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Rebollo and her family were excited earlier this month when the lights came back on. But the celebration was short lived: The power blinked back off a few days later. Stacks of branches and rotten plantain tree trunks also sit on the curb outside her home — leftovers from Hurricane Irma, which skirted Puerto Rico two w...
One of the toughest losses for Rebollo has been her travel business. She just started Aventura Total last year, taking clients on kayak and hiking trips around Puerto Rico. Since the storm, she’s had to return $6,000 in deposits and lost an estimated $12,000 in revenue for October, she said.
To make ends meet, Rebollo first took a $7.25-an-hour job at a nearby supermarket. Later, she found a job with UNICEF, who deploys her on clean-up missions to different businesses impacted by the hurricane.
On a recent day, UNICEF sent her to the Office Max in Caguas to pack salvageable office supplies into boxes and load them on pallets. After working all day in a building thick with humidity and mold, her back stiff and achy, Rebollo received another text from the global agency, sending her to Home Depot to pile pallets...
Despite the hardships, Rebollo said she’s optimistic about her island’s future.
A prom photo has sparked a fresh round of debate over students’ First Amendment rights.
Last May, several dozen young men gathered on the steps of the courthouse in Baraboo, Wisconsin, to take pictures before their high-school prom. It’s not clear what was going through each of their heads—though one could guess—when the majority of them extended their right arms, mimicking the Nazi salute as a parent sna...
Is a school really not able to discipline its students for, whatever their intentions, making the same gesture that Nazis did (and do)? Catherine Ross, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, says when considering students’ First Amendment rights, it’s important to gauge whether what they’re doing or ...
And before schools punish symbolically hateful speech or actions, Ross told me, the school’s case is stronger if it can cite related incidents that disrupted the learning environment in the past. (For instance, it’s much easier for a school to ban displays of the Confederate flag if it can point to a history of violenc...
Another law professor, Michigan State’s Kristine Bowman, says that because the photo was taken in the lead-up to a school event, Baraboo High School did have jurisdiction over the students’ behavior. “But that doesn’t mean that the school can necessarily punish them,” she says.
But it is possible to make some deductions. Either they didn’t know what they were doing (which seems a failing of education), knew but meant the gesture as a joke (which would be inexcusably flippant), or knew and meant the gesture to convey its hateful meaning (which would be self-evidently awful). At any rate, if so...
Still, those are moral objections, and as far as the law is concerned, Bowman says, what matters is whether a student’s speech would “materially and substantially interfere” with a school’s educational process. That was a standard set by the Supreme Court in 1969’s Tinker v. Des Moines, which upheld multiple Iowan high...
Bowman adds that because students at public schools are “effectively a captive audience”—all states have laws that require kids to attend school, public or otherwise—schools have more license to shape the community environment, and thus more power to restrict speech, than the government might in contexts where attendan...
Still, as Bowman and Ross both pointed out, even if a school can’t punish something like the Baraboo incident, there are other things it can do. Bowman says that the school is allowed to take the opportunity to establish that it doesn’t condone anti-Semitism. “I think the best response is for the school to take that as...
The Baraboo School District appears to be planning something along those lines. Mueller, the superintendent, said the school was going to implement “restorative practices” to bring the community back together, and to take steps to directly address hate. Baraboo may be constrained when it comes to punishing students, bu...
Freeport is in tense negotiations with Indonesia over a key mine. Here's what the miner's business will look like if it has to walk away from that asset.
After muddling through a disastrous and debt-fueled foray into the energy business, copper and gold miner Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (NYSE:FCX) finally started to turn a corner in 2017. Jettisoning oil and reducing debt got the company back onto solid footing. And then a dispute with the Indonesian government over ownership...
The first-quarter update on the negotiations between Freeport and Indonesia highlighted the broad framework that the two sides agreed on in 2017. Essentially, Indonesia wants to take 51% ownership of the asset so it can benefit more financially from the success of the mine. Freeport has OK'd this, but the two sides hav...
In early 2018, Indonesia complicated the issue by hitting Grasberg with new environmental demands. Freeport says the demands aren't workable and that the new environmental regulations need to be dealt with before a final agreement can be reached on the ownership issue. In short, negotiations between Freeport and Indone...
The difficult negotiations are a big problem for Freeport because Grasberg is a very important asset for the company. The mine accounted for roughly a third of its copper production in the first quarter and virtually all of its gold production. If the two sides aren't able to come to terms and Freeport has to walk away...
Freeport's stature would decline if Grasberg went away. Image source: Freeport-McMoRan Inc.
However, that's only half the story. Grasberg isn't just a large mine -- it's also a highly profitable mine. The cash cost to produce copper at this mine in the first quarter was 26% below that of its North American operations and 24% lower than the cash costs of its South American business. Add in byproduct credits an...
