http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/news/companies/guinness-brewery-baltimore/index.html

Guinness is opening a brewery in the US for the first time in more than 60 years, hoping to drum up sales and woo younger consumers.
Guinness, owned by Diageo (DEO), will open the $80 million brewery near Baltimore on August 3. It will be the first Guinness brewery in the US since 1954, featuring a 270-seat restaurant and a tap room in a former distillery, according to the company.

"The USA is probably the most dynamic and exciting beer market in the world right now, and, put simply, we'd like to be closer to the action," said Guinness on its web site. "Having a brewery in the USA will help us understand and respond to trends more quickly, as well as brew smaller batches and get them to market faster."

Guinness, established in Dublin in 1759, is an Irish brewer known for its dark-hued stout. But sales have stagnated in the US in recent years as craft beers from smaller breweries have become more popular. In addition to its famous stout, the new Guinness brewery is offering India Pale Ale as well as wheat beers, lagers and more experimental brews with names like Guava Wit and Cherry Stout.

Robert Edward Ottenstein, a beverage industry analyst for Evercore ISI, said this is Guinness' way of reaching out to younger people who might not even be aware of the iconic Irish brand.

"This is all about brand building. This is a way to make it relevant to the so-called millennials," Ottenstein said.

He said it's a necessary move for Guinness because establishing brands has never been tougher. "Consumers are very skeptical," he said.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/27/news/economy/arizona-birth-rates-economy/index.html

When Laura Pedersen opened her clinic for young pregnant women in Tucson nearly 20 years ago, her job seemed overwhelming — around 12,000 babies were born to teens in Arizona a year, with all of those young moms requiring special counseling and support. The program, called Teen Outreach Pregnancy Services, even opened a second location in Phoenix to keep up with the need.
But 18 years later, demand has fallen off a cliff. In 2016, fewer than 6,000 teens gave birth in Arizona.

"We have definitely experienced a decline in the number of referrals," Pedersen says. "There's not as great a need for our services."

Arizona, which in the early 2000s had one of the highest fertility rates in the country, saw the largest decline in the number of births of any state over the past decade. It went from nearly 103,000 births in 2007 to about 81,000 last year — a 20% drop.

What's happening in Arizona is an extreme example of a wider trend occurring across America. The "total fertility rate" in the United States, representing the number of kids the average woman will have in her lifetime, sank to an estimated 1.76 in 2017, down from 2.12 in 2007. (This isn't the lowest point, however. The nation's birth rate reached 1.74 in 1976, after a huge spike from the Baby Boom, when American women had more than three kids each on average.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/27/montana-woman-with-machete-hides-behind-ex-boyfriends-door-then-forces-sex-on-him-police-say/?utm_term=.c677f07a880b



Late Friday night, police in Great Falls, Mont., received a call from a man in distress: He had come home to find his ex-girlfriend hiding behind his bedroom door, wielding a machete.

She had somehow broken into the house while he was away, he said, and when he opened the door and walked into his room she confronted him from behind and held the machete to his neck.

Then, according to a probable cause affidavit, she told him to take off his clothes.

Samantha Ray Mears, 19, now faces six charges after police say she forced her ex-boyfriend to have sex with her at machete-point, damaged his property and fled just as they were arriving. She is charged with aggravated battery, assault with a weapon, unlawful restraint, partner family member assault and two counts of criminal mischief in Cascade County, Mont. It was not immediately clear whether Mears had an attorney. She allegedly told police the man kidnapped her and then gave her a machete to protect herself, according to the Great Falls Tribune.

The man told police that once she told him to undress she ordered him onto the bed. He complied because he feared what she might do to him. Mears then took off her pants, climbed on top of him and started having sex with him, still holding the machete, the affidavit alleges.

When the man tried to push her off, she bit him on the arm and kept going, he said.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/26/news/companies/steel-tariffs-job-losses/index.html

Steel tariffs could force the nation's largest nail manufacturer to close or move to Mexico.
The Mid-Continent Nail plant in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, laid off 60 of its 500 workers last week because of increased steel costs. The company blames the 25% tariff on imported steel. Orders for nails plunged 50% after the company raised its prices to deal with higher steel costs.

