Coming in ‘candy' — Local chocolate stores stock up on supplies for Valentine's Day rush
This is one of the busiest weeks for Pulakos Chocolates on Parade Street with Valentine's Day holiday being their busiest single-day holiday.
Sara Harris, co-owner and operations manager for Pulakos said preparations begin far out in advance to ensure their products go above and beyond for their customers.
Don't give love a bad name — FirstEnergy reminds residents about dangers of metallic balloons
'We start getting ready for Valentine's Day probably in September. We order all of our boxes months in advance so everything's ordered probably at the end of spring, May or June. And then we add it to our production schedule for packing, so we like to have everything in the store by the end of January,' said Harris.
But they aren't the only chocolate shop gearing up for the holiday — Preparations are also well underway over on West 8th Street with Stefanelli's Candies.
'We are so far ahead of schedule on our Valentine's. We have about 400 flats of strawberries coming and we'll be doing that for the next three days or so,' said Linda Maloney, plant manager for Stefanelli's Candies.
Maloney said their preparations for Valentine's Day began a week prior by getting boxes and spaces ready.
'Strawberries are our biggest seller at Valentine's. Yes, for sure,' said Maloney.
Harris said their fan favorites are also chocolate-covered strawberries as well as chocolate-covered grapes.
'Valentine's Day is really busy the day of and the day before and we've been getting busy all week here,' said Harris.
'Right now our little bit of a rush the people want to beat the people coming in on Thursday and Friday but for the most part it'll be Thursday and Friday morning,' said Maloney.
Getting in the Valentine's spirit with a Valentine's Day ice cream social
Many of Erie's chocolatiers said they have been impacted by price changes and supply chain issues but they do their best to keep their products affordable for their customers.
'Chocolate prices are up and it has affected us but we're keeping the strawberries the same price that they've been for the last few years, so $15 for a half dozen, so $25 for a full dozen,' said Harris.
'We do have some supply issues. We've had those even since the pandemic, you know, getting things in and stuff but we're doing okay right now,' said Maloney.
A little fun fact — Although a variety of chocolate is offered on Valentine's Day, Maloney said Easter is actually their biggest chocolate holiday, followed by Christmas.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Atlantic
6 hours ago
- Atlantic
Where Is Barack Obama?
Last month, while Donald Trump was in the Middle East being gifted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, Barack Obama headed off on his own foreign excursion: a trip to Norway, in a much smaller and more tasteful jet, to visit the summer estate of his old friend King Harald V. Together, they would savor the genteel glories of Bygdøyveien in May. They chewed over global affairs and the freshest local salmon, which had been smoked on the premises and seasoned with herbs from the royal garden. Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV ('a fellow Chicagoan') and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis. No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication. His 'audacity of hope' presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement. Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: 'Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.'). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for 'rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt' by the White House 'to stifle academic freedom.' He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy. Beyond that, Obama pops in with summer and year-end book, music, and film recommendations. He recently highlighted a few articles about AI and retweeted a promotional spot for Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, a new Netflix documentary from his and Michelle's production company. (Michelle also has a fashion book coming out later this year: 'a celebration of confidence, identity, and authenticity,' she calls it.) Apparently, Barack is a devoted listener of The Ringer 's Bill Simmons Podcast, or so he told Jimmy Kimmel over dinner. In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world's most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money. But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times. And Obama's detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump's assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified. 'There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,' Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. 'It is heartbreaking,' he added, 'to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.' People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. 'We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,' Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. 'There is a dilution factor that we're very aware of.' 'The thing you don't want to do is, you don't want to regularize him,' former Attorney General Eric Holder, a close Obama friend and collaborator, told me. When I asked Holder what he meant by 'regularize,' he explained that there was a danger of turning Obama into just another hack commentator—' Tuesdays With Barack, or something like that,' Holder said. Like many of Obama's confidants, Holder bristles at suggestions that the former president has somehow deserted the Trump opposition. 