VOL. 46 | NO. 21 | Friday, May 27, 2022
It was both a big hit and a herald of hard times for the ‘scruffy little city’
In 1982, the “scruffy little city” did it. Despite some near-death experiences, what is billed by some as the last successful world’s fair to date was held in Knoxville from May to October that year.
The 1982 World’s Fair had a lot to see, from new and repurposed buildings to ground-level artwork installations.
World’s Fair enthusiasts or those simply curious about what the 1982 event was all about have a six-month plethora of ways to learn about the event – about 300 all told, Visit Knoxville’s Kim Bumpas says.
One of the great cultural honors of the 1990s was to be featured in an episode of the Fox animated sitcom The Simpsons. The 1982 World’s Fair and the Sunsphere achieved that honor in the March 31, 1996, episode “Bart on the Road.”
RICHARD COURTNEY: REALTY CHECK
April home prices hit all-time highs, with median single-family prices rising dramatically from $385,000 in April 2021 to $480,000 for April 2022, data from Greater Nashville Realtors and Realtracs reveals.
REAL ESTATE
WASHINGTON (AP) — Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates fell this week for the second week in a row, though interest rates on the key 30-year home loan remain at decade-high levels.
NEWSMAKERS
Eric Setterlund has joined Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in the firm’s health care and cybersecurity and privacy practice groups.
BRIEFS
EJF Capital LLC and Chartwell Residential has announced the close of an approximately $67.35 million construction loan to develop the first phase of a multifamily development in Nashville’s Metrocenter neighborhood.
BEHIND THE WHEEL
Wrapping a vehicle in vinyl to alter its look was once the domain of show cars, luxury and exotics but has now gone mainstream as part of a growing multibillion-dollar industry.
PERSONAL FINANCE
A successful yard sale involves hours of preparation and plenty of hard work. So does an unsuccessful sale. I’ve had both kinds and can confidently say the version that makes money is better.
Being in debt feels like you’re always a step behind. It doesn’t help that debt is spoken about as something that’s your fault – too much online shopping, or too many pricy pitchers of mimosas at brunch.
MILLENNIAL MONEY
There are many people out there who want to tell you what to do with your money. The problem is only some of them know what they’re talking about.
BUSINESS BOOK REVIEW
Everybody in. The meeting’s about to start, the train is leaving soon and the car is idling, so pack it up and let’s go. We’re not leaving anyone behind. With “Inclusion Revolution” by Daisy Auger-Domínguez, we can be sure that no one’s missed.
SPORTS
7:26amHOOVER, Ala. (AP) — Drew Gilbert went 2-for-4 with two RBIs and scored twice, five Tennessee pitchers combined to give up just five hits and the top-seeded Volunteers beat No. 8 seed Vanderbilt 10-1 on Thursday night in the SEC Tournament.
RELIGION
7:25amIn response to an explosive investigation, top Southern Baptists have released a previously secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church-affiliated personnel accused of sexual abuse.
EDUCATION
7:25amNASHVILLE (AP) — Fisk University has won a five-year, $1.4 million grant to help low-income high school students in the Nashville area become the first in their families to attend college, the school announced this week.
ENVIRONMENT
7:27amBERLIN (AP) — Officials from the Group of Seven wealthy nations announced Friday that they will aim to largely end greenhouse gas emissions from their power sectors by 2035, making it highly unlikely that those countries will burn coal for electricity beyond that date.
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
7:54amAn inflation gauge closely tracked by the Federal Reserve rose 6.3% in April from a year earlier, just below a four-decade high set in March and the first slowdown since November 2020.
7:28amNEW YORK (AP) — More than 1,250 Thai workers who sewed bras for brands Victoria's Secret, Lane Bryant and Torrid — and who were laid off last year without their legally required severance — have received 281 million baht ($8.3 million) in compensation, according to worker rights groups Solidarity Center and the Worker Rights Consortium.
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
10:16amWASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats' first attempt at responding to the back-to-back mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, failed in the Senate as Republicans blocked a domestic terrorism bill that would have opened debate on difficult questions surrounding hate crimes and gun safety.
7:29amWASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan group of senators is considering how Congress should respond to the horrific shooting of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, restarting gun control talks that have broken down many times before.
7:29amWASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday to console families and honor victims of Tuesday's mass school shooting in which 19 children and two teachers were killed.
7:26amISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey's foreign minister said Friday that Sweden and Finland must now take "concrete steps" to alleviate his country's security concerns to overcome Ankara's objections to their NATO membership bid.
7:27amDETROIT (AP) — The Senate on Thursday confirmed former California pollution regulator Steven Cliff to run the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
UKRAINE
7:23amKYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces on Friday pounded the last Ukrainian strongholds in a separatist-controlled eastern province of Ukraine, including a city where authorities said 1,500 people have been killed and 60% of residential buildings destroyed since the start of the war.
7:24amWELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The United States on Friday won the latest round of a legal battle to seize a $325-million Russian-owned superyacht in Fiji, with the case now appearing headed for the Pacific nation's top court.
7:24amKYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Moscow pressed the West on Thursday to lift sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine, seeking to shift the blame for a growing food crisis that has been worsened by Kyiv's inability to ship millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products while under attack.
