Tag: Politics

Latest Headlines

Ind. Kindred exec accused of child molestation found dead; layoffs hit Deutsch ad agency that lost Pizza Hut account; GE Firstbuild’s cold-brew coffee maker set for 2017 release

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 7:42 p.m.

KINDRED: The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office says Kindred Greenwood hospital CFO William Brenner was found dead inside his home near Indianapolis yesterday, 10 days after authorities accused him of molesting a 6-year-old boy he was fostering in 2014 and 2015.

William Brenner
Brenner

Police say there was no evidence of a struggle and no weapons were found near the body. Investigators believe he may have had a medical episode and had died several days earlier. His body was found in a hallway and was badly decomposed (WIBC).

Brenner, 49, faced four counts of felony child molesting and one count of felony dissemination of matter harmful to minors, according to the Indianapolis Star. The Greenwood facility is one of Louisville-based Kindred’s 95 transitional care and rehabilitation hospitals. Greenwood is 12 miles south of Indianapolis.

Also today, Kindred said it would release its second-quarter financial results on Aug. 4 after stock markets close. The following day, it will host a teleconference with Wall Street analysts to discuss the report (press release).

In downtown Louisville, construction is picking up at Kindred’s new headquarters expansion at Broadway and Fourth streets after a relatively slow start. The $36 million project financed with substantial public incentives will add 142,000 square feet and around 500 new jobs. Plans also include around 7,000 square feet of restaurant space (Broken Sidewalk).

PIZZA HUT: Advertising agency Deutsch went through a round of layoffs at its Los Angeles office last week directly related to the loss of the Pizza Hut account last spring. A Deutsch spokesperson would say only that less than 2% of the L.A.-based team had been affected. Deutsch won the struggling Yum unit’s account two years ago and went on to create the agency’s debut campaign (which essentially said, “We’re Italian”); video, top. Last December, the pizza chain started shopping the account, eventually choosing the independent Droga5 agency in May — its fifth agency of record in six years. Multiple sources have told Adweek that Pizza Hut is not the world’s most agreeable client. It’s not yet clear when Droga5’s first work for the chain will appear (Adweek).

Prisma
Prisma.

GE: A cold-brew coffeemaker developed by GE Appliances’ Firstbuild laboratory in Louisville is scheduled to reach the market next summer, after first passing through a crowdfunding round on IndieGoGo. The lab is using unconventional funding for the coffee maker, called Prisma, not so much as a financial requirement as it is an awareness-raising launchpad. “We believe crowdfunding is a great way to validate products with the early adopter community,” Firstbuild Senior Design Engineer Justin Brown told Daily Coffee News. The Prisma can make anywhere from five to 25 ounces of ready-to-drink cold coffee (Daily Coffee News).

AMAZON has reportedly fired one of its delivery men Continue reading “Ind. Kindred exec accused of child molestation found dead; layoffs hit Deutsch ad agency that lost Pizza Hut account; GE Firstbuild’s cold-brew coffee maker set for 2017 release” →

Latest Headlines

Facing heightened competition, UPS will try limited Saturday delivery in three U.S. cities

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 7:02 a.m.

UPS will test Saturday delivery this summer in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles for standard ground packages as it defends its turf against FedEx, which already offers the service, and the U.S. Postal Service, which delivers on Saturdays and Sundays in some markets for Amazon. UPS is remaking its network to accommodate online shopping while watching potential rivals enter the market, including courier services now pitching same-day delivery. The proportion of UPS’s packages going to U.S. homes is expected to rise to 51% in 2019 from today’s 46%, challenging its efficiency. While it earns a bit more per parcel for home deliveries, it averages only 1.2 packages on each residential stop, compared with 3.6 at each business (Bloomberg).

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Erdogan

PAPA JOHN’S has 22 restaurants in Turkey, only 1% of all its more than 1,500 locations outside the U.S., according to regulatory filings that show it has limited exposure to the tumult in that country, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been facing a military-led coup attempt since yesterday. List of all overseas restaurants. Louisville’s other major fast-food chain, YUM, doesn’t show any locations broken down by country.