'Should he do more? Everybody can have their opinions,' Holder said. 'The one thing that always kind of pisses me off is when people say he's not out there, or that he's not doing things, that he's just retired and we never hear from him. If you fucking look, folks, you would see that he's out there.' From the April 2016 issue: The Obama doctrine Obama's aides also say that he is loath to overshadow the next generation of Democratic leaders. They emphasize that he spends a great deal of time speaking privately with candidates and officials who seek his advice. But unfortunately for Democrats, they have not found their next fresh generational sensation since Obama was elected 17 years ago (Joe Biden obviously doesn't count). Until a new leader emerges, Obama could certainly take on a more vocal role without 'regularizing' himself in the lowlands of Trump-era politics. Obama remains the most popular Democrat alive at a time of historic unpopularity for his party. Unlike Biden, he appears not to have lost a step, or three. Unlike with Bill Clinton, his voice remains strong and his baggage minimal. Unlike both Biden and Clinton, he is relatively young and has a large constituency of Americans who still want to hear from him, including Black Americans, young voters, and other longtime Democratic blocs that gravitated toward Trump in November. 'Should Obama get out and do more? Yes, please,' Tracy Sefl, a Democratic media consultant in Chicago, told me. 'Help us,' she added. 'We're sinking over here.' Obama's conspicuous scarcity while Trump inflicts such damage isn't just a bad look. It's a dereliction of the message that he built his career on. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, his former life as a community organizer was central to his message. His campaign was not merely for him, but for civic action itself—the idea of Americans being invested in their own change. Throughout his time in the White House, he emphasized that 'citizen' was his most important title. After he left office in 2017, Obama said that he would work to inspire and develop the next cohort of leaders, which is essentially the mission of his foundation. It would seem a contradiction for him to say that he's devoting much of his post-presidency to promoting civic engagement when he himself seems so disengaged. To some degree, patience with Obama began wearing thin when he was still in office. His approval ratings sagged partway through his second term (before rebounding at the end). The rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 was a fiasco, and the midterm elections of 2014 were a massacre. Obama looked powerless as Republicans in Congress ensured that he would pass no major legislation in his second term and blocked his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. 'Obama, out,' the president said in the denouement of his last comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in 2016. In Obama lore, this mic-drop moment would instantly become famous—and prophetic. After Trump's first victory, Obama tried to reassure supporters that this was merely a setback. 'I don't believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes,' he said in an interview with The New Yorker. Insofar as Obama talked about how he imagined his post-presidency, he was inclined to disengage from day-to-day politics. At a press conference in November 2016, Obama said that he planned to 'take Michelle on vacation, get some rest, spend time with my girls, and do some writing, do some thinking.' He promised to give Trump the chance to do his job 'without somebody popping off in every instance.' But in that same press conference, he also allowed that if something arose that raised 'core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it's necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I'll examine it when it comes.' That happened almost immediately. A few days after vowing in his inaugural address to end the 'American carnage' that he was inheriting, Trump signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. The so-called Muslim travel ban would quickly be blocked by the courts, but not before sowing chaos at U.S. points of entry. Obama put out a brief statement through a spokesperson ('the president fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion'), and went on vacation. Trump's early onslaught made clear that Obama's ex-presidency would prove far more complicated than previous ones. And Obama's taste for glamorous settings and famous company—Richard Branson, David Geffen, George Clooney—made for a grating contrast with the turmoil back home. 'Just tone it down with the kitesurfing pictures,' John Oliver, the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, said of Obama in an interview with Seth Meyers less than a month after the president left office. 'America is on fire,' Oliver added. 'I know that people accused him of being out of touch with the American people during his presidency. I'm not sure he's ever been more out of touch than he is now.' Oliver's spasm foreshadowed a rolling annoyance that continued as Trump's presidency wore on: that Obama was squandering his power and influence. 'Oh, Obama is still tweeting good tweets. That's very nice of him,' the anti-Trump writer Drew Magary wrote in a Medium column titled 'Where the Hell Is Barack Obama?' in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. 