THURSDAY, MAY 26
NASHVILLE AREA
NASHVILLE (AP) — A civil rights advocate says he and two Dollar General store workers were denied access to the company's shareholder meeting Wednesday in Tennessee where they had been outside protesting for better pay and workplace safety improvements.
REGION
Ko Im always thought she would live in New York forever. She knew every corner of Manhattan and had worked hard to build a community of friends. Living in a small apartment, she found her attitude shifting early in the pandemic. After her brother accepted a job in Seattle in the summer of 2020, she decided to move there too.
EDUCATION
NASHVILLE (AP) — A state report says nearly half of Tennessee public high school seniors in the class of 2021 did not attend college or technical school right after graduating.
COURTS
WASHINGTON (AP) — With mass shootings in Texas, New York and California fresh in Americans' mind, the Supreme Court will soon issue its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, one expected to make it easier to carry guns in public in some of the largest cities.
The Biden administration has sided against the airline industry and urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to uphold a California law that would provide more rest and meal breaks than airline crews are guaranteed under federal rules.
TRENDS
NEW YORK (AP) — Even when regular workers win their biggest raises in decades, they look minuscule compared with what CEOs are getting.
NEW YORK (AP) — Pay packages for the women who run S&P 500 companies jumped in 2021 as the economy recovered and stock prices and profits soared.
Here are the highest paid male and female CEOs in the S&P 500 index for 2021, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm.
NEW YORK (AP) — CEO pay is a tricky thing to explain.
TRANSPORTATION
LOS ANGELES (AP) — To drive, or not to drive? This Memorial Day weekend, with surging gas prices that are redefining pain at the pump, that is the question for many Americans as a new COVID-19 surge also spreads across the country.
MEDIA
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday revised the financing plan for his proposed $44 billion purchase of Twitter, raising investor hopes that the unpredictable billionaire still intends to pull off a deal roiled by market turbulence and Musk's not-entirely-explicable concerns about the number of fake accounts on Twitter.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter will pay a $150 million penalty and put in new safeguards to settle federal regulators' allegations that the social platform failed to protect the privacy of users' data over a six-year span.
TECHNOLOGY
Computer chip and software maker Broadcom will spend about $61 billion to acquire the cloud technology company VMware, one of the biggest deals of the year despite an environment of rising inflation and economic uncertainty.
ENVIRONMENT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Biden administration to use a higher estimate, challenged by Republican-led states, for calculating damages to people and the environment from greenhouse gas emissions.
BERLIN (AP) — Germany's energy and climate minister said Thursday that the Group of Seven wealthy nations can lead the way on ending the use of coal, a heavily polluting fossil fuel that's responsible for a large chunk of global greenhouse gas emissions.
COVID-19
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — As the nation marked 1 million deaths from COVID-19 last week, the milestone was bookended by mass shootings that killed people simply living their lives: grocery shopping, going to church, or attending the fourth grade. The number, once unthinkable, is now an irreversible reality in the United States — just like the persistent reality of gun violence that kills tens of thousands of people every year.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Thursday announced more steps to make the antiviral treatment Paxlovid more accessible across the U.S. as it projects COVID-19 infections will continue to spread over the summer travel season.
New U.S. research on long COVID-19 provides fresh evidence that it can happen even after breakthrough infections in vaccinated people, and that older adults face higher risks for the long-term effects.
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks are ending higher on Wall Street Thursday as investors cheered a strong set of quarterly results from Macy's and other retailers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Stagflation. It was the dreaded "S word" of the 1970s.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year even though consumers and businesses kept spending at a solid pace, the government reported Thursday in a slight downgrade of its previous estimate for the January-March quarter.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Fewer Americans applied for jobless aid last week with the number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits already near five-decade lows.
NEW YORK (AP) — The fastest inflation in 40 years squeezed retailers during the first quarter, alarming investors worried about the broader economy's outlook.
NEW YORK (AP) — Shoppers' return to occasion dressing helped to power Macy's fiscal first-quarter results, and the department store chain raised its annual earnings outlook even as surging inflation is crimping Americans' budgets.
TOKYO (AP) — Troubled Japanese technology giant Toshiba announced some additions to its proposed leadership Thursday, ahead of a shareholders' meeting next month.
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, surveyed the collection of black, military-style rifles on display in the middle of the room as he denounced the sale of guns whose "only real function is to kill human beings at a ferocious pace."
WASHINGTON (AP) — Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday that he's ashamed the United States is "becoming desensitized to the murder of children" and that action is needed now to prevent more lives from being lost in school shootings like the one in Uvalde, Texas.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to improve accountability in policing —a meaningful but limited action on the second anniversary of George Floyd's death that reflected the challenges in addressing racism, excessive use of force and public safety when Congress is deadlocked on stronger measures.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday the Biden administration aims to lead the international bloc opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into a broader coalition to counter what it sees as a more serious, long-term threat to global order from China.
UKRAINE
BERLIN (AP) — Western allies are considering whether to allow Russian oligarchs to buy their way out of sanctions and using the money to rebuild Ukraine, according to government officials familiar with the matter.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pressed Thursday for the West to lift sanctions imposed because of its war in Ukraine, claiming without proof that the punitive measures are preventing millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products from leaving Ukrainian ports, exacerbating a global food crisis.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an order Wednesday to fast track Russian citizenship for residents of parts of southern Ukraine largely held by his forces, while lawmakers in Moscow passed a bill to strengthen the stretched Russian army.