The company is in danger of shutting production by Labor Day unless the Commerce Department grants it an exclusion from paying the tariffs, company spokesman James Glassman told CNN's Poppy Harlow.

Mid-Continent Nail is "on the brink of extinction," he said.

Glassman said the company might relocate to Mexico, where it could buy the steel without the tariffs — and then export the finished nails back to the United States without tariffs, which only apply to raw materials.

"It's obviously an option," said Glassman about moving to Mexico. "It absolutely is something this company does not want to do. It wants to save the jobs in Poplar Bluff Missouri."

Glassman called President Donald Trump's trade policy misguided. He noted that the company had doubled its work force since 2013, and thrived despite increased competition from China.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hold-in-your-belly--legs-together-chinese-college-teaches-female-students-to-be-perfect/2018/06/25/c0e1205e-6a21-11e8-bbc5-dc9f3634fa0a_story.html?utm_term=.596bf8f391e0



At a college in southern China, Duan Fengyan is studying to be an accountant. She is also getting lessons in how to be a woman in the time of President Xi Jinping.

In a course launched in March, not long after China abolished presidential term limits, Zhen­jiang College and the All-China Women’s Federation have been teaching female students how to dress, pour tea and sit just so — all in the name of Xi’s “new era.”

“You must sit on the front two-thirds of the chair — you cannot occupy the whole chair,” said Duan, 21, demonstrating. “Now, hold in your belly, relax your shoulders, legs together, shoulders up.”

The class, offered only to female students, aims to develop “wise,” “sunny” and “perfect” women, where wisdom comes from studying Chinese history and culture, sunniness from oil painting and etiquette classes, and perfection from the application of (never too much) makeup.

The Communist Party wants women educated, yes, but with economic growth slowing and the population shrinking, it is bringing back the idea that men are breadwinners and women are, first and foremost, wives and mothers — so it is teaching young women that this is the norm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/immense-rains-are-causing-more-flash-flooding-and-experts-say-its-getting-worse/2018/06/24/3970a236-765e-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.b02ab93717e0



OLD FORT, N.C. — Brian Gentry was certain his 33,000-pound truck would be fine as he headed out into the heavy rains here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But as he went to clear debris from a two-lane highway after more than a half-foot of rain, rocklike drops pounded the windows, and he heard the earth “crack” around him as the land began to slide.

Mud and uprooted trees slammed his vehicle, tossing it across the highway, over a ­10-foot embankment and into the raging Catawba River. Gentry and a co-worker with the North Carolina Department of Transportation were rolled, and the truck came to rest in the water, just the passenger-side window peaking out.

“I looked around, and I saw everything that was going on, and I thought, ‘I am going to ­­die,’?” Gentry, 47, recalled. “I thought, ‘My life is about over, so I need to call my wife.’?”

Gentry spent 40 minutes clinging to a rope in the water awaiting rescue, the victim of an alarming phenomenon: Torrential rain events across the United States are becoming more frequent and more intense, leading to record rainfall, rare extreme flooding and perilous infrastructure failures.

Experts say the immense rains — some spawned by tropical ocean waters, others by once-routine thunderstorms — are the product of long-rising air temperatures and an increase in the sheer size of the storms. Because warmer air can hold more water, large storms are dropping far more rain at a faster clip.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/21/news/economy/health-care-worker-shortage-ohio/index.html



Connie Ellis had been working at railroad operator CSX Corp. for seven years when she accepted a buyout package and left the company.
In the three years since, she's worked as a janitor at a local college, then as a quality manager at an auto supplier. But she wanted a position that offered a lot more job security - and better pay than those jobs.

When she heard about the growing demand for health care workers, she started looking around and found Mercy College of Ohio about 10 minutes away.

The school, which is based in Toledo, specializes in health sciences and offers 16 programs that train students for a variety of medical professions, including certificate programs that can be completed in as little as one semester to master's degrees.

At job fairs and community events, Mercy College's recruiters are seeking out students from a variety of fields, but especially the manufacturing and retail sectors -- which have been hit by layoffs after big companies like General Motors, DHL and Toys R Us left scores of people looking for work.

