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The case has rattled labor groups, who fear that allowing companies to more easily sue after strikes would saddle unions with expensive legal bills and undermine a key piece of worker leverage in negotiations.

A deal to raise the debt ceiling would require borrowers of federal student loans to resume paying for the first time since early in the pandemic.

A 15-week federal minimum. Court reform. Abortion activists on both sides are already preparing their 2024 playbooks in an uncertain post-Dobbs landscape.

Some of the biggest providers of housing for mentally ill and formerly homeless New Yorkers have sued tenants for unpaid rent. While few have been evicted, critics call the process cruel and unnecessary.

Four people died when a storm sank a boat in northern Italy. Then it emerged that 21 of those aboard had worked for Israeli or Italian intelligence, igniting a speculative frenzy.

Growing up in New Jersey, summertime for Al Leiter was, as he puts it, “WOR, Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson and Ralph Kiner.” Leiter has vague memories of 1969, when he was nearly four years old and the Mets made a magical run to an improbable World Series title:

“Black-and-white TV, upstairs at a house in Pine Beach, my older brothers and my dad, all excited when they won.”

Tom Seaver, of course, “walked on water, as far as the Leiter family was concerned,” he adds. In 1973, when the Mets made their next trip to the World Series, Leiter was seven and “in the sweet spot of being a young boy, loving baseball,” he says.

No wonder Leiter, now 57, describes himself as a Mets fan “at birth.” Lucky for him, he eventually got a chance to pitch for the team he swooned over as a kid and he was so good at it he’s headed to the Mets Hall of Fame. Leiter will be honored Saturday at Citi Field along with Howard Johnson and broadcasters Gary Cohen and Howie Rose.

Leiter, no surprise, is thrilled to be recognized. “Ya think?” he says, laughing.

“I believe this: It’s always in that innocent heart of every Major Leaguer — once you sign professionally, you know it’s a job. But deep in your baseball soul, you have an affinity for the team you rooted for as a little boy.”

Really, Leiter did more than just pitch for the Mets — he was an affable star in Queens, one who lifted up teammates and fans and helped fuel one of the best eras in club history. Leiter, who arrived in a Feb. 6, 1998 trade with the Marlins, was a big part of the Mets return to the MLB postseason in 1999-2000 after the post-1980s drought.

“Short of winning a World Series, it’s the best seven years of my baseball life,” says Leiter, who did win the Fall Classic with the 1993 Blue Jays and 1997 Marlins. When it ended in 2004, he was disappointed.

Still, his name is all over the Mets’ record books — he’s still sixth in wins and only Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Dwight Gooden, Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling made more starts in Flushing. Leiter, who was 95-67 with a 3.42 ERA with the Mets, is one of only nine Met pitchers with more than 1,000 strikeouts.

He also authored one of the best big-money pitching performances in club history, quite a statement considering the Mets’ pitching bloodlines. In 1999, Leiter threw a two-hit shutout in Cincinnati in a tie-breaker game for the National League Wild Card berth, sending the Mets to the playoffs for the first time since 1988. When fans approach him, he says, it’s the game they mention most.

“It was just masterful to watch him carve up the Reds,” recalls reliever Turk Wendell. “Me, Johnny Franco, Dennis Cook, we were sitting in the bullpen saying, ‘We getting in this game?’ We were on call, but chilling out. That was an awesome performance.”

Leiter always embraced his inner Mets-ness — he loved meeting former Mets and was a mentor to younger teammates. He soaked up wisdom from Sandy Koufax, the Hall-of-Famer who grew up in Brooklyn with ex-Mets owner Fred Wilpon. Leiter still cherishes the day Wilpon gave him Koufax’s cell phone number.

Leiter especially loved moments with Seaver, a Mets broadcaster from 1999-2005. Leiter would seek out The Franchise on the team plane to talk pitching while sipping wine from Seaver’s vineyard.

They even had a ritual of sorts: Seaver would pluck the opponents’ lineup card from the back pocket of Leiter’s uniform pants on the days Leiter pitched. Then he’d go down the batting order with ideas: “The fifth inning on, he won’t beat me and he won’t beat me. Then he’d do the seventh inning,” Leiter says. “They were small, simple conversations that made sense.”

When the Mets strived to offer comfort or distraction to the families of Sept. 11 victims, Leiter was among those at the forefront. “Al has a great way of looking into someone’s eyes when talking to them,” says former Mets manager Bobby Valentine. “You feel like he’s looking right into your brain or soul. He was able to show the compassion that was needed in a very sincere way.”

