Latest news with #Muchnick
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘Proudly making our country your new home': Citizens naturalized at Old State Capitol ceremony
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WCIA) — Fifty-six people walked into the Old State Capitol Wednesday from all corners of the globe. They walked out sharing one thing in common: they're the United States of America's newest citizens. The group, originally from 25 different countries, all received their certificates in a ceremony presided over by District Judge Colleen Lawless. 'For some of you the choice to come here was an easy one. While others, it was one of the most difficult decisions of your life,' Lawless said. 'But no matter what your journey was or what choices you had to make by getting here, every one of you has made the American dream a reality by becoming citizens and proudly making our country your new home.' 300 people attend funeral of Springfield veteran with no known family They each left the ceremony with an American flag and a newfound sense of gratitude. 'I really liked the ceremony, definitely, and I feel very thankful with all of this country and with Illinois today,' Raquel Muchnick, a citizen naturalized in the ceremony originally from Honduras, said. Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher addressed the newest citizens and welcomed them to the capital city. 'Your presence here reminds us that what truly unites us is not where we are born or how we are here, but what we believe in our heart,' Buscher said. Accessible exhibit opens in Springfield's Lincoln Museum The day was even more special for the naturalized citizens as it was held in the room where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous 'House Divided' speech and the grounds where Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign. 'It was a privilege to us that the ceremony was here in the capitol, in a historical place, to know Abraham Lincoln was here,' Muchnick said. The group crossed the finish line of their citizenship journey surrounded by their family and friends and love for their new country. 'It was a long, long journey to be here but I'm very thankful,' Muchnick said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
San Francisco Chronicle
28-05-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Is your youth swimming club safe? Bay Area author's latest will make you think
Muckraking is hard work, one would assume, but Irvin Muchnick doesn't seem worn out by almost four decades of that dirty duty. We have met for coffee a couple times, and the Berkeley-based author and investigative reporter, now 70, has looked peppy and sounded upbeat. All that digging into the slimy, dark corners of sport certainly hasn't made Muchnick wealthy — he still hasn't replaced his old Honda Civic that was stolen four years ago — but it hasn't broken him down or dimmed his spirit. 'For whatever reason, this role suits me,' Muchnick says. 'The payoffs are few and far between, but they're there. I love my work, fortunately.' His work? Since the late '80s, Muchnick has written a trillion words, give or take, exposing various creeps, pedophiles, enablers, profiteers and other vermin in the world of sport. That makes Muchnick a hero to me. Some of us keyboard-pounders write the write. Others try to right the wrong, and those folks have my admiration. The least I can do is occasionally buy them a cup of coffee. Most of Muchnick's work has dealt with abuses and crimes in football, professional wrestling and swimming. He has written six books, tons of magazine and newspaper articles, and reported extensively and relentlessly on his website. His most recent book is 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Muchnick takes pains to point out that most youth swim coaches are honorable and honest, but, 'If it's Tuesday, a coach somewhere is preying on a young athlete, because that's just the way it is.' He learned that dirty little secret about swimming by accident, the same way he stumbled into his odd calling in the first place. The beginning: Muchnick grew up in St. Louis, where his uncle, Sam Muchnick, was a wrestling promoter, kind of the godfather of pro wrestling in America. This was before the arrival of cable TV, global advertising and Vince McMahon. Little Irv got to hang out with the wrestlers. He came to know them as people, not human cartoon characters, and when wrestling blew up into a major culture phenomenon in the mid '80s, Muchnick did some of the very first inside-wrestling journalism, peeking behind the theatrical curtain. In 2007 he published his first book, 'Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.' He dug hard and found stuff. Like the story behind Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka's girlfriend's 'accidental' death. When the newspaper for whom Muchnick was freelancing got cold feet, he posted the true-crime account on his own blog. There was no turning back. Muchnick hadn't found his calling; it had found him. He wrote about Hulk Hogan's steroid issues. He wrote 'Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death.' In that book's third printing, in 2020, Muchnick's new introduction explains how the wrestling phenomenon pushed the rise of Donald Trump, a Vince McMahon crony. The prevalence of concussions in wrestling led him to dig into the same issue in football, and he wrote, 'Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning.' Muchnick is not a big football fan. Calls it 'a system socially imposed on young men,' and 'a blood sport.' After Cal football player Ted Agu dropped dead while on a training run in 2014, local mainstream media (my hand is raised) pretty much dropped the ball on the story of Cal's shameful coverup. Muchnick dug in and wrote/reported extensively. He sued Cal under the state Public Records Act and won, uncovering a lot of coverup. Cal ultimately admitted liability for Agu's death and settled with the family. Digging up dirt, Muchnick found, was hard. From 1994 to 2000, as assistant director of the National Writers Union, he fought for writers' rights. He was the lead respondent in the landmark 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case (Reid Elsevier v. Muchnick) for freelance writers' economic rights. He successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records of a swim coach he was investigating. Stories kept finding Muchnick. In 2004 his 8-year-old daughter took up swimming, joining the Berkeley Bears club, coached by former Cal swimmer Jesse Stovall. Muchnick loved the scene, happily taking his daughter to predawn practices. He even took some lessons himself. In 2009, after Stovall had been pushed out of the club over financial improprieties and was coaching masters swimming on the Cal campus, the story came out that the year before, he had sex with an underage club swimmer while chaperoning her at a national meet. Muchnick contributed to an investigative story in the East Bay Express, which did not endear him to the local swim community. 