NEW YORK — Hostess is betting that its Twinkies comeback will be a sweet one.
The company that went bankrupt after an acrimonious fight with its unionized workers last year is back up and running under new owners and a leaner structure. It says it plans to have Twinkies and other snack cakes back on shelves starting July 15.
Paul Krugman thinks Harvard economist Greg Mankiw forgot an important detail in his new paper, “Defending The One Percent“: Social inequality just keeps growing.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote in blog posts Saturday and Sunday that rising social inequality makes it less likely for children born into poor families to earn more money later in life. Krugman illustrates this point with a chart from Miles Corak, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, that shows a widening gap between how much money the rich and poor spend on their children.
Earlier this month, Mankiw wrote that the top 1 percent of society is richer because they contribute more to society and in essence earn more as a result. But, as Krugman points out, the former economic adviser to President George W. Bush fails to acknowledge how much society has changed in the last 50 years and how those changes lead to differing opportunities for children, depending on the family into which they are born.
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The town of Kirkenes in northernmost Norway used to be further away from Asia than virtually any other European port, but it suddenly seems a lot closer. The reason: Global warming.
Melting ice has opened up the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s Arctic coastline, changing international trade patterns in profound ways — even if so far it looks more like a sleepy county road than a busy, four-lane highway.
In a change of potentially revolutionary significance, the travel time between the Japanese port of Yokohama and Hamburg in Germany has been cut by 40 percent, while fuel expenditure is down by 20 percent.
“For the first time in history we are witnessing a new ocean opening up in the high north which will have a major impact on both trade and provision of energy,” said Sturla Henriksen, the president of the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association.
In 2012, when the ice reached its lowest extent on record, 3.4 million square kilometres (1.3 million square miles), 46 ships used the new route, compared with only four in 2010, according to Rosatomflot, a Russian operator of icebreakers.
The traffic is still negligible compared with traditional routes. Ships transit the Panama Canal 15,000 times a year, while passing through the Suez 19,000 times. But the future looks promising.
The volume of goods transported along the Northern Sea Route is likely to grow strongly in the coming years, from 1.26 million tonnes last year to 50 million tonnes in 2020, according to the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association.
Kirkenes, whose 3,400 inhabitants live in nearly uninterrupted darkness during the winter months, is suddenly preparing frantically for the expected boom.
The Tschudi Shipping Group plans to open a logistics hub measuring the equivalent of 200 football fields in a fjord nearby that is held ice-free all year by the warm Gulf Stream.
The port’s location is extremely strategic. It is nine days’ travel from both the Pacific and the Mediterranean, and close to major oil and gas deposits in the Arctic as well as mines in northern Sweden and Finland.
Twenty-six of the ships that traversed the Arctic Ocean between Europe and Asia last year were carrying hydrocarbons, while six were transporting iron ore or coal.
The new route also opens up an interesting market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) extracted in the Barents Sea, especially after North America, the customer that local companies initially had in mind, has turned away following a decision to use its own shale gas.
On the other hand, Asia’s appetite for gas has increased after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, and prices there are significantly higher than in Europe.
Adding to the lucrative nature of the trade, each ship transporting LNG by the northern route can do it close to $7 million cheaper than vessels going through the Suez.
Traditional goods traffic, however, is not realistic in these latitudes, according to Tschudi Shipping.
“The big trading routes in dry bulk shipping are located too far South for the Northern Sea Route to become relevant,” said Henrik Falck, the company’s project manager for Eastern Europe.
And “we can forget about containers,” he added, noting that owners preferred traditional routes with stops at densely populated cities along the way.
In a fragile ecosystem that is the source of immense worry among environmentalists, Russia plays a central role in assisting navigation with icebreakers.
It has also decided to establish 10 bases along its coast to redress the current abject lack of infrastructure.
Admitted last month as an observer in the Arctic Council, China also wants to be part of the game.
After the first transit of its icebreaker Snow Dragon last year, the world’s second-largest economy now plans to send its first commercial shipment along the northern route this summer.
Between 5 and 15 percent of Chinese international trade could take this new road by 2020, the director of the Polar Research Institute of China, Yang Huigeng, was quoted as saying in the media.
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KAESONG, North Korea — The remains of a fortress that once surrounded Kaesong, the ancient capital of Korea’s Koryo Dynasty, is among sites in North Korea that made it onto UNESCO’s World Heritage list on Sunday.
North Korea’s bid to have the sites added to the list was approved at a UNESCO meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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If there are weather apps, calendar apps and to do list apps, there should be an app that spits out an optimal schedule for you to follow. What’s the point of jogging in the rain and then doing laundry when the sun comes out? Or maybe you like to run in the rain because it cools you off. Or you’re really pale and trying to avoid direct sun. Whatever. It’s between you and Foresee now.
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On Saturday night, Kimberly Kidwell, a 31-year-old EMT, married Katie Short in a wedding ceremony on the front lawn of the Equality House in Topeka, Kan. — directly across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church.
Members of the church, who have travelled across the U.S. to promote their anti-gay message, didn’t even need to leave their headquarters to protest, putting up some signs in their front yard and a banner over the wooden fence outside their property.
The brides hardly noticed. “I guess I was almost numb after seeing them for a minute. I knew the signs would be there, and I wasn’t even angry about it. We were just so ecstatic to be getting married,” said Kidwell, who wore a white pantsuit for the occasion.
And the battle to build quantified self gadgets rages on. The newest entrant is one that isn’t exactly new to the space — Withings has been churning out smart scales and body analyzers since 2009, but it recently decided to set it sights on Fitbit and Jawbone with a new, $99 wearable fitness tracker called the Pulse.
The particulars should sound familiar: the Pulse is a tiny (it weighs in at 8 grams) thing with a touch-sensitive OLED display that’s worn on your person and measures the steps you’ve taken, calories you’ve burned, and how long you’ve slept. Oh, and to top it off, you can press your finger to the Pulse’s rear end to figure out your heart rate. Neat trick.
Familiar though that formula may be, Withings brings something rather neat to the table though: a hardware ecosystem (if a small one). The company’s background in smart scales means it’s capable of adding some crucial context to the activity data the Pulse is able to collect — a more accurate picture of a person’s fitness level and the effect it actually has on the body. Media darling Fitbit has so far struck to a similar strategy, albeit one that ran in reverse — the company spent years honing its Fitbit wearables before releasing the Aria scale in 2012.
That said, Withings is no stranger to cooperation with other quantified self players either. Companies like Fitbit and Jawbone have made it a point to partner with Withings so they can incorporate weight data into users’ accounts. It’s a natural fit considering that a person’s weight represents a crucial bit of information that those company’s respective gadgets can’t really figure out on their own.
Honestly though, for a company that’s been nothing if not eager to add value to other wearable gadgets, it’s a little strange to see Withings take a shot at the market themselves. These days it seems like nearly every fitness-focused company is trying reinvent to the pedometer, but it takes some serious expertise to turn a pint-sized selection of sensors and components into a product worth using. The development process may have been a bumpy one too — Withings first showed off that activity tracker (encased in Plexiglass no less) back in Las Vegas at CES 2013, and here we are about five months later with only the option to pre-order the thing.
For all the question marks that come with the Pulse, Withings may actually be onto something here. If the company can nail the experience of aggregating data across its hardware lineup and feeding it all into its accompanying app (not to mention the 100 or so partner apps floating around out there), Withings may just be able to pull ahead of a sizable pack.
If your freestanding electric fan blows accumulated dust around the room every time it’s turned on, a fashionable fabric dust cover will keep the fan clean while adding some designer dash to your room decor.
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