МЗС: внаслідок домовленостей із Києвом в Угорщині відкрили першу школу для україномовних дітей

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Навчання вестимуть рідною українською мовою з 1 по 12 класи, а програма включатиме вивчення угорської та англійської мов як іноземних
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Стратком ЗСУ: новий начштабу Сил безпілотних систем пройшов «усі необхідні перевірки» з безпеки

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«За наявною інформацією, упродовж 2018 – 2019 років Капітан 1 рангу Гладкий пройшов усі необхідні перевірки Службою безпеки України»
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High rents are forcing small businesses in into tough choices

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NEW YORK — While many costs have come down for small businesses, rents remain high and in some cases are still rising, forcing many owners into some uncomfortable decisions.

“Every time the rent goes up, we have to raise prices, to keep up with the cost,” said Adelita Valentine, owner of HairFreek Barbers in Los Angeles. “But with the cost of living, it makes it difficult on our customers.”

Other owners are choosing to be late on payments or seeking out new locations where the rent is lower. A few are pushing back against their landlord.

Although inflation is easing, it remains a top concern for small businesses. According to Bank of America internal data, rent payments per small business client rose 11% year-over-year in July. That’s more than twice the increase for renting and owning a residence, a metric known as shelter, according to the government’s monthly Consumer Price Index. That figure rose 5.1% in July.

And although the situation has improved since the height of the pandemic, a survey by business networking platform Alignable of more than 6,000 small business owners found that 41% could not pay their July rent on time and in full. And 52% said they’ve encountered rent spikes in the past six months.

The rent for Valentine’s barbershop rose to $4,000 in January from $3,600 in December, the fifth increase in the past eight years. She had to raise the price for her cuts from $35 to $40.

Two months ago, she moved locations for a cheaper $3,200 rent, but her space is smaller now and she sees fewer families coming in.

“A lot of people can’t afford to take a whole family to get haircuts,” after the price increase, she said.

Peter Yu has owned iPAC Automotive, an auto repair and detailing shop in Ontario, Canada, for six years. He said the rent on the shop typically went up about 4% a year. But when his landlord sold the property to a new owner, Yu’s rent jumped from about $1,800 (2,500 Canadian dollars) to about $2,700 (3,700 Canadian dollars) after three months.

He contemplated moving but decided that the cost of a move would be more than just paying the extra rent.

Yu tried to raise prices a month ago, but customers would come in and say “Oh, its too expensive,” and leave, he said. So, he had to drop the price increase in order to get those customers back.

“When we do try to raise our prices, consumers don’t have the money to pay for it. They’re looking for financing options,” he said. Yu’s services run the gamut from paint correction that costs a few hundred dollars to troubleshooting problematic EV battery and electric drive units for out-of-warranty Teslas that can cost up to $15,000.

So instead, he’s going to try to improve his marketing, close more sales, and find a way to offer more financing.

Standing firm against a landlord sometimes works. Janna Rodriguez has run her home-based The Innovative Daycare Corp. in Freeport, New York, since 2018. When she first signed her lease, she paid $3,500, plus costs including landscaping and maintenance. In 2020, the pandemic began, and her landlord raised her rent to $3,800 and also made her start paying half of the homeowner’s insurance. Last year, the landlord raised her rent to $4,100, plus the additional expenses.

Rodriguez raised her prices for the first time, by $10 per child per week, to help offset the rising rent.

This year she successfully pushed back when the landlord wanted to raise the rent yet again.

“I said to them, if you do that, then I’m going to find another property to move my business to, because at this point now you’re trying to bankrupt a business, right?” 

It’s worked – so far. But Rodriguez is worried about the future.

For others, negotiating a late payment is an option. Nicole Pomije owner of Minneapolis-based The Cookie Cups, which makes cookie kits for kids, has a 372-square-meter office space along with a warehouse where she develops her line of baking kits. Her rent rose 10% this year to $4,000 monthly. Then there are unanticipated bills, such as $1,500 for snow plowing.

“There’s so much stuff that pops up that you just you never expect,” she said. “And it’s always when you never expect it.”

Pomije hasn’t raised prices, but instead tried to mitigate the higher rent costs by buying materials in bulk – like ordering 5,000 boxes instead of 1,000 boxes for a 40% discount — and finding cost savings elsewhere.

Still, there have been several months over the past couple of years where she couldn’t pay rent on time. So, far the landlord has been amenable.

“If we have a conversation like hey, we don’t know if we’re going to make it for the first this month. It might be closer to the tenth,” she said.

Asked if she thinks costs might ease in the future, Pomije said she is focused on the present.

“It’s weird, but I’m trying not to think about the future too much and I’m trying to just do what we have to do, and get ready for a holiday season and just, like, get everything paid on time now,” she said. “And then we’ll kind of reevaluate everything in January.”
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X platform suspended in Brazil amid Brazilian judge’s feud with Musk

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SAO PAULO — A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of the decision seen by The Associated Press.

The move further escalates the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. 

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative. He set a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month. 

In his decision, de Moraes gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will remain blocked until it complies with his orders. He also said people or companies who use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X will be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais ($8,900). 