'I'm sick of Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole.' Obama did insert himself in the 2024 election, reportedly taking an aggressive behind-the-scenes role last summer in trying to nudge Biden out of the race. He delivered a showstopper speech at the Democratic National Convention and campaigned several times for Kamala Harris in the fall. But among longtime Obama admirers I've spoken with, frustration with the former president has built since Trump returned to office. While campaigning for Harris last year, Obama framed the stakes of the election in terms of a looming catastrophe. 'These aren't ordinary times, and these are not ordinary elections,' he said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Yet now that the impact is unfolding in the most pernicious ways, Obama seems to be resuming his ordinary chill and same old bits. Green, of the Progressive Change Institute, told me that when Obama put out his March Madness picks this year, he texted Schultz, the Obama adviser. 'Have I missed him speaking up in other places recently?' Green asked him. 'He did not respond to that.' (Schultz confirmed to me that he ignored the message but vowed to be 'more responsive to Adam Green's texts in the future.') Being a former president is inherently tricky: The role is ill-defined, and peripheral by definition. Part of the trickiness is how an ex-president can remain relevant, if he wants to. This is especially so given the current president. 'I don't know that anybody is relevant in the Trump era,' Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, who wrote a book called Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, said that Trump has succeeded in creating a reality in which every president who came before is suspect. 'All the standard rules of being an ex-president are no longer applicable,' he said. Still, Obama never presented himself as a 'standard rules' leader. This was the idea that his political rise was predicated on—that change required bold, against-the-grain thinking and uncomfortable action. Clearly, Obama still views himself this way, or at least still wants to be perceived this way. (A few years ago, he hosted a podcast with Bruce Springsteen called Renegades.) From the July 1973 issue: The last days of the president Stepping into the current political melee would not be an easy or comfortable role for Obama. He represents a figure of the past, which seems more and more like the ancient past as the Trump era crushes on. He is a notably long-view guy, who has spent a great deal of time composing a meticulous account of his own narrative. 'We're part of a long-running story,' Obama said in 2014. 'We just try to get our paragraph right.' Or thousands of paragraphs, in his case: The first installment of Obama's presidential memoir, A Promised Land, covered 768 pages and 29 hours of audio. No release date has been set for the second volume. But this might be one of those times for Obama to take a break from the long arc of the moral universe and tend to the immediate crisis. Several Democrats I've spoken with said they wish that Obama would stop worrying so much about the 'dilution factor.' While Democrats struggle to find their next phenom, Obama could be their interim boss. He could engage regularly, pointing out Trump's latest abuses. He did so earlier this spring, during an onstage conversation at Hamilton College. He was thoughtful, funny, and sounded genuinely aghast, even angry. He could do these public dialogues much more often, and even make them thematic. Focus on Trump's serial violations of the Constitution one week (recall that Obama once taught constitutional law), the latest instance of Trump's naked corruption the next. Blast out the most scathing lines on social media. Yes, it might trigger Trump, and create more attention than Obama evidently wants. But Trump has shown that ubiquity can be a superpower, just as Biden showed that obscurity can be ruinous. People would notice. Democrats love nothing more than to hold up Obama as their monument to Republican bad faith. Can you imagine if Obama did this? some Democrat will inevitably say whenever Trump does something tacky, cruel, or blatantly unethical (usually before breakfast). Obama could lean into this hypocrisy—tape recurring five-minute video clips highlighting Trump's latest scurrilous act and title the series 'Can You Imagine If I Did This?' Or another idea—an admittedly far-fetched one. Trump has decreed that a massive military parade be held through the streets of Washington on June 14. This will ostensibly celebrate the Army's 250th anniversary, but it also happens to fall on Trump's 79th birthday. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million, including $16 million in damage to the streets. (Can you imagine if Obama did this?) The spectacle cries out for counterprogramming. Obama could hold his own event, in Washington or somewhere nearby. It would get tons of attention and drive Trump crazy, especially if it draws a bigger crowd. Better yet, make it a parade, or 'citizen's march,' something that builds momentum as it goes, the former president and community organizer leading on foot. This would be the renegade move. Few things would fire up Democrats like a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Obama. If nothing else, it would be fun to contemplate while Democrats keep casting about for their long-delayed future. 'The party needs new rising stars, and they need the room to figure out how to meet this moment, just like Obama figured out how to meet the moment 20 years ago,' Jon Favreau, a co-host of Pod Save America and former director of speechwriting for the 44th president, told me. 'Unless, of course, Trump tries to run for a third term, in which case I'll be begging Obama to come out of retirement.'
