After months of speculation, former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg made it official: he's running for president. Bloomberg, 77, who enters the race more than two years after former Rep. John Delaney became the first Democrat to announce his bid for president, brings a huge personal fortune to the race as well as moderate political views. He said he won't take donations and is running "to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America."
The former Republican plans to skip early states like Iowa and New Hampshire and focus on Super Tuesday states, which offer about 40 percent of the total number of delegates.
Bloomberg will likely take heat from progressives for his past stances on criminal justice issues, inappropriate comments about women, and his personal wealth. New York’s 'Stop-and-Frisk' policy during his mayoral term, which ended in 2013, led to a disproportionate number of black and Latino men being stopped by city police, a policy he apologized for just last week.
On his campaign website, Bloomberg said he will outline plans to deal with a variety of issues, including "raising taxes on wealthy individuals like me," possibly a response to criticism of his $50 billion fortune. Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday "multibillionaires like Mr. Bloomberg are not going to get very far in this election," and Tom Steyer, another 2020 billionaire candidate called on Bloomberg to back a wealth tax. In an opinion article, Steyer said Bloomberg should "support a wealth tax or drop out." Steyer's proposal adds a 1 percent annual tax on the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans.
From the outset, Bloomberg surprised rival campaigns by reserving more than $30 million to spend on airtime for commercials. His ad campaign will be run by a former Facebook executive.
Journalists at Bloomberg, the financial data company owned largely by the now-candidate, were told in a memo that the company plans to cover its eponymous founder's foray into presidential politics, but carefully.
"We will write about virtually all aspects of this presidential contest in much the same way as we have done so far," John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief at Bloomberg News, wrote in a note to staffers.
After laying out the complexities of covering his boss, Micklethwait described how the outlet plans to cover the 2020 election. Bloomberg News will neither investigate "Mike," as Micklethwait referred to the candidate throughout the letter, nor his Democratic rivals.
He noted the editorials have "reflected" Bloomberg's views and so will suspend the editorial board. Additionally, he announced two executive editors of Bloomberg Opinion will join the campaign.
"We will describe who is winning and who is losing," Micklethwait wrote. "We will look at policies and their consequences. We will carry polls, we will interview candidates, and we will track their campaigns, including Mike's. We have already assigned a reporter to follow his campaign (just as we did when Mike was in City Hall). And in the stories we write on the presidential contest, we will make clear that our owner is now a candidate."
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