The size and low-cost structure of Grasberg are the two main reasons the miner is unlikely to walk away from the negotiating table. They are also why the company is not in a great bargaining position. At this point, Freeport is putting forward a scenario in which it remains in Indonesia and transitions majority ownersh...
The current projections for Grasberg. Image source: Freeport-McMoRan Inc.
Assuming a deal is reached that matches up with the company's current estimates, copper production from the mine attributable to Freeport will fall from an estimated 1.15 billion pounds in 2018 to just 500 million pounds in 2019. Production would double by 2020 and increase to 1.5 billion pounds in 2021 as capital proj...
Freeport-McMoRan is working hard to retain as much value as it can at the giant Grasberg mine. The sheer size of the asset in its portfolio means it has little choice. While it could walk away from Grasberg, the effect on its production and costs would be pretty devastating. That's not likely to happen. But the current...
Here at Travail Employment Group we are always looking for a professional, experienced Legal Secretaries in the Gloucestershire area.
·Diary management for the fee earner, booking appointments etc.
·Telephone contact with new clients, existing clients, experts, the Court and opponent solicitors.
The successful Legal Secretary will need to have previous legal secretary experience in any legal department.
The CEO and board of directors of a company can be banned for a period – typically three years – if a court finds they acted with gross negligence in connection with the company going bankrupt.
In some cases it could be racking up grotesque expenses with any company prepared to give them credit – not dissimilar to the age-old organised crime practice – with no personal liability for the debt accrued.
The rules at present governing bankruptcy came into force on 1 January 2014, passed by a broad majority in Parliament, but they seem to have had an unintended consequence.
In only one year, the number of top executives who have been banned has doubled. According to figures from the Danish business authority, Erhvervsstyrelsen, today there are 1,832 executives on the banned list compared to 898 as of 31 December 2016, reports DR Nyheder.
“This is a surprisingly high number – almost three times as high as we estimated three years ago when the rules came into force, so it is something we are going to have to address,” said Sven Petersen, the head of business law at the Danish chamber of commerce, Dansk Erhverv.
Lars Lindencrone Petersen, a partner in the Bech-Bruun law firm and a previous chair of the bankruptcy council Konkursrådet, also voiced his surprise. “It takes a great deal to ban people, so seen in that light it is rather surprising that there are really so many who have been banned,” he said.
According to Petersen, it is especially at companies with limited liability that the sinners are to be found, so the new figures have cast an unexpected light on a problem the extent of which was unknown four years ago.
Petersen also thinks there is a need for a closer look at the rules to see whether they are adequate or too strict. “Maybe the executives [who are banned] are condemned on far too flimsy evidence or perhaps we might find that the rules are fine and there really is a need to tighten up in this area,” he said.
Nevertheless, regardless of whether the consequences are severe enough for the individual, more people are getting caught and barred following the introduction of the new rules.
Nevertheless, many avoid punishment by using a strawman to take the fall. And in some cases, deliberately poor book-keeping is presented to implode the business – although sometimes this is a result of pure incompetence.
A liquidation firm won the bidding for Sparrows Point, offering $72 million for the Baltimore County steel mill — less than a tenth of what the complex sold for just four years earlier — and realizing the worst fears of its roughly 2,000 employees.
Mill advocates vowed to push for a miracle to keep steelmaking going there. The local United Steelworkers union had hoped for a steelmaker would buy and restart the mill — idled after owner RG Steel filed for bankruptcy in May. But no steelmaking companies showed up to bid at the Tuesday afternoon auction in New York, ...
The mill's general manager, Glenn Mikaloff, sent an email to managers late Tuesday that identified Hilco as the winner and the size of its bid.
"They pledged not to destroy key steelmaking assets for 6 months while the unsecured creditors attempt to find an operator," he wrote. "Sorry I don't have better news."
Hilco Trading LLC, based in Illinois, dismantles closed industrial sites, sells off retail inventory and recently auctioned off equipment from bankrupt solar panel firm Solyndra. Hilco declined to comment beyond saying that it did bid at the auction.
RG Steel did not return calls and didn't file auction results with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Wednesday. Any sale of the mill must be approved by the court, which has scheduled a hearing for Aug. 15.
The results were a tremendous blow for the steelworkers and hundreds of others in the region whose jobs depended on the mill, where steel has been made since 1889. Both the union and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said they would work to find a company interested in purchasing Sparrows Point — or critical pi...
"Our position is that this is not over yet," Kamenetz said. "My understanding is that the other bidders had wanted an extension, and that was denied."
Ukrainian mining and metallurgy company Metinvest Group had reportedly registered to take part in the auction, but spokesman Ivan Shmidik said by email Tuesday that the company would not bid. U.S. steelmaker Nucor Corp. and Brazilian steel giant CSN had also registered, according to a source. Neither responded to reque...