Miami Herald
13 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Jobs at the Port of Los Angeles are down by half, executive director says
LOS ANGELES — Job opportunities at the Port of Los Angeles are dwindling as President Donald Trump's steep tariffs take a hit on global trade and a major economic engine for the regional economy. Nearly half of the longshoremen who support operations at the port went without work over the last two weeks, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said in an interview. The port processed 25% less cargo than forecast for the month of May, he said. Trump's tariffs have drastically stemmed the flow of goods into the U.S., driving down activity at the neighboring ports of L.A. and Long Beach, which collectively processed more than 20 million 20-foot-long cargo units last year. The two ports are the largest in the country and provide jobs for thousands of dockworkers, heavy equipment operators and truck drivers. But work has fallen off sharply in recent weeks. Over the last 25 work shifts, only 733 jobs were available for 1,575 longshoremen looking for work. 'They haven't been laid off, but they're not working nearly as much as they did previously,' Seroka told the Los Angeles Times. 'Since the tariffs went into place, and in May specifically, we've really seen the work go off on the downside.' Marine terminal operators post available work opportunities, known as job orders, on a digital board at the port three times a day. Longshoremen can review the job orders at each shift and bid on the jobs they want to take. If there are more longshoremen than job orders, a portion of workers will go without pay. The average of 733 job orders posted over the past 25 shifts, which is equal to roughly two weeks, is unusually low. Ordinarily, between 1,700 and 2,000 job orders are posted during a typical day shift, and between 1,100 and 1,400 are posted during a standard night shift. Seroka attributed the decrease in job opportunities to lower cargo volume moving through the port. In May, 17 cargo ships canceled their planned trips to Los Angeles amid uncertainty over duties the Trump administration imposed worldwide. Although May is typically a busier month than April, this past May saw 18% less cargo processed than the month before, according to port data. The falloff comes during a critical time in advance of the Christmas shopping season, orders for which are usually placed before July 1. Conditions are not expected to significantly improve anytime soon. 'The June numbers that we're projecting right now are nowhere near where they traditionally should be,' Seroka said. An average of five ships have entered the port each day over the last week. This time of year, there would typically be between 10 and 12 ships in the port each day. 'The drop in cargo volume caused by Trump's tariffs will mean empty shelves when products don't reach our stores, rising prices on everything from groceries to clothes to cars, and undoubtedly, more Americans out of work,' U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California said in a news conference last month. The decline in shipping has broader ripple effects on L.A.'s logistics economy. A 2023 report found that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach contributed $21.8 billion in direct revenue to local service providers, generating $2.7 billion in state and local taxes and creating 165,462 jobs, directly and indirectly. A decline of just 1% in cargo to the ports would wipe away 2,769 jobs and endanger as many as 4,000 others, the study found. Union officials could not be reached for comment on Friday but had previously predicted job losses for their members. 'Some of the workforce will not be getting their full 40 hours a week based on the loss of cargo,' Gary Herrera, president of the longshoremen union ILWU Local 13, warned last month. 'That is going to have an effect on the work opportunities for not just us, but for truck drivers, warehouse workers and logistics teams,' he said. The slowdown in activity at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach has also spread into surrounding communities. Businesses in the area rely on a robust community of port workers to frequent their establishments. 'We're starting to hear from small businesses and restaurants in the harbor area that their customer patronage is trending downward,' Seroka said. 'Outside of COVID, this is the biggest drop I've seen in my career.' Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Opinion: Thank You ‘Fewer Toys' Trump, You're a Bigger Grinch than Me