On the mound, Leiter exhibited a repertoire of quirks. He’d chomp on his glove or stomp around, his emotions oozing from every pore. Those, along with his hitting — Leiter had a lifetime average of .085 — still make teammates chuckle.

“Everyone says you’re supposed to control your emotions; Al allowed his to propel him forward,” Valentine says. “I appreciated that.”

Says Leiter: “When you’re so locked in, you really lose yourself and you don’t care what it might look like. I guess I did some goofy stuff.”

All of the above might be fodder when he’s introduced Saturday. Franco is handling that. Leiter is the godfather to Franco’s youngest daughter and the two former Mets are longtime friends.

“Al,” Franco says, “is a guy you want in a foxhole with you.”

A word of advice to his teammates, though: Beware Leiter’s celebratory hugs.

“Al doesn’t know his own strength,” jokes former teammate Todd Zeile. “He’s just so strong and has no idea he’s crushing your body. And he’s got passion to go with it. It’s very unique to Al. It’s an Al-type of embrace.”

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For the last several years, to be a cuck has had little to do with your sexual proclivities or those of your partner. It has instead been a sort of energy: Being cucked is about being spiritually and philosophically submissive, resigning your values to some dominating ideological or cultural force, and telling yourself you like it. The threat of being cucked no longer comes down to whether your wife would cheat on you—now, the risk of anyone being cucked is near-constant. And as these recent weeks have made clear, we can’t get that idea off our minds.

Last week, the cuck conversation took two forms. The first was through a viral illustration of a line of naked men all waiting to have sex with a single woman. Among all these naked men is one man in a suit, holding a bouquet of flowers. It circulated via a masculinity and dating-centric Twitter account with over 200,000 followers called “The Man Maker,” who shared the image saying, “Ignoring her past will ruin your future.” Just two days later, the account posted it again, edited so that the line appears to extend into infinity, the woman at the end no longer even visible. “You can’t keep a woman who belongs to the streets,” the caption said. “I didn’t make these rules, nature did.”

The tweets amassed millions of views, with hundreds of men responding with “100” emojis and earnest retweets. “Once a prostitute, always a prostitute,” one wrote. It also generated plenty of mocking responses that went viral on their own. But even amid all those dunking on the post, for a significant population of men, this image does represent a deep fear: not only being the chump in the suit but being recognized among their peers as such.

At the same time, photos emerged of Jeff Bezos and his now-fiancé Lauren Sánchez hanging out with her ex-boyfriend, former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez. There are pictures of the trio on Bezos’ yacht, with Gonzalez notably buff and shirtless, as well as some of the gang all walking down the street together—the suggestion being that Bezos shouldn’t tolerate hanging out with a man that fathered a child with his fiancé, particularly so soon after their engagement. It had to mean one of two things: for all his excessive wealth, Bezos cannot enforce boundaries with women and position himself as some “alpha”—or Gonzalez and Sánchez must be sleeping together, and Bezos must actually enjoy it. Either way, Bezos is a cuck—literally or emotionally.

In all likelihood, the three adults are probably attempting to foster some sort of blended family dynamic among all their children, or maybe Bezos doesn’t have many friends. Still, the mere image of them all together has brought the cuck theory to life, even when it doesn’t quite make sense. After all, Gonzalez and Sánchez had been separated for several years before Bezos came into the picture. Sánchez was married to an entirely different man when she and Bezos began seeing each other. If anyone was cucked in this dynamic, it was probably Sánchez’s ex-husband. But none of this matters because we know something about Bezos: no matter how much money he has, no matter how ripped he gets, and no matter how hot his new partner is, he will still evoke this image in our minds of a balding tech dork. For many, he will always embody the ethos of spiritual cuckoldry.

Cuckoldry has been the topic of insults and humor since at least Shakespearean times, but in less than a decade, its meaning has fluctuated repeatedly to this odd place it’s in now. When Trump-adjacent conservatives began using the term around 2015, the public acted scandalized. Buzzfeed News called it racist; the Southern Poverty Law Center published a blog explaining the meaning of the “cuckservative” meme. Meanwhile, at VICE, actual cuckold fetishists spoke out angrily about their niche being used as a right-wing dig. All this now feels dated, at best. We’re well beyond the phase of needing it either explained or defended. If anything, actual cucks have become relatively normalized: It’s common now for men whose wives or girlfriends have other partners to post publicly about the dynamic on social media, even if they are often met with some ridicule. Now, with “cuck” being both politically and sexually neutered, it’s come to mean everything and nothing.

