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Nigeria can’t afford another civil war – Gowon
By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO The Associated Press — The Container Store has filed for bankruptcy protection as the storage and organizational goods retailer with roots dating back to the 1970s grapples with mounting losses and cash flow shortages. The Texas company has faced increasing competition from retailers like Target and Walmart at the same time that demand for its goods is under strain in a rough housing market, where soaring prices and elevated mortgage rates have stunted sales. Under Chapter 11 protection, The Container Store will continue to operate while it restructures. The chain has stores in Costa Mesa and seven other locations throughout Southern California. The company said Sunday that it had filed for bankruptcy protection in Texas. The filing arrives two weeks after the trading of company shares was suspended by the New York Stock Exchange. The Container Store Group Inc. failed to maintain an average market capitalization of at least $15 million in accordance with NYSE rules. Last month, The Container Store said that it was in advanced discussions with lenders to provide additional capital as it aimed to turn around sagging earnings and sales, according to a regulatory filing. The company has struggled to raise cash, and last month an agreement with the owner of Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock and Zulily that would have come with a $40 million cash infusion fell apart. The Container Store said in a regulatory filing that it did not believe that it could match the financing requirements of the partnership with Beyond Inc. The Container Store was founded in 1978 by Garrett Boone, Kip Tindell and investor John Mullen, who opened the doors of The Container Store’s first location in Dallas, according to the company. Neither of the men, Boone with a master’s degree in history and Tindell who was an English major, expected a career in retail. Yet both were driven by the idea of creating a store devoted entirely to storage. The chain had its skeptics when Boon and Tindell opened their first 1,600-square-foot location. Yet the chain expanded to more than 100 stores ranging from 12,000 to 20,000 square feet, according to the company. In 1999, The Container Store purchased one of its vendors, Elfa International. In 2021, it acquired Chicago’s Closet Works and launched its premium, wood-based line Preston shortly thereafter. In its most recent quarter the company reported losses of $16 million, and comparable store sales, a good barometer of a retailer’s health, dropped 12.5%.Group petitions Fish and Wildlife Service to revise grizzly recovery plan based on new report
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High employee attrition of 25 pc in private banks pose operational risk: RBI ReportIndia will host the World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit (WAVES) for the first time in February next year which will be a global platform for its creative talents, fostering collaborations and showcasing the country's potential as a hub for world-class content creation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke extensively about the WAVES Summit in his monthly 'Mann ki Baat' Radio address on Sunday. Comparing the WAVES to global events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Modi said the leaders from the media and entertainment industry as well as creative minds from across the globe will gather in Delhi for the Summit being held from February 5-9. "This Summit is an important step towards making India a hub of global content creation," he said. The prime minister emphasized the pivotal role of young creators in the preparations for WAVES, reflecting the dynamic spirit of India's creative community. He expressed pride in the enthusiasm of the country's youth and their contribution to the burgeoning creator economy, a key driver as India advances toward becoming a five trillion dollar economy. "Whether you are a young creator or an established artist, associated with Bollywood or regional cinema, a professional from the TV industry, an expert in animation, gaming, or an innovator in entertainment technology, I encourage you to be a part of the WAVES Summit," Modi said. He urged all stakeholders in the entertainment and creative industries to actively participate in the WAVES. "The WAVES Summit is poised to serve as a global platform for India's creative talents, fostering collaborations and showcasing the country's potential as a hub for world-class content creation," Modi said. The Summit will also highlight India's advancements in animation, gaming, entertainment technology, and regional and mainstream cinema, he added. Modi also paid heartfelt tributes to ace director Raj Kapoor and singer Mohammed Rafi on their 100th birth anniversaries. Raj Kapoor's role in showcasing India's soft power through his timeless films and Mohammed Rafi's mesmerizing voice that continues to resonate with all generations, he said. Modi also recalled Akkineni Nageswara Rao's contributions in elevating Telugu cinema while reflecting the Indian traditions. He also honored Tapan Sinha's socially conscious films that inspired unity and awareness. Modi said these legends not only shaped the golden era of Indian cinema but also strengthened India's cultural heritage, leaving behind an everlasting legacy for generations to admire and draw inspiration from.