Trump made headlines this week for going all Marie Kondo on the American economy—and I am here for it. During an interview with Meet the Press's Kristen Welker, Trump answered a question about rising prices due to his tariffs on China by declaring his aversion to the excesses of American-style capitalism: 'I don't think that a beautiful baby girl—that's 11 years old—needs to have 30 dolls,' said the President, before continuing later in the interview, 'They can have three.' In that same interview, he also stated that the nation's rates of pencil ownership have gotten out of control: 'They don't need to have 250 pencils,' he decreed of the sick stationery addicts among us. 'They can have five.' Exactly right! Families across the nation going broke trying to keep up with the latest pencil innovations. Our strategic graphite reserves at an all-time low. Finally, an American president has the courage to stand up to those b----rds at Dixon-Ticonderoga. Is it surprising that the President of the United States is now dictating how many dolls, crayons, vaccines or eggs children need? Sure, a little bit. But why should it be? Many of the world's great leaders have advocated for a centrally planned command economy—Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung come to mind. And funnily enough, I've been making the argument that we waste too much money on cheap plastic cr-p from China to my wife for years, especially at Christmas when the kids were young. 'A Grinch,' she used to call me, a charge I have never denied. So I'm delighted to discover that the First Family hates Christmas as much as I do, although maybe I should have guessed as much during the first Trump administration when Melania apparently took her seasonal decorating theme from The Shining. Speaking of which, I was also heartened to see Trump's intention to impose 100% tariffs on foreign films. Why do we need to shoot films abroad when we've already got the entire world built to scale in Las Vegas? And why stop there either? I'd also like to see a 100% tariff on subtitles and on elevator music that sounds a little too 'ethnic.' Economists are warning that the significant impacts of Trump's economic policies should hit our shores this week, as the first Chinese ships to leave port following the imposition of the tariffs begin arriving in the U.S. Speaking with CNN, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said that 'cargo coming into Los Angeles will be down 35% compared for a year ago.' Fewer shipping containers means less work for dockworkers, fewer hauls for truckers, fewer products for sale. Will shortages follow? Some economists think so, with consumers likely to experience scarcity and/or price hikes in toys, footwear, glassware, cutlery, furniture, bedding and clothing—as are U.S. companies that rely on China for plastic, iron, steel and electronic components. One has to wonder whether Trump's message of austerity will fly among his own base. Republican orthodoxy has always been 'buy, buy, buy!' Following 9/11, for example, George W. Bush's message to the nation was, in effect, 'Go shopping.' After any one of our nation's frequent mass shootings, Republicans respond to calls for gun control by saying it isn't a matter of needing to own more guns, but of having the right to own as many as we, the people choose. How many guns do Americans get, Mr. President? Is it more or less than the number of pencils? We are told that any pain caused by these tariffs is likely to be short-lived. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reassured investors at the Milken Institute this week, claiming that, 'the result of the president's economic plan will be more. More jobs, more homes, more growth, more factories, more critical manufacturing plants, more semiconductors, more energy, more opportunity, more defense, more economic security, more innovation.' That may end up being the case, although it's hard to see where all the new jobs are coming from, or the wood to build all those new homes. It's difficult to envision factories springing up across the heartland paying American wages to American workers. It's difficult to see how cutting ourselves from the world will lead to more opportunity. But while it's tough to see how destroying our trade relationships creates more economic security (or national security) rather than less, I do agree with the Treasury Secretary that we are likely to see more innovation. After all, nothing inspires creativity like empty shelves.
