Latest news with #Saberi
Yahoo
23-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Government-funded grocery store flounders in Midwest city as similar proposal gains steam in NYC
A community-owned grocery store in Kansas City, Missouri, is on the brink of closing as the concept of municipal subsidies for such stores gets more attention around the country due to the New York City mayoral race. The local government in Kansas City sought to address a so-called "food desert" — a term used to describe areas without access to full-service grocery stores that sell fresh produce, meat and other healthier options along with the standard supermarket fare. The store, known as KC Sun Fresh, lost nearly $900,000 over the last year and received tens of millions of dollars dating back to 2018. The store's nonprofit operator's pre-pandemic success gave way to a downturn in the years since the pandemic, as customer traffic dropped and the store's operations suffered. FOX Business Network's Kelly Saberi visited the store and noted that large portions of the store's shelves were bare or only partially stocked — including meat, produce and dry goods. Mamdani's Public Grocery Stores May Have Devastating Effects On City's Food Supply One customer told Saberi that the quality of products and the price they sell for in comparison to other local options is better, though another took issue with the lack of inventory for shoppers and said a change of ownership would be beneficial. Read On The Fox Business App "There's no meat. There's no vegetables. There's no nothing. Are you going to take care of the community that's surrounded around you? If not, sell the store to someone that can be more responsible," the patron told Saberi. Grocery Ceo Warns Nyc Could Become 'Like Havana Under Castro' If Progressive Candidate Wins Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas acknowledged the crime issues impacting the area around the store, though he noted another grocery store nearby is faring well, so the city needs to find a way to resolve the operational issues. "While I hear and understand the crime issues and concerns, there's a grocery store right down the street — largely in the same kind of area, some of the same criminal numbers and statistics — that still is doing pretty darn well," Lucas said. "So we do want to make sure that we can get those operations right and that's the work that we're collaboratively trying to do." Grocery stores run on relatively thin profit margins that fall into the range of 1% to 3%, which can make it very difficult to operate in a financially sustainable manner. Grocery Chain Shutters Multiple Locations As Industry Struggles Continue To Mount Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for the New York City mayoral race who has advocated for socialist policies, included a plan in his campaign platform to create city-owned grocery stores in each of the city's five boroughs. "They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods in products and sourcing," his platform states. Mamdani's plan calls for halting city subsidies to private grocery stores to redirect those funds to a real "public option." Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed a city-owned grocery store in 2023 after the city experienced the closure of a Walmart and Whole Foods. However, Johnson's administration has since backed off the plan for a city-owned grocery store and is exploring the creation of a city-owned farmer's market — potentially with multiple locations — that would be more focused on providing vendors with a location to sell products instead of a full-fledged article source: Government-funded grocery store flounders in Midwest city as similar proposal gains steam in NYC Solve the daily Crossword
Straits Times
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Straits Times
After war with Israel and US, Iran rests on a knife edge
A man holding portraits of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (right) and the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the funeral procession of military commanders and scientists killed during Israeli strikes, at Enqelab Square in Tehran on June 28. PHOTO: AFP DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran, Iran. As she watched Israel's bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran's political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009. Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country's immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a ceasefire vied with each other. 'For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,' said Ms Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. 'I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women's rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn't catch the real spies.' Those spies, mainly from Israel's Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran's highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called 'a golden opportunity for change'. That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the United States briefly joined. The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran's national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah's death would 'end the conflict'. The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on. It does so despite the collapse of its 'axis of resistance' that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies. Yet Mr Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. 'The Islamic Republic won,' he said in a video broadcast on June 26 from a secret location, laying to rest rumours of his demise. His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power. 'To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic's survival is always a victory,' said Mr Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a London think tank. Revolution at a crossroads Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident. Mr Pezeshkian appears to favour a liberalising makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of 'an opportunity to change our views on governance'. It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favour strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system. Mr Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed 'to achieve anything significant'. But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on June 26 that the country's nuclear facilities had sustained 'significant and serious damage'. Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the 'colour revolutions' that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr Khamenei and his entourage. They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the United States have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country's single most powerful institution, the Revolutionary Guard. The Guard numbers 150,000 to 190,000 members, Mr Vakil said. With control over vast swaths of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government's survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall last year. Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas. Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. 'The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,' said Mr Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. 'A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.' This weakness appears deep. The 'victory' claimed by Mr Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence. 'I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei's priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear program, the missile program and armed proxies, all now in shreds,' said Mr Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations undersecretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader. 'Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,' Feltman recalled. 