AFL premiership coach Mark Williams spotted in Aussie camp ahead of Boxing Day TestOn Wednesday, at Sednaya, a political prison in Syria, hundreds of people prowled the grounds. It was the third day after an astonishing rebel offensive deposed Bashar al-Assad, who had ruled as a tyrant during thirteen years of vicious civil war. After the rebels swept into Damascus, the jailers had fled Sednaya, and the prisoners had been set free. The visitors on Wednesday were relatives of men who were known to have been held there but had not reappeared. On the grass outside, burned black in places by recent fires, groups of them camped out in a grim limbo. That morning, a Turkish search-and-rescue team in blue coveralls was busy with shovels inside the darkened administration block, working at a small rectangle of dirt where a concrete slab had been torn away. Rumors persisted that there was a buried hatchway to a “red prison”—a secret underground facility where hundreds, or even thousands, of prisoners might still be alive but dying of hunger, thirst, or asphyxiation. Whether or not the rumors were true, most everyone at Sednaya seemed to believe them, and several relatives approached me to ask whether, as “a Westerner,” I could provide the technology to peer through the floors. The leader of the Turkish team told me that his group had nothing but shovels. “We are here because we want to show solidarity,” he explained, gesturing at the desperate people around him. Being entombed alive is an apt metaphor for a populace that had its civic freedoms squashed by the Assad dynasty for half a century. Hafez al-Assad, a secular nationalist from the minority Alawite sect, ran Syria tyrannically from 1971 until his death, in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar, a former ophthalmologist who proved no less repressive than his father. The civil war erupted in 2011, after Bashar responded to a peaceful demonstration with deadly force. Since then, it has been estimated that six hundred thousand Syrians have been killed; some six million, nearly a third of the population, have fled into exile. Throughout the decades of the Assads’ rule, resistance of any kind was brutally quashed, and offenders were detained and tortured in a network of dozens of facilities across the country. Sednaya was the most infamous. Built in the late eighties, on a barren limestone hilltop forty minutes from downtown Damascus, it acquired such a fearsome reputation that many Syrians refused to utter its name aloud. In the first days of the war, I visited the hills nearby and spotted the complex. When I asked my driver what it was, he shook his head. Asked again, he whispered, “Sednaya” but would add only that it was a “terrible” place. Since then, as the war intensified, the prison became, by all accounts, even more terrible. In 2021, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calculated that as many as thirty thousand people had been executed there since the war began. But the number of people who survived within the prison’s walls was, like most everything else about it, impossible to know. When Sednaya was liberated, last weekend, some of those freed had been there for decades. One inmate had reportedly been imprisoned since 1981; he had entered as a young man of twenty-seven and emerged, a ghastly Rip Van Winkle, at seventy. The searchers who gathered on Wednesday morning, moving through dank stairwells and across the flat prison roof, were traversing a place that they could have seen only in their horrified imaginations. A militiaman in camouflage played me a cell-phone video—sent, he claimed, by a former jailer—that purportedly showed the layout of the prison and of a set of tunnels. The militiaman held out his hands uncertainly; even with the video, no one could find the tunnels. No one had even found a registry of prisoners who had been held there. I met an elderly couple from Aleppo—a man in a red-and-white-checked kaffiyeh and a woman in a dark hijab. “Where are the lists?” the man asked, and then answered himself: “There are no lists.” Moving away, he said, “All I want to know is if they are alive or dead.” For the family members who have come to Sednaya—after enduring years with no news about their fathers, brothers, sons, and nephews—any bit of evidence stirs a despairing hope, which shows plainly in their body language and on their faces. The crowd that gathered around the Turks shovelling at the floor resembled relatives of people buried in earthquakes; they watched avidly, helplessly, for any indication of life. Other visitors wandered through cellblocks, some stooping to examine the documents on prison stationery that lay everywhere. I asked one dazed-looking man about a paper in his hands. Studying it as if for the first time, he said that it had to do with food allocation—not for the prisoners but for the guards. “It says the guards have been transferred, so they don’t need the food anymore,” he said. Another visitor thrust his phone in my face. It was playing a video of a young man in shorts being beaten in a cell at Sednaya. There were vicious red welts on his body; he whimpered in fear and pain as guards struck him. For years, as reports of atrocities filtered out, Bashar al-Assad remained in power, propped up by Russian and Iranian allies. As I entered one hallway, a woman in a robe began shouting, “Now you come to look. Why didn’t you come before? Why didn’t you believe us? Why didn’t you hear us when we said they were killing us!” After a moment, she moved on, but a nearby man began shouting, too. He wanted revenge, nothing less or more. He would get a weapon and kill the Alawites—Assad’s sect, which some members of Syria’s Sunni majority see as complicit in his repression. The man vowed to kill every man, every woman, and every child he saw. A boy in a turban stood inside the barred steel door of a cell. He was looking for his brother, who had been taken, at the age of fifteen, from their family’s home in the northeastern city of Deir ez Zor. He had been gone for nine years, which would make him twenty-four now, the boy calculated. The cell floor, like all the others, was covered with unidentifiable stains and strewn with grimy gray blankets and bits of clothing. The boy looked intently at the refuse, as if expecting to see something that would help him find his brother. Up on the roof, three men pointed at a reinforced hatchway, from which a pipe protruded. Perhaps, they suggested, it was an air vent to the secret underground prison. There was a rank smell seeping from it, but it seemed like the stench of sewage, not of bodies. As I prepared to climb back down into the prison through a hole bashed through the concrete, they called out again, pointing to a hatch at the far end of the roof. Another vent there had an even worse smell—but that, too, seemed like nothing more than waste. The men went on, aimlessly looking for whatever they could find. Everywhere I went in Sednaya, it was the same story. The Syrian people had been so terrorized and disenfranchised, so thoroughly cut off from their missing relatives, that they were reduced to a kind of ad-hoc forensic anthropology. One man, who had lost two brothers and three cousins to Sednaya, told me that he had been able to visit them once, back in 2016. But he was told afterward that he could not return, and since then there had been only silence. I asked if he had tried to come back, despite the order, to check on his family members. He replied, with a stricken look, “My relatives told me not to ask about them, that it could be bad for them, and so I stopped.” As I walked down a stairwell, a young man beckoned to me, cupping his other hand over his mouth and nose. A friend of his had made a hole in the wall about six feet up and was crouched in the opening. “Please smell,” the young man asked me. This time, I thought, it did possibly smell like death. The man in the hole began tearing at the masonry and hurling aside debris. A knot of onlookers gathered, looking up through the bars of a locked doorway below. For the moment, their faces were hopeful. ♦ New Yorker Favorites A man was murdered in cold blood and you’re laughing ? The best albums of 2024. Little treats galore: a holiday gift guide . How Maria Callas lost her voice . An objectively objectionable grammatical pet peeve . 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