Latest Headlines

Top U.S. health official: competition key to insurance markets in Humana-Aetna deal; British Pizza Huts are 😋 about their 🆕 menus; and Amazon adds 10th Calif. center

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 5:23 p.m.

Pizza Hut emoji menu
An emoji expert wrote the new menus.

HUMANA: The Obama administration’s top health official highlighted the importance of competition to insurance markets, as the Justice Department is poised to decide on two massive deals among four of the health-plan industry’s biggest players: Humana-Aetna’s $37 billion tie-up, and Anthem-Cigna’s $48 billion. But Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell declined to comment on her department’s view of the two massive deals. “When there is competition, that creates downward price pressure, and it also creates upward quality pressure,” Burwell said in a brief interview in Fort Dodge, Iowa (Bloomberg).

PIZZA HUT: Six British Pizza Huts have unveiled menus written entirely in emojis, all in time for Sunday’s World Emoji Day. “Many of the items look easy enough to translate, with one pizza option including pictures of a tomato, basil plant, a green heart and a mushroom with the vegetarian ‘v’ sign next to it,” says the Daily Mail. “A crown, chicken and drumstick is slightly more obscure.” But if it all gets too difficult for some customers, there’s a traditional menu on hand (Daily Mail). Here’s an English-to-emoji translator.

YUM: Financial news site Seeking Alpha has published a transcript of Yum’s second-quarter conference call with analysts on Wednesday (Seeking Alpha).

AMAZON today disclosed plans to open its 10th California distribution center, in Sacramento. It’s the fourth center the retailer has announced for California alone over the past four months, and is expected to create more than 1,000 full-time jobs (press release). Amazon has more than 120 centers worldwide, including two in the Louisville area with a combined 6,000 employees, in Jeffersonville and Shephardsville.

FORD posted its best first-half for total European vehicle and passenger car sales since 2010, and best commercial vehicle sales since 1993 in its 20 traditional European markets (press release). The company’s philanthropic arm, the Ford Motor Company Fund, said it would award $400,000 in scholarships and grants to support programs encouraging Latino students to graduate from high school (press release).

And the U.S. Postal Service started selling first-class “forever” stamps today that commemorate four pickup trucks, including the 1948 Ford F-1 — the first F-Series truck — and the 1965 Ford F-100:

pr16_056

Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant employs 5,100 workers, producing F-250 and F-550 Super Duty pickups, plus Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators.

KFC: In the U.K.’s Plymouth, a 46-year-old man branded “too fat to work” on national television has vowed to chain himself to land set aside for a new KFC, in protest of the plans. Stephen Beer, who once gorged on three takeaways a day and weighed more than 420 lbs, is on a mission to raise awareness of childhood obesity, and says he’s “disgusted” by the thought of more fast-food chains in the city (Plymouth Herald).

In other news, presumptive GOP White House nominee Donald Trump Continue reading “Top U.S. health official: competition key to insurance markets in Humana-Aetna deal; British Pizza Huts are 😋 about their 🆕 menus; and Amazon adds 10th Calif. center” →

Latest Headlines

Roadhouse stock hits new record high; Yum shares climb 3% on second-quarter earnings report; and Trump reportedly picks Indiana’s Pence for VP

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 5:02 p.m.

Texas Roadhouse vs S&P
Texas Roadhouse stock (blue) outgunned the S&P 500 index over the past year.

TEXAS ROADHOUSE shares traded at a new record high today: $47.33, before closing slightly lower at $47.02, up 36 cents, or less than 1%. The company’s stock is up 24% from a year ago vs. a much smaller 4.2% gain in the broader S&P 500 index.

YUM‘s stock closed moments ago at $88.27 a share, up $2.53, or 3% on a better-than-expected second-quarter earnings report, released after markets closed yesterday afternoon. The fast food restaurant giant also raised its profit outlook for all of 2016 to 17% from an earlier 12%. Shares have been roaring so far this year, jumping 17% vs. a smaller 5% gain in the broader S&P 500 index (Google Finance).