'The biggest danger of the kind of work that I do is that it can be perceived as trolling,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm a troll, I think I'm an investigative reporter. But I haven't been perfect.' After the swim story, Muchnick was ready to move on, but fate stepped in. 'The story came out, I thought, 'I'm done, I've done my little rabble-rousing thing,' which I'd done in other areas,' Muchnick says. 'The next week (ABC News') '20/20' aired a report (on widespread sexual abuse in amateur swimming), and I realized that what I had found on my team was just a local piece of a national problem.' That plunged Muchnick into years of investigating horrors in the world of competitive and recreational swimming, culminating in his 2024 book, 'Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe.' Please read it if you believe your club-swimmer child is protected by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Subtle book titles, then, are not Muchnick's thing. He names names, he shines a bright light on a lot of cockroaches, but with a higher purpose. 'My real hope would be to actually change the youth sports system,' Muchnick says. 'I don't think I'm interested in getting all the bad guys, that's not really possible. I'm really interested in our taking a look at the youth sports system we have in this country, which has turned adults into children and children into adults. It's hard, because I'm a sports fan, too, we all love our sports, we just don't want to deal with the sausage factory behind them.' The swim book, Muchnick says, might have been his 'last rodeo' in muckraking. He's veered off that trail. He's finishing a biography of Rikidozan, a legendary, pioneering Japanese wrestler in the '50s. Typically, he won't make much money off this book. Monetizing his work has never been Muchnick's specialty. He has already spent most of his small advance on translation of research material. Muchnick, who has four kids, one of whom was adopted from China, says of the book, 'It's my love letter to Japanese and Korean culture.' All of his writing has been love letters, really. Like wrestlers, it's cleverly disguised.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NotCo's plant-based venture with Kraft Heinz hits stumbling block
NotCo has confirmed the Chile-headquartered plant-based start-up has pushed back its target for reaching group-wide profitability from as early as this year. The set-back to 2027 was first reported by Bloomberg, based on an interview with NotCo's CEO Matias Muchnick, who told the news agency the profitability hitch was linked to its 'co-branding' business in the US and Canada with Kraft Heinz. However, based on communication with Just Food and the Bloomberg interview, NotCo has suggested its operations in Latin America and Mexico will reach profitability goals before 2027. NotCo entered a partnership (The Kraft Heinz Not Company) with the Chicago-based US food major in 2022 to co-develop, produce and market plant-based proteins in North America, excluding Mexico. A spokesperson for the Chile start-up told Just Food via a statement that a number of products have since been launched in retailers such as Whole Foods Market and Sprouts. These are NotMayo; NotSausage; NotHotDog; Kraft NotCheese Slices; Not Mac & Cheese; NotChicken Patties; NotBurger and Philly Plant-Based Cream Cheese. In his interview with Bloomberg, Muchnick said NotCo had closed its office in New York and Kraft Heinz will take over the sale and marketing of the products in the US and Canada. 'NotCo, in collaboration with Kraft Heinz, made the strategic decision to consolidate its operational efforts in the US and Canada, [while] expanding the portfolio within the joint venture,' the spokesperson informed Just Food. 'The JV is now the primary vehicle for the commercialisation of plant-based food products for both companies in these markets. At the same time, NotCo remains firmly focused on its food business in LATAM, where it continues to experience solid growth.' Kraft Heinz has not responded to a request for comment. At the same time, this publication has asked NotCo to confirm which of the two companies was conducting the manufacturing of the JV products and at which factories. 'The collaboration with Kraft Heinz not only broadened our portfolio but also created opportunities to enhance operations, distribution, and commercial efforts,' the spokesperson added. 'While we remain committed to profitability across all business units, we now anticipate reaching profitability by 2027.' However, NotCo's own-branded business, NotCo Foods, is 'on track to reach profitability as early as 2025'. Muchnick told Bloomberg that its Chilean and Argentine operations are expected to become profitable by the second quarter of this year, while Mexico and Brazil are likely to reach that goal in 2026. NotCo also confirmed it had laid off about 11% of its workforce in November 2023 under a restructuring exercise to 'optimise operations' in order to 'enhance efficiency and ensure long-term sustainability'. The company added in the statement: 'Despite these adjustments, NotCo remains a strong and growing organisation, dedicated to advancing plant-based innovation and expanding its market presence.' "NotCo's plant-based venture with Kraft Heinz hits stumbling block" was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