We can say whatever we want to make ourselves feel superior to a man like Bezos, but that does not change the reality that he is one of the wealthiest people to ever live in a way that none of us will remotely compare. Whether Bezos’s fiancé sleeps with other men doesn’t change that. Meanwhile, images like the cuck line highlight the gaping insecurity men still feel about being put in such a category, whether getting labeled as a literal cuck or a spiritual one. Even if we’ve lost much of a definition of the word, it continues to dominate us. The frequency of the cuck conversation borders on obsession. Whether it be Bezos or this fantasy of comparing women to used cars, cucking has invaded our brains. And isn’t that a type of being cucked, in itself?

Dam it all to hell

Picture the scene. You're on holiday and intend to go for a swim in a nearby dam. You pull out your phone for a selfie to make sure everyone knows you're having a lovely time, but you fumble the handset and it falls into the water.…

Luton Town’s Sonny Bradley lifts the trophy after their sides victory during the Sky Bet Championship play-off final against Coventry City at Wembley Stadium, London, Saturday, May 27, 2023. Luton Town’s promotion to the Premier League is an opportunity not given to U.S. minor-league teams.(Adam Davy/PA via AP) 

We need more pain in American professional sports leagues – and by that, I mean financial hurt.

Maybe you didn’t know that much of the world makes their pro teams sweat to keep their status in top-tier leagues. What’s called “relegation” is an annual culling of the sporting herd.

Consider soccer’s English Premier League, for example. Every spring, the three worst of its 20 teams are booted out of one of the world’s top sports league.

Let me explain. As its season was recently winding down, the best Premier League teams competed for championships and qualification to continental playoffs.

The twist of relegation is that season-ending sports drama also played out in real-life “survival games” at the bottom of the Premier League standings. Clubs were fighting to avoid demotion to the second-tier league.

Now I know relegation seems almost un-American. Could you imagine your favorite team being cut from a major league?

But the intrigue surrounding these sporting demotions has become pop culture lore. Relegation was a common theme in the popular “Ted Lasso” comedy from Apple TV about an English soccer team and its quirky and overly-optimistic American coach.

The script had Lasso’s fictional team relegated out of the Premier League, then back in. But the fear of losing that lofty status was ever-present.

“The teams that get relegated, they can get un-relegated, yeah?” Lasso asked in one episode.

Is a bubble brewing for sports businesses?

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That kind of pressure to produce is quite a contrast to America’s franchised pro sports. U.S. owners purchase eternal rights to play in the nation’s pre-eminent leagues governing football – the American kind and soccer, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

Yes, many U.S. sports teams choose the costly fight to battle for supremacy. But no fear of relegation translates to other franchises spending far less money and energy toward victory.

Worse, American sports actually nudge teams to play poorly. There’s too much guaranteed cash flow, win or lose, as well as curious incentives to be really bad.

Think about one way U.S. sports leagues try to keep play competitive. The weakest teams aren’t kicked out, rather they’re awarded better chances at acquiring the next generation of talent.

Relegation’s payoff

Imagine the entertainment value U.S. teams could create by using relegation.

There’s the excitement of a late-season rush for struggling major league teams to avoid getting sent to the minor leagues.

Then add to that buzz what’s happens in the league one notch below. That’s where top teams play to win promotion to the high-profile competition next season.

In English soccer, the top two teams from the second-tier Championship League automatically qualify to for an upgrade to the Premier League for next season. The next four teams in the standings compete to decide who gets the final coveted promotion to the Premier League.

In late May, Luton won that elevation by defeating Coventry in front of 85,700 fans at Wembley Stadium in London in a dramatic match that required overtime play and a six-round shootout.

Forget the cute storylines. “Luton returns to England’s top league after 32 years.” Or that only five years ago, the Hatters were playing fourth-tier soccer. Or that Luton’s 118-year-old home field seats only 10,000 – and will easily be the Premier League’s smallest venue.

This is a real business victory. Premier League is an estimated $200-plus million windfall each for Luton plus the two other promoted clubs – Burnley and Sheffield United – compared to remaining in the second-tier circuit.