KFC: The Kentucky Fried Chicken Foundation will award $1.2 million in college assistance to 600 hourly restaurant employees across the country this month (Portsmouth Daily Times).

FORD declared a regular quarterly dividend of 15 cents per share, payable Sept. 1 to shareholders of record July 28 (press release). The automaker also said it will release second-quarter financial results at 7 a.m. ET on July 28 (press release). Ford shares closed at $13.59, up 11 cents, or less than 1%. The current dividend yield is generous 4.4%.

AMAZON said it will hold a conference call to discuss its second-quarter results July 28 at 5:30 p.m. ET; the report itself will be released shortly after markets close that day (press release).

Smaller noose

UPS: About 15 people gathered yesterday outside the shipper’s Maumee, Ohio, distribution center to protest two nooses (photo, left) found hanging in the building, after photographs circulated widely on Facebook and Twitter.

“We want justice. We want accountability,” Julian Mack told WTVG. “There’s no place for nooses in Lucas County.”

Company spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said UPS had confirmed the nooses’ presence, and fired the worker responsible when he arrived for work Tuesday evening. Maumee is 18 miles southwest of Toledo. (Blade and WTVG).

Trump and Pence
Trump and Pence.

In other news, presumptive GOP White House nominee Donald Trump will choose Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, multiple media outlets are now reporting, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The New York billionaire’s choice of Pence had been widely expected in recent days in advance of the start of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, starting Monday.

Money in Politics

Gray says he raised nearly $1.1M in second quarter in Senate race against Paul

That boosts Democratic nominee Jim Gray‘s total raised to more than $2.8 million in his campaign against incumbent Republican Rand Paul. The Lexington mayor announced the figures in a press release yesterday; he says he expects to file a formal report with the Federal Election Commission by next Friday’s deadline.

Paul and Gray
Paul and Gray

Paul, completing his first senate term, hasn’t reported his fundraising totals for the quarter. But at the end of April, according to the FEC’s website, he had about $300,000 more on hand than Gray, despite the fact Gray had out-raised him since the beginning of the year, according to The Courier-Journal.

Wayback News

Louisville 52 years ago: GOP backed Goldwater; ‘peachy ham balls,’ and pricey washer-dryers

By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher

Kentucky’s delegation to the 1964 Republican National Convention was solidly behind ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater, who eventually won the nomination only to get shellacked by President Lyndon Johnson the following November.

Goldwater campaign button“As many as 23 of the 24 voting delegates may line up behind the Arizona senator on the first ballot Wednesday night,” The Courier-Journal’s Richard Harwood reported on the front page from the convention city of San Francisco.

Inside the paper, newly-named food consultant Loyta Higgins suggested readers bake “peachy ham balls” from leftover ham and canned cling peaches in heavy syrup. (Remember, it was the ’60s!)

And on page 10, GE Appliances competitor Kelvinator was advertising washers for $179.95 with a trade-in — or $299.95 with a matching dryer. You could buy them at 13 Louisville retailers, including Bill’s Auto Stores at Broadway and Shelby Street.

Kelvinator washer ad

Fast-forward 52 years, and you can appreciate how incredibly expensive those appliances were. In inflation-adjusted 2016 dollars, the washer would cost $1,395, and the combo would be $2,395, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

At Home Depot in St. Matthews today, you can get an Amana 3.5 cubic-foot high-efficiency top-load washer for just $299. And a matching Amana dryer also is just $299.

Postscript

Since the 1980s, the Kelvinator brand has been owned by Sweden’s Electrolux, which nearly bought GE Appliances before the Department of Justice blocked the deal on antitrust grounds. Last month, China-based Haier bought it for $5.6 billion, including 6,000-employee Appliance Park in the city’s south end.

Goldwater’s landslide loss to Johnson — 61% to 39% (he lost Kentucky, too) — brought down many conservative Republican office-holders as well, a pattern some GOP leaders fear will happen this November if Donald Trump gets the nomination.

Goldwater died May 29, 1998, at the age of 89 of complications from a 1996 stroke.