That could prove to be a real boon for the area's health care system, said Jason Theadore, vice president of ambulatory services and business development with Mercy Health, which partners with the college and operates 23 hospitals and 500 health care centers throughout the state.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/racial-profiling-tsa-airport-security

It’s 4:45am on a Monday morning, and my flight from Washington, DC to Charlotte, North Carolina is set to depart in 90 minutes. I haven’t made it through security yet, but my friend tells me it should be “no problemo” -- it’s so early we should be able to cruise through. I’m more skeptical. I don’t think she usually flies with people who look like me.

Midway through the line, a TSA agent pulls me aside to swab my palms for explosive powder. For the 15 minutes we’ve been in line, I’m the only person who’s been pulled away for this drill. When we get to the metal detectors, I go through without a beep, and yet the agent asks me to step aside for frisking and pat-downs.

Finally I’m allowed to pass through to pick up my bags from the conveyor, but I already know I’m not going to see my backpack come out the other side. Sure enough, it’s been redirected on the other conveyor at the security checkpoint for more detailed inspection. As it always is.

We wait another 15 agonizing minutes. An agent finally comes, inspects the bag, and lets me get my things. My friend is stunned at how long everything has taken; we have to jog through the terminal to catch the plane. When we sit down, she literally sighs with relief that we made it. I don’t tell her that if this was an international flight and we were moving through passport control, there would have been another round of interrogation about who I was and why I was doing anything. Unless we’d planned accordingly for these inevitabilities, we would have missed our flight.



I’M A U.S. CITIZEN, VERY MUCH FROM AND OF THIS COUNTRY, without the smallest blemish of a criminal record. I was born outside Chicago and raised right outside DC by a computer engineer father and a clinical research auditor mother. In high school, I was a keener for AP and IB courses, and I graduated with a biology degree from Virginia Tech (go Hokies!). Now I eke out a living writing about NASA and Hyperloop and whatnot. Stereotypes are bad, but I will admit, my life does little to dispel the ones about Indians.

I wouldn’t say I’m a model citizen (I work in the media, for chrissake), but at 5-foot-2-inches and with a petite frame, I’m the definition of non-threatening. I put airport security on alert only because I’m brown -- a typecast stand-in of how Americans picture a Muslim terrorist.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-19/coal-is-being-squeezed-out-of-power-industry-by-cheap-renewables

Coal will be increasingly squeezed out of the power generation market over the next three decades as the cost of renewables plunges and technology improves the flexibility of grids globally.

That’s the conclusion of a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which estimated some $11.5 trillion of investment will go into electricity generation between now and 2050. Of that, 85 percent, or $9.8 billion, will go into wind, solar and other zero-emissions technologies such as hydro and nuclear, the London-based researcher said.

Better batteries, which allow grid managers to store power for times when it’s neither breezy nor sunny, will allow utilities to take advantage of plunging costs for solar panels and wind turbines. The ability of natural gas plants to work at a few minutes notice means the fuel will become the choice for most utilities wanting guaranteed generation capacity.

“Coal emerges as the biggest loser in the long run,” said Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF. “Beaten on cost by wind and PV for bulk electricity generation, and by batteries and gas for flexibility, the future electricity system will reorganize around cheap renewables.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/sign-to-report-employees-not-speaking-english-at-doughnut-shop-creates-a-stir/2018/06/19/bf6fc4de-73ac-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.24d221ccc902

A sign asking customers at a Dunkin’ Donuts store in Baltimore to report employees who were heard not speaking English has set off a controversy.

The sign, according to the Baltimore Sun, would offer coupons to customers who reported workers at a doughnut store on West 41st Street if they were heard yelling in foreign languages.

Views of the sign were posted on Twitter. It read, “If you hear any of our staff SHOUTING in a language other than ENGLISH Please call 443-415-7775 immediately with the name of the employee to receive a coupon for FREE Coffee and a pastry.”

The sign was spotted Monday at the store and has apparently since been removed after it went viral on social media, according to the Sun and other media outlets.

Dunkin’ Donuts told the Sun in a statement that the store’s general manager put it up “based on her own personal judgment” to deal with a “customer service and satisfaction issue.”

[Millions of U.S. citizens don’t speak English to one another. That’s not a problem.]