'His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.' Paranoia, institutionalised Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr Khamenei's predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. It was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important. The Islamic Republic's first president, Abolhassan Banisadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power. War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion. The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Mr Khomeini drank from 'the poison chalice,' as he put it, and accepted an end to the war. The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in light of US military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall. 'The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimization that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,' Mr Vakil said. All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalised. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country's profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured. At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than 2 million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mir-Hossein Moussavi's liberalising Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote. Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed. More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran's morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab. The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that aging clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder. The government's ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it. So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed. 'The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the ceasefire than the war itself,' said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the UAE's Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management. 'But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favour stability,' he added. A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Persian Gulf states, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr Khamenei, but out a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity. 'For now, I don't see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,' Mr Feltman said. 'But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran's nuclear or ballistic programs.' A tug that endures Ms Saberi's hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents' home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it. She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, 'would be a one-way ticket'. But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures. 'Iran's in our heart, it's in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,' she said. 'My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fight over lumber tariffs could reshape future of US home building
Lumber is in the spotlight as the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the U.S. Lumber Coalition disagree over what's behind the U.S. housing market slump. FOX Business correspondent Kelly Saberi reported Monday that the NAHB has pointed to tariff uncertainty and lumber prices as being partly responsible. The U.S.'s current anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty on imported Canadian softwood lumber stands at 14.5%. It could potentially climb later in the year to nearly 35%. Canada's softwood lumber makes up roughly 85% of America's imports and almost a quarter of the U.S. supply, according to the NAHB. "I share President Trump's desire to create fair and balanced trade across our borders, certainly would bring back as much production as we can," NAHB CEO Jim Tobin said. "But until we do that, and it will take years and millions of dollars of investment, we need to make sure that we have a reliable, affordable source of lumber." Saberi reported that the U.S. Lumber Coalition "says that the price of lumber says something different about this story." Read On The Fox Business App Between May 2021 and April of this year, the random lengths framing composite price decreased 67%, she reported. It stood at $442 per 1,000 board feet as of May 23, per the NAHB. Meanwhile, the price of new homes has gone up 21%, Saberi reported. "Everything from regulatory costs to the cost of land and, quite frankly, also the cost of home builder profitability rates that have gone up, those are actually the driving forces of home affordability," U.S. Lumber Coalition executive director Zoltan van Heyningen told FOX Business. "Lumber just isn't one of them." Click Here To Read More On Fox Business The U.S. Lumber Coalition has also been critical of Canada, saying that "ongoing unfair trade practices" by its lumber industry have been "extremely harmful to U.S. lumber producers, workers, and their forest-dependent communities." John Kalabich, the owner of Acme Lumber in Chicago, told Saberi he was able to keep prices relatively flat over the past 12 months because of the duty on Canadian lumber. He has also heard from contractors that the demand for small repair work and big-ticket construction has gone down. Trump Issues Executive Orders Addressing Lumber Production, National Security Concerns Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau said single-family housing starts suffered a 2.1% decline from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 927,000 in April. Sales of new single-family homes in April came in at a seasonally adjusted rate of 743,000, while sales of existing ones were 3.63 article source: Fight over lumber tariffs could reshape future of US home building
Business of Fashion
23-05-2025
- Business
- Business of Fashion
Boris Bidjan Saberi Is Shutting Down Operations
Boris Bidjan Saberi, the brand known for its sophisticated menswear silhouettes informed by subcultural codes and artisanal production, is ceasing operations. The company confirmed in a statement to The Business of Fashion that it will close by the end of July. News of the label's shuttering was first revealed in a letter sent out to retail partners that was shared by blogs such as StyleZeitgeist on Thursday. In the letter, the brand said current manufacturing hurdles made it 'unviable' for the German-Persian designer to continue producing his two namesake labels, Boris Bidjan Saberi and 11 by Boris Bidjan Saberi. 'The reality is clear: under current conditions and without reallocating production, it is impossible for us to maintain operations with the standards of quality, integrity, and consistency that has always been the foundation of our project,' the brand shared in its statement to retail partners. Launched in 2007, Saberi's label blossomed during a 2010s menswear boom that saw the rise of chic yet dark labels embracing unconventional silhouettes propelled by designers such as Saberi and Rick Owens, as well as brands such as the Viridi-anne and Julius. During the label's nearly 20-year run, it anticipated the rise of contemporary menswear trends such as 'gorpcore' by becoming one of the first fashion labels to collaborate with the outdoor brand Salomon on sneakers in 2016. At end of the letter to retail partners, the brand shared that the closure did not signal the end of the designer's career but a transformation. 'Boris's vision, aesthetic, and spirit will continue, in other forms, in other formats, and under new structures that allow for greater exploration without compromising the essence of the brand.' Learn more: How Matches' Collapse Could Impact Independent Fashion The luxury retailer's closure has far-reaching knock-on effects for independent brands. Unpaid bills for inventory have pushed some labels into dire financial straits, while confidence in other stockists like Farfetch-backed Browns has sunk to a nadir.
