned Boot and Saddle and operates Union Transfer. “If [the stimulus] happened a few weeks earlier it would probably still be up and running, which is a brutal thing.”

Still, better late than never, Agnew said. Even after selling off the Boot and Saddle’s liquor license, and sound system, and other assets, the future of Union Transfer was still in doubt.

“This almost guarantees that we can open when it is safe to do so,” he said.

For Karen Saillant, who has operated The Fire in Northern Liberties since 1999, the new funding would be a way out of a financial hole that has grown deeper with each passing month of the pandemic.

For decades, the Fire has been a launchpad for new acts. John Legend played some of his first shows there while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Saillant, who is also the artistic director of Philadelphia’s International Opera Theater, gave singing lessons to G. Love frontman Garrett Dutton before he found fame.

But the venue has long struggled to make money. In 2018, Saillant sold her home of five decades to help keep it afloat.

“It was kind of unfortunate timing,” she said.

Sailliant is in her mid-70s, and so worried about contracting COVID-19 she has hardly been outside since March. Still, she said she will do whatever it takes to re-open The Fire when it is safe to do so.

“I can’t imagine not continuing to offer venues for young musicians to play,” she said. “It is always art that leads away. If we lose our artistic institutions….what do we have left?”

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Port and tunnel operators confident of avoiding Brexit Channel chaos - Financial Times

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The operators of the vital Dover-Calais trading route are confident new Brexit bureaucracy from Friday will not bring a repeat of the pre-Christmas chaos of stranded truckers across Kent and parts of France.

A combination of an expected sharp drop in traffic after January 1, the UK temporarily waiving most of its customs checks, and new systems and infrastructure on the French side of the border should keep traffic moving, they predicted this week.

“We are very confident that our bit [of the process] will work,” said John Keefe, director of public affairs at Channel Tunnel operator Getlink. 

But much of the success of the new border operations will still depend on traders successfully completing millions of customs declarations, costing businesses an estimated £7bn a year in new red tape, according to HM Revenue & Customs, as Britain leaves the EU single market and customs union.

Ministers are nervous that Brexit will be defined by queues that appear immediately after frictionless trade disappears at 11pm UK time on December 31. Michael Gove, Britain’s Cabinet Office minister, warned this week of “bumpy moments” resulting from “practical and procedural changes” imposed in the new year. The UK government is anxious to avoid more pictures of miles of lorries gridlocked or parked in a disused airfield.

On Monday morning, while all but 15 trucks had been cleared from the M20 motorway, the remnants of France’s pre-Christmas decision to close the border with the UK because of the discovery of the new Covid-19 variant was still visible, with thousands of plastic bags of waste and bottles of urine strewn on the verges and hard shoulder.

But while the UK’s new truck stop and lorry park at Sevington, just
outside Ashford, is still full of mechanical diggers and far from
complete, the post-Brexit border facilities on the other side of the
channel have been finished for many months. The gleaming new customs facilities at both the Channel Tunnel and the Port of Calais stand as testament to the new frictions to trade.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s false claim that there will be no non-tariff barriers to trade brings out a grimace from Jean-Marc Puissesseau, president of the port of Boulogne and Calais, who had to spend €13m on new processes for trucks and buildings for checks. Getlink has spent €47m on new infrastructure on its Coquelles site.

Mr Keefe said the all-important part of the process in getting 3,500 trucks a day through the Channel Tunnel was ensuring escape routes for those trucks that do not have a smooth passage so that they do not hold up those behind them.

“Everything we’ve done is to build offline moments to do controls and inspection without disrupting the flow of the traffic,” Mr Keefe said.

For UK exports to the EU this means that so long as their customs paperwork was accepted by both the British and French authorities and the truck was allowed on to the trains, they would round a corner after disembarkation in France, go through a couple of chicanes to slow them down and allow their number plates to be read automatically. Then, without stopping, each lorry would be given a green or an amber sign and told to follow road markings depending on the risk assessment made by French customs authorities.

The green lane goes straight to the motorway as now, while the amber lane is routed to a lorry park on site with nine new inspection bays and even a stable for horses. There, drivers will wait for checks, most likely if importing plant or animal products.

A similar system has been built at the Port of Calais for the larger number of trucks using ferries, but drivers will be given their green or amber verdicts on an app while crossing the channel.

For European exports to the UK, the infrastructure is also in place. Both the Channel Tunnel and the port will operate systems that require only a barcode to show that export declarations have been loaded into the EU systems and the import declarations for the UK, and these will be scanned at the same time as the existing dog checks to look for illegal migrants take place.

At this “pit stop”, the Channel Tunnel and authorities can check 20 trucks every four to five minutes, according to Mr Keefe. Any truck without the required paperwork will be routed out of the flow to a new facility with customs agents and 250 spaces for lorries to park up and fill in the paperwork.

It is the requirement for all trucks to turn up at the coast with all paperwork ready which all sides warn has the potential to cause disruption. “If the majority of hauliers don’t make a declaration, there will be a problem, but I don’t believe it will happen,” Mr Puissesseau said.

On the UK side, there will be minimal initial checks on imports into Britain because the facilities are not yet ready.

John Glen, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, suggested a lack of queues on the M20 would disguise a loss of trade because of insufficient customs agents to process millions of new declarations. “Much of the problem will be hidden,” he said and would build once pre-Christmas stockpiles began to run short in February.

In Calais, the new rules had already brought a post-Christmas lull in traffic ahead of the new rules coming into force. Port operators said they expected a very quiet month ahead.

“We expect January to be calm because lots of people have taken themselves out of the market by stockpiling, but we expect traffic to be going again from the beginning of February,” Mr Keefe said.

But with the anticipation of Brexit alongside coronavirus already reducing the trucks crossing by ferry from 2m a year to 1.7m in 2020, Mr Puissesseau hopes the reality of the new customs checks will not hurt his business further, especially as it prepares to open a huge expansion to the port later in 2021. “I hope it will remain at 1.7m,” he said. 

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