Category: US

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CNN
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With the thick vegetation of the northern Guatemala rainforests hiding its 2,000-year-old remnants, the full extent of the early Mayan way of life was once impossible to see. But laser technology has helped researchers discover a previously unknown 650-square-mile (1,683-square-kilometer) Maya site that offers startling new insights about ancient Mesoamericans and their civilization.

The researchers detected the vast site within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin of northern Guatemala by using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, a laser mapping system that allows for structures to be detected below the thick tree canopies. The resulting map showed an area composed of 964 settlements broken down into 417 interconnected Mayan cities, towns and villages.

A 110-mile (177-kilometer) network of raised stone trails, or causeways, that linked the communities reveals that the early civilization was home to an even more complex society than previously thought, according to a recent analysis on the architecture groupings, published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

“They’re the world’s first superhighway system that we have,” said lead study author Richard Hansen, a professor of anthropology at Idaho State University. “What’s amazing about (the causeways) is that they unite all these cities together like a spiderweb … which forms one of the earliest and first state societies in the Western Hemisphere.”

The causeways, which rise above the seasonal swamps and dense forest flora of the Maya Lowlands, formed “a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions” with further implications regarding “strategies of governance” due to how difficult they would have been to build, according to the study.

The causeways were composed of a mixture of mud and quarry stone among several layers of limestone cement. Mayans likely made the elevated pathways with a process similar to the one they used to build their pyramids — by creating 10- to 15-foot (3- to 4.5-meter) stone boxes, then filling, stacking and leveling them off, according to Hansen. Several of these causeways were as wide as 131 feet (40 meters), nearly half the length of an American football field.

In Maya language, the word for causeway is “Sacebe” which translates to “white road.” On top of the raised roads was a thick layer of white plaster, which would have helped to increase visibility in the night as the plaster reflected moonlight, Hansen said.

“They didn’t have any pack animals in the Maya region … and we’re not thinking that they had wheeled vehicles on these causeways like Roman roads, like chariots or whatnot, but they were definitely built for people to interact, communicate and probably travel between sites,” said Marcello Canuto, anthropology professor and director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University.

Canuto, who was not involved in this study, was co-director on research that used the same LiDAR technology to reveal over 60,000 ancient Mayan structures in 2018.

The causeways “were efforts that involve a lot of people, a lot of labor and coordination,” Canuto said. “They are complex work projects that would have required coordination and some form of hierarchy.”

LiDAR has been used to detect the remains of early Mayan civilizations since 2015, when two large-scale surveys were taken of the southern half of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin. The technology allows for these discoveries to be made without harming the rainforests.

From an airplane flying overhead, light waves are pulsed down, and they bounce off objects below before returning to the sensor. Similar to sonar, which uses sound to locate structures, the LiDAR sensor tracks the amount of time each pulse takes to return and creates a three-dimensional map of the environment below.

“Imagine you’re in Poughkeepsie, (New York), and that’s all you can see, but you might catch this thing that we call the turnpike, right, but everything else is covered in jungle … you’ll have no idea that this turnpike might connect New York with Philadelphia,” Canuto said. “LiDAR is telling us everything that we found archaeologically over the last 100 years, here and there, is found everywhere … LiDAR lets us connect all the dots.”

Researchers are looking to gather more sampling and possibly locate more settlements through LiDAR technology this month to continue their research into the early Mayan civilization, according to Hansen.

CNN
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It’s the stuff of nightmares. You’re trying to get somewhere, you’ve prepped and planned and you’re doing your best and yet you end up right back where you started.

That’s about what happened to frequent flyer Bryan Gottlieb and his fellow Air New Zealand passengers on Thursday when their planned journey from Auckland to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was disrupted by an electrical outage at the airport.

JFK’s Terminal 1 was closed and some of the flights scheduled to land there had to be diverted. Some international flights landed at other airports: Newark, Washington Dulles, Boston Logan.

Gottlieb’s flight, ANZ2, turned around mid-flight and landed back in Auckland, more than 16 hours after departing the same airport. Flight tracking site FlightAware logs a total flying time of 16 hours and 25 minutes, with the plane turning back roughly halfway through its scheduled journey.

“I was sleeping pretty soundly, and I woke up with the feeling that I would surely be landing in JFK soon,” Gottlieb said in a message to CNN Travel. Then “the passenger next to me tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘did you know we’re almost back in Auckland?’”

Gottlieb said his fellow passenger gave him the news two or three hours before the plane was set to land. An announcement about the diversion didn’t come until the flight was almost back in New Zealand, he said, although “you could see our route on the tracker, and word had spread around.”