And that cash was lost by the Leicester, Leeds and Southampton clubs – the trio relegated down to the Championship League for the 2023-24 season.

Thank the tank

In most businesses, you almost never profit by losing. Yet American sports owners can plot to reap the odd business perks of being a loser.

Sure, sports executives never admit to “tanking” – polite words for losing with purpose. However, some tanking teams shed talent. Others ignore tactical options. Or star athletes can be rested at key moments.

And tanking is bad for business as it spins fandom on its head. Team supporters actively argue whether a late-season victory is good news or a bad move, hurting chances to obtain high-end talent.

Tanking, sadly, is a real business tactic because losing can pay.

Note that the Dallas Mavericks were fined $750,000 by the National Basketball Association this spring for what was deemed “conduct detrimental to the league.”

The team sat key players at the season’s end so it could miss the playoffs and get a better draft choice.

Does losing win?

Look at the Anaheim Ducks, the National Hockey League’s worst club this past season.

That infamy got the team the best odds to win the first spot in the NHL’s annual talent draft. And this year’s selections include what observers say is a once-in-a-generation talent.

Ducks fans have suffered several years of horrible results. It’s a retooling bet that losses help the franchise acquire young players who’ll return the team to its  glory days.

Now this decline in the Ducks’ fortunes pains me, a season ticket holder since the team’s inception in 1993. And the Ducks actually “lost” the draft lottery despite favorable odds and will pick second.

So projected superstar Connor Bedard won’t be joining the Anaheim team.

Meanwhile, it seems Major League Baseball’s homestand in Oakland is over.

The A’s are having a historically bad season watched by stunningly few fans. The long-suffering franchise, known for incredibly cheap ownership, has alienated its supporters and local politicians. That indifference cut support for a new A’s ballpark in the city.

This mismanagement unfortunately may have won the A’s a relocation to Las Vegas. The team recently secured tentative deals with Nevada business partners and political leaders, deals that includes taxpayer assistance for a new stadium just off the Vegas Strip.

Bottom line

I know it’s fantasy to think relegation would ever come to an American sports system that’s so darn profitable for its wealthy team owners.

Obviously, there are no replacement teams. The lower-tier U.S. leagues are essentially training grounds for the major-league clubs – not competition for a coveted spot in the game’s top tier.

Still, this missing incentive to win is diluting the product. Regular season matches often lack passion. Teams frequently play just well enough to qualify for the playoffs. Then, sadly, competition begins in earnest.

And that modest motivation speaks only for the teams that dare to seriously compete. It’s too easy for pro sports organizations to accept mediocrity as a profitable strategy.

Or, as Ted Lasso said in the TV show when asked how no relegation impacted the weaker teams in America.

“They play out the rest of the schedule, going through the motions in meaningless games contested in lifeless, half-empty stadiums, and everyone’s pretty much fine with that.”

Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com

After several brutal years of fighting drought, California finally got the water that it has so sorely needed.

The Pentagon is spending $1 billion a year developing laser and microwave weapons, and Washington is worried that money will go to waste. 

According to new reports from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. military faces serious challenges trying to get what it calls directed energy weapons out, but should consolidate efforts so that the weapons don’t fall into what it called the “valley of death.”

The U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force have all worked to develop various kinds of direct energy weapons. The most prominent are high energy lasers (HEL) and high power microwaves (HPM) weapons. An HEL is a tight beam weapon good for hitting direct targets like a drone or a missile. HPM hit a wider band and could have less than lethal uses. A HPM could down a swarm of drones or disable vehicles without harming the passengers. 

Both weapons would, hypothetically, come with unlimited ammo pools and would be far cheaper to fire than conventional munitions. An interceptor designed to down a nuclear ICBM costs the U.S. $111 million dollars. A laser that does the same thing would cost as much it takes to generate the energy to fire it.

The problem, according to the GAO, is that the Pentagon has no plan for consolidating these programs and actually deploying working weapons. “DOD has long noted a gap—sometimes called ‘the valley of death’—between its development and its acquisition communities that impede technology transition,” an April GAO report said. “For example, the acquisition community may require a higher level of technology maturity than the development community is able to produce.”

GAO slide.

According to a May GAO report, there are three main problems with the weapons: technological limitations, concerns around battlefield use, and ethical and health concerns. The tech isn’t mature and the Pentagon is having trouble finding civilian contractors to help work on it. Both HEL and HPM are hard to power for long periods of time, for example, and laser-based weapons lose effectiveness in heavy fog or rain. 

