The post Fiesta Forever! Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days Fiesta Poster Revealed appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

Por Hanna Ziady, CNN

GameStop ha ofrecido comprar al gigante del comercio electrónico eBay por US$ 55.500 millones, una unión que el jefe del minorista de videojuegos cree que podría producir un “competidor legítimo” de Amazon.

La oferta llega en medio de una especie de resurgimiento de eBay, que ha impulsado su reinvención frente al aumento de la competencia de empresas como Walmart, Amazon, Shein y Facebook Marketplace.

GameStop —que se convirtió en un nombre conocido durante la fiebre de las acciones meme de 2021— ha ofrecido US$ 125 por acción por eBay, la mitad en efectivo y la mitad en acciones, anunció la empresa el domingo. Eso representa una prima del 46 % sobre el precio de cierre de la acción de eBay el 4 de febrero, el día en que GameStop comenzó a construir una participación del 5 % en la empresa.

Es una oferta audaz, dirigida a un negocio casi cuatro veces más grande que el suyo.
Al viernes, GameStop valía US$ 11.900 millones, mientras que eBay estaba valorada en US$ 46.200 millones, según datos de FactSet. Las acciones de eBay subían 9 % en las operaciones previas a la apertura del mercado, mientras que las de GameStop apuntaban a una apertura marcadamente más débil tras ganar 6,3 % el viernes.

En una carta al presidente de eBay, el director ejecutivo de GameStop, Ryan Cohen, dijo que la empresa recortaría costos en eBay y la haría más rentable. También ve beneficios en combinar las tiendas físicas de GameStop con la presencia en línea de eBay. “Las ~1.600 ubicaciones de GameStop en EE.UU. le dan a eBay una red nacional para autenticación, recepción, cumplimiento y comercio en vivo”, señaló.

“Podría ser un competidor legítimo de Amazon”, dijo Cohen sobre eBay en una entrevista con el Wall Street Journal. Indicó que creía que eBay debería hacer más en torno al comercio en vivo, donde las marcas venden directamente a los compradores a través de transmisiones de video en tiempo real, informó el Journal.

En su carta, Cohen dijo que se desempeñaría como el director ejecutivo de la empresa combinada. GameStop planea financiar la compra mediante efectivo y deuda, lo que incluye un compromiso de TD Securities por hasta US$ 20.000 millones.

Lanzada en 1995, eBay sigue estando entre los principales sitios de comercio electrónico minorista de EE.UU., pero ha perdido cuota de mercado a medida que el campo se ha ampliado, según Emarketer, una empresa de investigación de mercado.

La empresa recibió un impulso de la pandemia de covid-19 y ha intentado aprovechar ese impulso invirtiendo en inteligencia artificial, una decisión que le ha granjeado el favor de los accionistas. El precio de la acción de eBay ha subido alrededor de 52 % en el último año, y el título ha ganado 188 % desde el inicio de 2020.

En febrero, la empresa acordó comprar la plataforma británica de reventa de ropa en línea Depop a Etsy por US$ 1.200 millones. Los reguladores de competencia del Reino Unido aún no han aprobado el acuerdo.

La semana pasada, eBay informó un aumento del 19 % en los ingresos del primer trimestre. Aseguró que su volumen bruto de mercancías, o el valor total de todas las transacciones entre usuarios, saltó 18 % hasta US$ 22.200 millones.

GameStop saltó a la fama hace cinco años durante la fiebre de las acciones meme, cuando un ejército de inversores minoristas se volcó a la acción, disparando su valor, en un intento

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for Louisiana to redraw a hotly contested congressional map that the court ruled days earlier was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a highly technical decision that sparked a bitter back-and-forth between three conservatives and a member of the court’s liberal wing.

The brief order dealt with a question about when the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act took effect in Louisiana. The state is quickly gearing up to redraw its maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections and suspended its US House primaries following the high court’s ruling Wednesday.

More notable than the decision itself, which was widely expected, was the tension it exposed in brief writings by Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal.

Writing in dissent, Jackson said the post-decision “developments have a strong political undercurrent.” And she suggested that the court should have stayed on the sidelines “to avoid the appearance of partiality.”