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote. 

Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the platform, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says about 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month. 

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.” 

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote. “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”

Musk characterizes judge as tyrant 

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users. 

Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. 

Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has repeatedly claimed the justice’s actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil’s political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant. 

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time in which it is imperiled. His order Friday is based on Brazilian law requiring foreign companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are legal cases against them. 

Given that operators are aware of the widely publicized standoff and their obligation to comply with an order from de Moraes, plus the fact doing so isn’t complicated, X could be offline as early as 12 hours after receiving their instructions, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro. 

Other apps suspended in past

The shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil. 

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 when the company’s refused to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online. 

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored. 
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Panama deports Ecuadorean migrants in second US-backed flight

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PANAMA CITY — Panamanian authorities deported a group of migrants to Ecuador on a second flight financed by the United States, as part of an agreement between the U.S. and Panama to discourage irregular crossings and reduce the flow of mostly U.S.-bound migration.

The flight carrying 30 Ecuadoreans departed on Thursday evening en route to the coastal city of Manta, Ecuador, Panama’s migration service said, adding the migrants were deported for evading a migration checkpoint on the popular Darien Gap route.

Thousands of people every year cross the dangerous Darien Gap jungle on Panama’s border with Colombia on the way to the United States.

The flight on Thursday followed a maiden journey financed by Washington in mid-August, which returned around 30 migrants to Colombia.

The latest deportation comes days after Panama’s President Jose Mulino announced return flights for Indian migrants in September and for Chinese citizens on an unspecified date.
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NY nonprofit reclaims centuries-old cemetery for enslaved people

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KINGSTON, New York — On a residential block in upstate New York, college students dug and sifted backyard dirt as part of an archeological exploration this summer of a centuries-old cemetery for African Americans.

Now covered with green lawns in the city of Kingston, this spot in 1750 was part of a burial ground for people who were enslaved. It was located on what was then the outskirts of town. An unknown number of people who were denied church burials were interred here until the late 19th century, when the cemetery was covered over as the city grew.

The site is now being reclaimed as the Pine Street African Burial Ground, one of many forgotten or neglected cemeteries for African Americans getting fresh attention. In the last three summers, the remains of up to 27 people have been located here.

Advocates in this Hudson River city purchased a residential property covering about half the old cemetery several years ago and now use the house there as a visitor center. Money is being raised to turn the urban backyard into a respectful resting place. And while the names of people buried here may be lost, tests are planned on their remains to shed light on their lives and identify their descendants.

“The hardships of those buried here cannot just go down in vain,” said Tyrone Wilson, founder of Harambee Kingston, the nonprofit community group behind the project. “We have a responsibility to make sure that we fix that disrespect.”

While the more-than-0.2 hectares site was designated as a cemetery for people who were enslaved in 1750, it might have been in use before then. Burials continued through about 1878, more than 50 years after New York fully abolished slavery. Researchers say people were buried with their feet to the east, so when they rise on Judgment Day they would face the rising sun.

Remains found on the Harambee property are covered with patterned African cloths and kept where they are. Remains found on adjoining land are exhumed for later burial on the Harambee property.

Students from the State University of New York at New Paltz recently finished a third summer of supervised backyard excavations in this city 129 kilometers upriver from Manhattan. The students get course credit, though anthropology major Maddy Thomas said there’s an overriding sense of mission.

“I don’t like when people feel upset or forgotten,” Thomas said on a break. “And that is what’s happened here. So we’ve got to fix it.”

Harambee is trying to raise $1 million to transform the modest backyard into resting spot that reflects the African heritage of the people buried there. Plans include a tall marker in the middle of the yard.

While some graves were apparently marked, it’s still hard to say who was buried there.

“Some of them, it’s obvious, were marked with just a stone with no writing on it,” said Joseph Diamond, associate professor of anthropology at New Paltz.

The only intact headstone recovered with a name visible was for Caezar Smith, who was born enslaved and died a free man in 1839 at age 41. A researcher mined historical records and came up with two more people potentially buried there in 1803: a man identified as Sam and a 16-year-old girl named Deyon who was publicly hanged after being convicted of murdering the 6-year-old daughter of her enslavers.

The cemetery was at first covered by a lumberyard by 1880, even though some gravestones were apparently still standing by that date.

In 1990, Diamond was doing an archaeological survey for the city and noticed the cemetery was marked on a map from 1870. He and the city historian went out to find it.

Coincidentally, Pine Street building owner Andrew Kirschner had just discovered buried bone chips while digging in front of the building in search of a sewer pipe. He put the pieces in a box. Kirschner said he was still digging when Diamond told him what they were looking for.

“The conversation begins and then I go, ‘Well, let me show you what I found.’ Of course, they were amazed,” said Kirschner, who had owned the building next to the current Harambee property.

Even after the discovery, Diamond said it was difficult to convince people there were graves on Pine Street. There were even plans in 1996 to build a parking lot over much of the site. Advocates purchased the property in 2019.

Similar stories of disregard and rediscovery have played out elsewhere.

In Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument marks the site where an estimated 15,000 free and enslaved Africans were buried until the 1790s. It was discovered in 1991 during excavations for a federal building. Farther up the Hudson River, the renovation in Newburgh of a century-old school into a courthouse in 2008 led to the discovery of more than 100 sets of remains.

Antoinette Jackson, founder of The Black Cemetery Network, said many of the 169 sites listed in their online archive had been erased.

“A good deal of them represent sites that have been built over — by parking lots, schools, stadiums, highways. Others have been under-resourced,” said Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Florida.

She added that the cemeteries listed on the archive are just the “tip of the iceberg.”

Given the meager historical record in Kingston, advocates hope tests on the remains will help fill in some gaps. Isotopic analyses could provide information on whether individuals grew up elsewhere — like South Carolina or Africa — and then moved to the region. DNA analyses could provide information on where in Africa their ancestors came from. The DNA tests also might be able to link them to living descendants.

Wilson said local families have committed to providing DNA samples. He sees the tests as another way to connect people to heritage.

“One of the biggest issues that we have in African culture is that we don’t know our history,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information of who we are.”
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Lowest euro zone inflation in 3 years sets up ECB for cut

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FRANKFURT/TALLINN — Inflation in the euro zone fell to its lowest level in three years in August, setting the stage for a further cut in the European Central Bank’s interest rates next month despite an Olympics-driven surge in the price of services.

The ECB has started winding down a two-year campaign against high inflation that followed the brisk reopening of the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Inflation in the 20 countries sharing the euro currency fell to 2.2% this month, the slowest pace since July 2021 and closing in on the ECB’s 2% target, according to a flash reading by the European Union statistics office, Eurostat.

While the fall was mostly driven by lower energy prices and may even reverse later this year, it was still likely to seal the deal on a second ECB rate cut on Sept 12 after a first move in June.

“The significant drop in headline inflation in August makes the September cut a foregone conclusion,” said Tomas Dvorak, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.

Even ECB board member and prominent policy ‘hawk’ Isabel Schnabel appeared to open the door to more easing on Friday, saying further gradual rate cuts might not derail the disinflation process as some policymakers had feared.

Still, the report showed price growth in the services sector – which is closely watched by policymakers because it better reflects domestic demand rather than external conditions – accelerated to 4.2% from an already high 4.0%.

This was the probable result of a boost from the Olympic Games in Paris, but also greater spending power by workers after some recent pay increases.

“This likely reflects a relatively tight job market, as the decrease in the unemployment rate in July shows,” said Gian Luigi Mandruzzato, senior economist at EFG Asset Management.

For now, markets see about six rate cuts before the end of next year, roughly one more cut than is baked into the ECB’s own economic projections, indicating that markets are more optimistic about the price outlook than the ECB.

This is partly because market economists see a bigger dip than the ECB’s own staff in inflation this autumn.

Policymakers say they will not be confident in the inflation outlook until wage growth slows, with Germany’s central bank especially vocal about this risk.

Still, with inflation now within a whisker of the ECB’s target, the euro zone’s central bankers were likely to broaden their debate from the single-minded focus on inflation to take into account signs of economic weakness.

Wage growth has slowed sharply and unemployment is already rising in around a quarter of the euro zone’s 20 countries. Survey data among firms and households suggest there is further labour market deterioration in store.

Lending has dwindled to a trickle since the ECB jacked up rates last year, causing investment to dry up and hampering sectors that rely on it, such as construction and manufacturing.

This has left euro zone economic growth barely humming along for over a year, with weakness in industrial powerhouse Germany only partly offset by strength in services-oriented countries such as Spain.

“We think the ECB is already behind the curve, fixated too much on current and narrow measures of inflation while not paying enough attention to weak growth, with potential long-term damaging impacts,” Oxford Economics’ Dvorak said.
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«Укренерго»: енергоспоживання залишається високим, у більшості регіонів – екстрені відключення

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«Споживання залишається високим через спеку у більшості областей. Вчора, 29 серпня, добовий максимум споживання був зафіксований вдень»
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US second quarter growth stronger than estimated, government says

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Washington — The U.S. economy expanded more than initially estimated in the second quarter this year, the Department of Commerce said Thursday, on stronger consumer spending than originally anticipated.

The world’s biggest economy grew at an annual rate of 3.0% in the April-to-June period, up from 2.8% according to an earlier estimate.

Analysts had expected no revision to the figure.

“The update primarily reflected an upward revision to consumer spending,” the Commerce Department said.

Unexpectedly robust consumption — even in the face of high interest rates — has helped to bolster the U.S. economy in recent times. But with households depleting pandemic-era savings, the anticipation was for consumption to pull back.

In the latest revision, the higher spending was partly offset by downward revisions in areas such as business investment, exports and government spending.

Imports, however, were revised higher.

The 3.0% figure for the second quarter this year was an uptick from 1.4% growth in the first quarter.

The Federal Reserve rapidly increased interest rates to tackle surging inflation in 2022. It is widely expected to make its first post-pandemic rate cut in September. This could provide a boost to the economy.
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