There’s also what GAO called “Battlefield concerns.” The weapons are so new that the rules of engagement around them aren’t clear. Microwave weapons affect such a wide area that they could indiscriminately hit civilian or allied targets in a battle. And then there’s the ethical concerns. According to the GAO, no one is sure what the long term effects of DEWs would be on people who were “intentionally or unintentionally exposed.”

Militaries all over the world have been working on some form of directed energy weapon since the early 20th century. The modern incarnations of the U.S. programs have their roots in President Ronald Reagan’s failed Strategic Defense Initiative. Later dubbed “Star Wars,” Reagan’s plan was to have scientists put energy weapons on satellites so that America could shoot Russian nukes out of the sky before they hit the homeland. It never worked.

Enlarge / Hurricane Irma as seen by satellite in 2019. (credit: NOAA)

Congratulations, everyone—we've made it to the startline of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.

Fasten your seatbelts because it could be a wild and bumpy ride. Or maybe not. Because when it comes to tropical activity, no one can be sure what will happen more than a few days into the future. And after about 10 or 12 days? Chaos theory rules, baby.

Not everyone needs to read this article, but many of you do. According to the US Census, more than 60 million Americans live in coastal areas vulnerable to tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. For those residents, including yours truly, the threat of a tropical storm or hurricane lurks in the back of one's mind during the summer months like the dull pain of a past injury. The longer it has been since a nearby landfall, the more distant the hum. But it's there.

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Federal prosecutors obtained an audio recording in which former President Donald Trump admits retaining a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, raising the threat of a potential indictment in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, according to CNN. The recording indicates that Trump knew he kept classified material. The former president suggests in the audio that he wants to share...

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Looking ahead to the weekend, conditions will continue a recent pattern of scattered clouds, partly sunny skies and high temperatures right around average.

By Brody Ford | Bloomberg

Coupa Software Inc., the enterprise firm acquired by Thoma Bravo earlier this year, announced job reductions, becoming the latest technology company to prioritize profit in an uncertain economy.

“We aren’t doing this because of new ownership; we’re doing this to put Coupa on a stronger footing for long-term success,” interim Chief Executive Officer Charles Goodman wrote Tuesday in a letter to employees. He added that the cuts were made to improve profitability and decision-making speed. The company will also evaluate its real estate footprint, he said.

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Goodman began leading San Mateo, California-based Coupa on May 1. Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, completed the $6.2 billion acquisition in February. Coupa, a maker of software that helps companies track and manage the purchasing of goods and services, employed 3,076 people as of January 2022, according to regulatory filings.

A Coupa spokesperson declined to say how many roles were affected by the workforce cuts, saying “as notifications are ongoing, we’re not in a position to provide a specific number.”

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

 

Leavenworth Adventure Park, a short walk from the downtown area, opens with an alpine roller coaster, a climbing wall, a trampoline and a mining sluice.

A South Carolina man robbed a convenience store with a fake gun from the Nintendo game Duck Hunt earlier this week, stealing $300 in cash.

As reported by Charlotte, North Carolina-based news station WBTV, David Joseph Dalesandro held up a Kwik Stop store on Tuesday evening around 5:45 p.m. According to a statement from the York County Sheriff’s Office, witnesses said that Dalesandro came into the store wearing a mask, wig, and hoodie, flashed the cashier the pistol, and demanded money.

Nintendo released Duck Hunt in the US in 1985 for the NES; the pistol, called the “NES Zapper,”  used an internal optical sensor that let players point it at a CRT monitor running the game and shoot down animated ducks. The zapper was originally bright orange and tan, but Dalesandro’s was spray-painted black.

Police found Dalesandro down the street in a Dollar General parking lot, with the Duck Hunt pistol still in his pants.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to use versions of the popular weight-loss drug used in Ozempic and Wegovy and sold online because they might not contain the same ingredients as prescription products and may not be safe or effective.

Nearly 40 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus broke with the majority of their House Democratic colleagues late Wednesday to vote against the debt ceiling agreement negotiated by President Joe Biden and Republican leaders. The legislation, which would lift the debt ceiling until January 2025 and enact painful caps on non-military federal spending, passed the GOP-controlled House by a...

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After three recent shootings near Garfield High School, school officials beefed up security and planned to host a meeting to address staff and family concerns.