The $72 million sales price is "ridiculous," said Michael Locker, a steel industry consultant with New York-based Locker Associates. OAO Severstal paid $810 million for Sparrows Point four years ago. RG Steel bought the mill and other plants from Severstal just last year.
"This is a viable steel mill that's being sold off for a song," Locker said. "I don't know why the steel companies didn't show up — it's perplexing."
Many steel mills in the country aren't operating anywhere close to full capacity, and RG Steel blamed market deterioration for its rapid descent. But Locker doesn't think the market is so weak that steelmakers wouldn't want a big mill for a liquidation price.
He said the "super accelerated" nature of this bankruptcy case — RG Steel filed for Chapter 11 protection 10 weeks ago — could have left potential operators with too little time to do their due diligence.
"Why the judge and the creditors wanted to move so fast is beyond me," Locker said. "I think it interfered with finding a buyer."
John Anton, a steel analyst at IHS Global Insight, said he couldn't guess at the likelihood of the union and local officials succeeding in finding an operator.
"I will bet however that if anyone does come in they will only operate cherry picked lines, and that the odds of everyone keeping their job is zero," he said by email Wednesday.
Gov. Martin O'Malley intervened when the cash-crunched mill furloughed hundreds of workers in December, asking General Electric — a key RG Steel lender — to help stabilize the company's "financial arrangements." The mill reopened in January after receiving more capital from RG Steel's owner, the Renco Group, and privat...
Raquel Guillory, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Wednesday that O'Malley intends to help if the mill could still be sold to an operator.
"The governor would be willing to hop on a plane and meet with that company if it means finding a buyer that will keep these jobs here in Maryland," she said.
Sparrows Point was one of Baltimore County's largest employers before the mass layoff, but it was far leaner in recent years than it was at its height under Bethlehem Steel. Together, the company's mill and shipbuilding complex in Sparrows Point employed about 30,000 people during World War II, producing hundreds of sh...
Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001. Sparrows Point has had four owners since then.
"We've been making steel here for 120 years, and we're not giving up," said Rosel, the local union leader and the third generation of his family to work at Sparrows Point. "We're still going to fight to find an operator for this plant, even in the face of what just occurred. There is an opportunity to make money for Hi...
Like the workers, Baltimore County has a stake in what happens. It's not just the jobs — it's the taxes.
RG Steel owes the county nearly $4.6 million in property taxes and sewage charges — the mill was about to go to tax sale when the company filed for bankruptcy protection. The county's attorneys said in court documents Wednesday that the local government would object to any sale that didn't result in prompt repayment of...
The mill sits on more than 2,400 acres at a prime location, south of Interstate 695 on a peninsula that juts into the Patapsco River. But the area is far from pristine.
"More than a century of steel making and finishing operations have resulted in perhaps the most complex environmental cleanup site in the Chesapeake Bay watershed," Baltimore County's attorneys wrote in court documents.
The U.S. Justice Department said in a court filing last week on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency that the federal government would object to any buyer without the wherewithal to continue mandated efforts to find and remediate problems.
"Sale of any Steel Facility to a purchaser who is incapable of performing cleanup and otherwise complying with the law is functionally indistinguishable from abandonment," the federal agency wrote in the filing.
It's not a foregone conclusion that a company specializing in liquidation will tear apart a closed facility and sell it off in pieces. Michael W. Rhodes, president of the Investment Recovery Association, a trade group for specialty firms that turn idle assets into cash, said it depends on the asset.
Sometimes it will be sold to a company intending to operate it, he said. Otherwise, a liquidator will market the pieces that can be sold intact and sell the rest as scrap — potentially tearing everything down to the ground.
"It really boils down to the math, whether it's Hilco or anybody else," said Rhodes, an investment recovery supervisor in Virginia. "When they choose to buy a facility, they'll go in and do an assessment."
Exhibit one is Frontier Industrial Corp., a plant demolition and brownfield remediation company that won the bidding last week for RG Steel's facility in Mingo Junction, Ohio. Craig Slater, Frontier's general counsel, said Wednesday that "lease, sell, operate are all possible alternatives for us."
"Steelmaking is not our core business, but it's a possibility that we'll work together with another company or joint venture to start one or more of the lines of the facility," he said. "It's something we're considering."
When it comes to Nicholas Sparks, you're either up for the ride or you're not. If you are, you're part of a Middle American fan club that has supported nine schmaltzy, formulaic, achingly sincere film adaptations of the novelist's books to the cumulative box office tune of about $750,000,000. If you're not, well, The L...
What's most strange here is how Sparks, in a calculated attempt to link people from very different worlds, offers up social backgrounds for them that simply don't mix at all — modern Southern college sorority life, the circumstances for World War II Jewish refugees, enclaves of modern art a half-century ago and today a...