Alito snapped back at Jackson’s dissent, describing her points as “trivial at best” and “baseless and insulting.”

“The dissent goes on to claim that our decision represents an unprincipled use of power,” Alito wrote in a brief concurrence joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “That is a ground­less and utterly irresponsible charge.”

In a flurry of briefing following last week’s decision, the state and two groups of voters who challenged various iterations of the map squared off over how quickly that decision would be finalized and sent back to a lower court. That normally unnoticed process usually takes about a month to give the losing side time to seek a rehearing — an avenue that is technically available but fruitless in virtually all cases.

Hours after a 6-3 majority struck down Louisiana’s map, a group of White voters who initially challenged it filed an emergency appeal asking the court to speed up that process to give the state as much time as needed to redraw. A group of Black voters who defended the map opposed that proposal on Thursday, urging the court instead to hold off on finalizing its decision until the general election in November — a long-shot request.

In the middle of that back-and-forth, Louisiana itself filed a brief asserting that it did not matter how the Supreme Court handled the technical question of its “judgment” because state lawmakers were prepared to plow ahead with redrawing its districts. That new map, whenever it is finished, will almost certainly mean the state will have one less Black and Democratic member of Congress than it does currently.

The court’s opinion on Wednesday was clear, but it was silent about the next steps Louisiana should take as it stared down a May 16 primary election. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, announced last week that the state was suspending the primary for House races so that it has time to redraw its maps.

The question of whether the Supreme Court had finalized its decision last week has also come up in separate litigation over Landry’s effort to push back election dates for House seats this year.

A lower federal court had found the state’s map unconstitutional in 2024. In May of that ye

VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (KEYT) – A Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites destined for low-Earth orbit is scheduled from Space Launch Complex 4 East Tuesday evening.

The designated launch window is between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Pacific Time.

A live webcast of the launch will begin about five minutes before liftoff. You can tune in to watch here or on SpaceX's X/Twitter account.

Following first-stage separation, the Falcon 9 assigned to this mission will return to Earth to land on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship awaiting in the Pacific Ocean.

A depiction of that launch sequence is shown in the image below.

There is the potential for one or more sonic booms associated with the launch to be heard across the local region, but how far the sound travels will depend on weather and other conditions at the time.

This will be the 24th flight for the booster assigned to this mission which previously launched the following missions:  Crew-7, CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, NROL-186, Transporter-13, TRACERS, NROL-48, COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM3, and 13 prior Starlink launches.

The post Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites scheduled from Vandenerg Space Force Base late Tuesday appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — In the Trump administration’s latest move to limit trans rights, the Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into Smith College, an all-women’s college in western Massachusetts, for admitting trans women.

Like most other women’s colleges in the US, Smith, a small liberal arts college, admits trans women. The 155-year-old school says it “is a women’s college and considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women are eligible to apply to Smith.”

In a Monday statement, the Department of Education said it was investigating Smith for “admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams.”

The term “biological men,” though often used by opponents of trans rights to describe trans women, is not commonly used by trans people.

Smith College told CNN it “is fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws” and “does not comment on pending government investigations.”

The Education Department says it’s investigating whether the college’s policy violates Title IX, a landmark federal civil rights law that bans sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal funding.

“Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity,” reads the statement. “An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the investigation an “ominous” example of government overreach into private institutions.

“If they (women’s colleges) have chosen – as many of them have – to admit transgender students, that’s something they should be able to do freely without being worried about persecution by the federal government,” he said.

“This administration seems hellbent on eliminating any inclusion of transgender people anywhere in our society,” he added.

President Donald Trump has taken sweeping measures to limit trans people’s rights and to deny trans identity exists in the first place. New policies under his second term include banning trans people from the military, suing states for allowing trans athletes to play on high school sports teams, restricting trans and nonbinary children’s access to gender-affirming care, and a Day 1 executive order that redefined gender as “sex” and said that humans are either male or female, determined by biology at conception.

Trans people make up a tiny fragment of the country’s population. Just 1% of the United States population ages 13 and older identify as trans, according to the Williams Institute, a public policy research