Toys “R” Us is closing its only two stores roughly a year after a highly anticipated relaunch of the storied brand.
Tru Kids Inc., which bought the retailer in a 2018 liquidation sale, confirmed that its two locations in New Jersey and Texas that opened in late 2019 have permanently closed because of the pandemic.
The Atlantic Ocean is getting wider, shoving the Americas to one side and Europe and Africa to the other. But it’s not known exactly how.
A new study suggests that deep beneath the Earth’s crust, in a layer called the mantle, sizzling-hot rocks are rising up and pushing on tectonic plates — those rocky jigsaw pieces that form Earth’s crust — that meet beneath the Atlantic.
Previously, scientists thought that the continents were mostly being pulled apart as the plates beneath the ocean moved in opposite directions and crashed into other plates, folding under the force of gravity. But the new study suggests that’s not the whole picture.
Nearly five years after an initiative to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the face of the $20 bill was introduced, White House press secretary Jen Psaki informed reporters in a briefing Monday that the Biden administration is “exploring ways to speed up the process” that was stopped during President Trump’s tenure.
Replacing Andrew Jackson on the bill caused an explosion of tweets when it was announced in April 2016. The proposed redesign was made public in 2019 and was supposed to have been put into circulation last year on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. However, Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, halted the process because he believed that adding security features on the money was more important than changing the face on the bill, adding that the redesign wouldn’t be in circulation until 2028.
Fueled by a massive short squeeze pinning Reddit traders against a storied Wall Street short-seller, a mindblowing rally in GameStop shares has minted a new billionaire in Ryan Cohen, an activist investor eager to forge a turnaround for the brick-and-mortar gameseller.
According to filings, Cohen—the founder and former CEO of Chewy, the booming e-commerce firm focused on pet supplies–spent about $76 million buying up more than 9 million GameStop shares at the tail-end of last year as he mounted an effort to restructure the Grapevine, Texas-based firm.
“Unfortunately, it is evident that GameStop currently lacks the mindset, resources and plan needed to become a dominant sector player,” Cohen said in a public letter to GameStop’s board of directors in November, blasting the stock’s dismal performance at the time—it was down 85% over the prior five years. “GameStop needs to evolve into a technology company that delights gamers and delivers exceptional digital experiences–not remain a video game retailer that overprioritizes its brick-and-mortar footprint and stumbles around the online ecosystem.”
According to a study by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory 25 states will raise their minimum wage in 2021, with 21 of those states enacting the increases on New Year’s day.
By the beginning of the New Year, New York and Oregon, which both have regional minimum wage rates, will see the highest wages reaching $15.00 in New York City and $14.00 in the Portland Metro Area effective July 1, 2021.
At the end of the spectrum, the lowest minimum wage rates of $5.15 are in Georgia and Wyoming. However, most employers and employees are subject to the higher federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve had to adjust to a huge range of changes to our day-to-day lives, which has had an impact far beyond necessities like buying groceries or socialising. The culture industry has taken a particularly significant hit, with major theater chains and concert venues shuttering permanently in the virus’s wake as they struggle to afford both rent and wages for staff.
The same has been true for the art world, with one recent survey showing that around three quarters of galleries “face severe financial hardship or even closure within the next year”, though only 35% of those have the finances to stay open until this time next year. Even when they have been open, footfall has been down, and those with the means have resorted to taking their collections online to offer the gallery experience to art lovers across the globe.
The coronavirus pandemic has reached almost every country in the world.
Its spread has left national economies and businesses counting the costs, as governments struggle with new lockdown measures to tackle the spread of the virus.
Despite the development of new vaccines, many are still wondering what recovery could look like.
Here is a selection of charts and maps to help you understand the economic impact of the virus so far.
Besides laundry-washing and lawn-sprinkling, the daily washing of hair uses up a lot of water. L’Oréal’s new Water Saver system is designed to help, by reportedly reducing the amount of water used in hair-washing by up to 80 percent.
Intended for use both in salons and users’ homes, L’Oréal Water Saver incorporates “Jet-Fusion” technology developed by Swiss company Gjosa.
In a nutshell, this involves angling two contained water streams diagonally downward toward one another, so that the droplets from the two streams collide at a central meeting point. As a result, the colliding droplets are blasted apart into much smaller droplets – about one tenth the original size – which proceed out of the system’s nozzle at a high velocity.
Along with single servings of coffee, we’ve also seen Keurig-like pods used to dispense cocktails, wine, fresh tortillas and even full meals. ColdSnap forges into different territory, by serving up fresh ice cream and other frosty treats.
Created by entrepreneur Matt Fonte (with input from his daughters Sierra and Fiona), the ColdSnap system consists of a countertop rapid-freezing machine, along with an assortment of pods.
You can officially claim autonomous commercial drones for your 2021 bingo card.
On Friday, Massachusetts-based industrial drone developer American Robotics announced it had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate its fully-automated “Scout” drones without any humans on-site.
It’s the first waiver of its kind, as the FAA has previously approved the use of autonomous commercial drones exclusively under the condition that human observers be present along the flight path — or that risk of collision be mitigated through otherwise hyper-strict limitations. Advocates of drone technology say those restrictions have long held the industry back.
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