The pretty couple at the center of things has modern cowboy Luke (Scott Eastwood), comeback-minded after having been violently thrown by a mighty mean bull named Rango, pursuing a very gentlemanly courtship of Wake Forest college senior Sophia (Britt Robertson) shortly before she's due to move to New York for a high-en...
But fate intervenes, as it has a habit of doing, when the couple rescue an old man from a car accident on a dark rainy night and take him to a hospital. While he recovers, genial old gent Ira Levinson (Alan Alda) allows Sophia to read aloud to him from old letters that recount his poignant relationship with his beloved...
The couple's many trials and tribulations, notably including Ira's Jake Barnes-like war injury that prevents him from giving Ruth the children she craves and their failure to adopt a parentless hillbilly boy who shows intellectual promise, simply serve to demonstrate how few obstacles Luke and Sophia face compared to t...
Leaving his career origins in Soul Food and the Barbershop series (which he produced) very far behind indeed, director George Tillman Jr. indulges, nay, embraces the sanitized banality of Sparks' world with a straight face. Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the char...
Curiously, the couple from 70-odd years ago has been cast with grandchildren of Hollywood luminaries from that period. Huston displays none of the gumption associated with his director grandfather John or the latter's thespian offspring. By contrast, Chaplin, granddaughter of Charles, daughter of actress Geraldine and ...
But providing the film with whatever emotional grounding it can claim is Alda. Restricted almost exclusively to a hospital bed, the 79-year-old actor makes the canned sentimentality of his 91-year-old character go down quite easily as he comments to Sophia about the vicissitudes of his life.
The settings and compositions are picture-postcard, the score syrupy, the bull-riding coverage not entirely convincing, the sentiments cliched and reassuring. But, boy oh boy, the ending! In Sparks' world, when happiness rains, it pours.
Just like the Consumer Protection Board can't help you get your money back from a huckster who sold you magical glass beads, railing against politicians now that got your vote in the last elections is pointless, writes Erik Gamzejev, editor-in-chief of Ida-Viru daily Põhjarannik. The only way to get it right is to actu...
There is no better way for a voter to stand up for the interests of their particular area than to make a well-considered selection in the local elections, and not let politicians make a fool out of them.
Why do people still need to be reminded of something so obvious? Probably because looking at the current election campaigns and candidates’ promises one could get the impression that some of them are getting ready to build Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun.
A municipality with 4,500 residents is promised a new and fancy register office as well as an entire new quarter for young families, a 30,000-seat stadium, a maritime museum, 500 new jobs, and free public transport. Legal aid is to be made free of charge, an addiction prevention center simply moved beyond the municipal...
This isn’t some joke or fantasy. The prime minister’s party is running in the county center of Jõhvi with these campaign promises as part of their platform, with former minister Martin Repinski on its list, who picked well-known clairvoyante Ilona Kaldre as one of his running mates.
So they are bluffing and manipulating the voters. It’s about a sense of measure, and the question how sensitive parties are to their voters’ level of political understanding.
If such an insane amount of unreal promises are heaped up, the assumption is that the voter has no idea what the roles of local and central power are, and that they don’t have a clue what the price would be of actually realizing one or the other of these promises. This lack of knowledge is abused without a moment’s hes...
That’s what encourages candidates to consciously use lies to dope their campaigns. There’s always a way back afterwards. You can claim that you were misunderstood, that this wasn’t really a promise, but that you were merely expressing something you wish could be done. Or the coalition partner didn’t allow you to see th...
So it’s important to differ between dreaming big and fooling the voters.
Unfortunately this epidemic didn’t emerge in small places in the countryside, but in the capital, where campaigns are eagerly promising to deliver things for free: public transport, meals for kindergartens, extracurricular activities, and so on. Practice has demonstrated that this approach works, and so smaller places ...
No party will attract as many votes with the promise to make planning processes faster and reduce bureaucracy to attract businesses as they will by promising something for free. Of course the former point is decidedly more important for the fostering of local development.
The local elections could be the best time for parties as well as election coalitions to come up with ideas how to slow down the marginalization of communities. But there are very few. The parties would rather try to outdo each other in the capital by making promises that will only deepen the inequality between the dif...
A principal question is whether or not offering more and more public services for free is justified. If we address this locally, then it would be in the interest of fair development across the country to do it in precisely those places that are losing people, and not in a city that is attracting people from other commu...
Erik Gamzejev is editor-in-chief of Põhjarannik, a local daily in Ida-Viru County.
Published: Nov 17, 2018 at 12:04 a.m.
Updated: Nov 17, 2018 at 12:05 a.m.
Put on the Christmas music, pour a festive drink and grab a handful of those yummy little After Eight straws.
Christmas is a time when many of us love to craft, whether it’s making something new to decorate our home or a little gift for someone else.

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