He said when the pilot made the announcement, “he acknowledged that part of the decision was based on schedule efficiency for the airline, and that the lack of crew at an airport near JFK would have caused the airline further delays.”

The passengers were not happy.

“Everyone on that plane would have much preferred to be in any airport in the US, to say nothing of Newark or LaGuardia right in the same general area,” said Gottlieb, a game designer who was headed home from a five-week work trip to join the tail end of his brother’s bachelor party trip.

Air New Zealand said Thursday in a statement to CNN Travel that “diverting to another US port would have meant the aircraft would remain on the ground for several days, impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers.”

At the time, the flight was still en route back to Auckland, and the airline said its team was ready to assist its customers with rebooking on the next available service.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and thank our customers for their patience and understanding,” the statement said. CNN reached out to the airline for more details on Friday but did not immediately hear back.

Gottlieb, who lives in New York, spent eight hours at the airport in Auckland waiting for his next flight out to Los Angeles, where he was set to connect to JFK. Air New Zealand provided him with $100 worth of meal vouchers, but he didn’t have any luck buying his way into a loyalty club lounge to freshen up in Auckland. He hadn’t heard about other compensation at the time he communicated with CNN.

The diverted flight was Gottlieb’s second attempt at getting home. His original flight back to the States on Monday was canceled due to the devastating cyclone that struck New Zealand this week. His wife’s plans to join him for the last two weeks of his stay were foiled when her flight was canceled due to airport flooding in Auckland at the end of January.

With the 16-hour Auckland to Auckland delay, he missed the bachelor party altogether. As far as trips go, “it was a wild one for sure!”

Gottlieb said he is disappointed with the airline’s response “at a corporate level,” but encountered very helpful airline staff.

“This is certainly the worst travel experience I’ve ever had, but ultimately, these things do happen, and I always try to keep in mind that none of the people I’m interacting with had anything to do with the decisions that delayed me — they’re all just doing their best and they were legitimately kind.”

And New Zealand is one of Gottlieb’s favorite places.

“The people and region are both lovely. I sure do wish it was a little closer though.”

CNN
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A Republican strategist was sentenced Friday to 1.5 years in prison for facilitating an illegal contribution from a Russian businessman to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jessie Benton, who worked for the pro-Trump super PAC and was a longtime aide to former GOP Rep. Ron Paul, was convicted by a federal jury in November on several charges, including conspiring to solicit an illegal foreign campaign contribution.

Both the Trump campaign and Trump himself were not aware of the scheme involving Russian money, the Justice Department has said.

According to evidence presented at trial, Benton helped a Russian national secure a ticket to a Republican National Committee event in 2016, where he would have the opportunity to meet and take a picture with Trump. The Russian national paid Benton $100,000 to get the ticket, prosecutors said.

Benton created a fake invoice suggesting he had received the money for consulting services, donated $25,000 of that money under his own name to the RNC to get a ticket to the event and pocketed the remaining $75,000.

A veteran GOP operative, Benton has now been convicted of crimes related to the 2016 and 2012 elections.

He was previously convicted of falsifying federal records as part of a plot to buy an endorsement from an Iowa state senator, who flipped her support to Paul during the 2012 Republican primary. Trump pardoned Benton for those crimes in late 2020, wiping those convictions off the books.

A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

New York
CNN
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Better Call Saul, The Colbert Report, Law & Order: SVU — Sometimes a spinoff is just as good as the original.

Wall Street has seemingly taken that lesson to heart. Corporate spinoff activity surged by 33% in 2022 to its second-highest level on record, according to a new analysis by Goldman Sachs.

A spinoff occurs when a company splits off a portion of its business into a separate company. The parent company may distribute the new company’s stock to its shareholders, allowing them to own shares in both.

The new company created through the spinoff operates as a separate entity with its own management team and board of directors, and typically has a different focus or strategy from the parent company.

In a year with a notable lack of merger activity and initial public offerings, US companies announced 44 new spinoffs and completed 20 of them, worth a total of $61 billion.

Expect the bonanza to continue this year, say Goldman analysts. The economic climate that supported spinoff activity last year remains in place: Rising interest rates, peaking profit margins, and below-trend economic growth.

What’s happening: Spinoffs can be beneficial all round, as the spinoff allows the parent to focus on its core operations, while the new company can operate with greater flexibility and focus on its specific business areas.

These so-called SpinCos typically outperform their parents, can drive growth and offer a boost to shareholders during bad years for the stock market. That could explain why even some well-established companies initiated spinoffs last year.

General Electric

(GE) completed its spinoff of GE HealthCare ($26 billion) followed by Intel’s

(INTC) Mobileye ($22 billion). Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg and 3M are expected to create new SpinCos this year.

Trouble in paradise: Spinoffs offer investors the potential for greater flexibility, simplified business models, and focused management teams. Wall Street tends to like that.

Of the 377 spinoff transactions completed since 1999, shares of SpinCos beat those of their parents by a median of four percentage points after their first year, and by seven percentage points over two years, according to Goldman Sachs.

But in the 2022 cycle, while 11 of the 20 spinoffs outperformed the S&P 500 since transaction completion, only six outperformed their parent entities.

So what’s going on? Blame lower profit margins, says Goldman. These smaller, newly formed companies are still in the process of establishing themselves in the market and often have lower profit margins than their parent company. Typically, that’s an acceptable tradeoff by investors if the company has strong long-term growth potential.

But not in this environment. It costs a lot to borrow these days and investors are looking for high profits and value stocks, writes Goldman.

So will this year’s SpinCos be more of a Joanie Loves Chachi than a Frasier? It all depends on how much profit they can deliver.

Stocks sank on Thursday as Federal Reserve officials spread their “higher for longer” interest rate gospel and even opened the door to a half-point rate hike at the Fed’s March meeting, rather than the quarter point that investors have been expecting.

The distressing talk comes on the heels of a week of very strong economic data — retail sales and employment data both came in white hot, highlighting the strength of the economy, while inflation numbers showed that prices were accelerating faster than expected.

▸ “My overall judgment is it will be a long battle against inflation, and we’ll probably have to continue to show inflation-fighting resolve as we go through 2023,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard told reporters in Jackson, Tennessee, on Thursday.

Bullard said he had pushed for a half-point increase at the central bank’s most recent two-day meeting, which concluded in early February. “I have argued consistently for front-loading of monetary policy,” he said. “I think we could have continued that at this past meeting.”

▸ Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said on Thursday that the central bank would need to bring its fund rate above 5% and keep it there. “Setting aside what financial market participants expected us to do, I saw a compelling economic case for a 50 basis-point increase, which would have brought the top of the target range to 5%,” she said at an event in Florida.

The US Congressional Budget Office released updated budget and economic projections this week, and they weren’t pretty.

If spending continues on its current path, the US national debt will reach its highest point in history within the next decade, the report found. It also projected that annual budget deficits will rise over the next 10 years, from an expected $1.6 trillion in 2024 to $2.9 trillion in 2033.

Those deficits come with a big caveat: The United States has to pay interest for borrowing the money — and the CBO expects that interest costs will nearly triple over the next 10 years. The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes have added significantly to the cost of government debt. In just 19 months, America’s projected 10-year total interest costs rose by a massive 93%.

“As we add trillion after trillion to our debt, the problem only gets worse and compounds. Our national debt relative to the size of our economy is set to reach an all-time high in 2028,” said Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in a statement.

The debt ceiling debate, meanwhile, still rages in Congress.

Chinese social media company TikTok plans to open two more data centers in Europe, a senior executive said Friday, in a move that could mitigate concerns over the security of users’ data and ease regulatory pressure on the company.

TikTok has been seeking to assure governments and regulators that users’ personal data cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China’s Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.

The short video sharing app, owned by China’s ByteDance, aims to expand its European data storage, TikTok’s general manager for operations in Europe Rich Waterworth said in a blog post.

“We are at an advanced stage of finalizing a plan for a second data center in Ireland with a third-party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.

“We’re also in talks to establish a third data center in Europe to further complement our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024,” Waterworth said.

On Friday, the company also reported on average 125 million monthly active users in the European Union between August 2022 and January 2023, subjecting it to stricter EU online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA labels companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and requires them to do risk management, external and independent auditing, share data with authorities and researchers, and adopt a code of conduct.

The European Commission had given online platforms and search engines until February 17 to publish the number of their monthly active users. Very large online platforms have four months to comply with the rules, or risk fines.

Twitter said Thursday that it has 100.9 million average monthly users in the European Union, based on an estimation of the last 45 days.

Alphabet provided one set of numbers based on users’ accounts and another set based on signed-out recipients, saying that users can access its services when they sign into an account or when they are signed out.

It said the average monthly number of signed-in users totaled 278.6 million at Google Maps, 274.6 million at Google Play, 332 million at Google Search, 74.9 million at Shopping and 401.7 million at YouTube.

Earlier this week, Meta Platforms said it had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the European Union and about 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022.