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Note the Iranian flavour to the street, despite Donald Trump's fire and fury against Tehran 

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Note the Iranian flavour to the street, despite Donald Trump's fire and fury against Tehran 

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Right near the US State Department

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(near the Office of Personnel Management)

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DC's best taqueria (or so the Washington Post has raved twice over)
I'll tell you my only problem – the Mole Rojowas slightly sweeter than I thought necessary but the tacos were fantastic.

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Outside Whole Foods in Foggy Bottom, the Popped! Republic mobile "revolution" continues.
"Bold flavors with a D.C. twist" as the company says.

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Amazon's August 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods is supposed to have led to major changes at the grocery chain. But not so's you'd notice.Prices haven't dropped – the jokey nickname “Whole Paycheck” still applies.

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Amazon's August 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods is supposed to have led to major changes at the grocery chain. But not so's you'd notice.Prices haven't dropped – the jokey nickname “Whole Paycheck” still applies.

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But this Business Insider story from this month seems to think otherwise.

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When Amazon launched in 1995, its whole business was about selling books. Fast forward a couple decades and they had transformed into an online superstore that's forever changed the way we shop. And where did they go from there? Well, they went to Whole Foods.

On August 28, 2017, Amazon officially took over the helm at Whole Foods, purchasing the upscale grocer and making big changes along the way. And while mergers and buyouts happen all of the time in the world of business, this particular marriage comes with some unique perks for the customer. Let's check how Amazon's latest purchase will benefit you, and more importantly, your wallet.

The Era of Whole Paycheck

If you don't already shop at Whole Foods, here's the skinny. It's an American supermarket chain that's known for exclusively featuring foods that are free of artificial additives - such as preservatives, colors, sweeteners, flavors and hydrogenated fats.

Whole Foods also seeks to promote organically grown foods, and they provide a variety of nutritional products. One more thing - they're historically considered a pricier option, which has earned them the name "Whole Paycheck" in jest.

Next to behemoths like Wal-Mart and Kroger, Whole Foods is still a small, responsibly farmed tilapia in a big pond, holding only about 1.2% of the overall U.S food and grocery market. That said, since Amazon's announcement and eventual purchase of Whole Foods, food retailers, including Sprout, Suprvalu, Target, Kroger and even Wal-Mart - watched their stock shares drop. Post the closing of the deal, these six stocks erased "nearly $12 billion from their combined market capitalization," according to CNBC news.

In other words, this is kind of a big deal.

Can I Get a Price Check On Avocados?

So what does this change mean for your wallet? On the day that Amazon took ownership of Whole Foods, the grocer's prices dropped as much as 43% on specific staples. This includes favorites such as organic avocados, organic cage-free brown eggs, almond butter and organic baby kale.

There were also additions at the stores, such as the Amazon Echo, which was also on sale for $99.99. While this may seem like a shift from coconut oil and quinoa, it did a good job of displaying Amazon's new - and significant - presence in Whole Foods.

The purpose of these discounts is to better compete with the larger grocery stores and attract a more budget-conscious consumer. "Price was the largest barrier to Whole Foods' customers," said Mark Baum, a senior vice president at the Food Marketing Institute. "Amazon has demonstrated that it is willing to invest to dominate the categories that it decides to compete in."

Check out the full list of price cuts below:

Competitors Could Slash Prices

The beauty of a significant shift in any market is that all of the other players start scrambling to keep their slice of the pie. Wal-Mart has been making more of an effort to compete with up-and-coming grocers, such as the budget-friendly grocer Aldi. In 2016, Wal-Mart made a multimillion-dollar investment to lower their prices even further than they already are. It's well aware of the evolution of Whole Foods, and it's going to do everything in its power to stay on top. Even if you don't shop at Whole Foods, this could translate to better prices and more convenience for you, the consumer.

New Amazon Perks!

Of every $10 spent online, $4 are being spent on Amazon. And if you pay for Amazon Prime, you're not alone. Approximately 64% of all households in the U.S. have Prime memberships, which comes out to about 80 million people. So yeah, that's a lot of free two-day shipping.

The Amazon-Whole Foods fusion is going to improve your Prime memberships, too. You'll soon have access to a Whole Foods rewards program, which will provide additional savings.

They are also connecting the brick and mortar business of Whole Foods with AmazonFresh, their grocery delivery service. AmazonFresh, first unveiled in 2007, has had a rough go so far. Even after a decade of trial and error, they haven't had much luck in the grocery store space. With Whole Foods in their utility belt, though, they now have access to an industry that they've wanted to reach for years.

With these new perks, you may never have to leave your home for groceries again.

Cons of Amazon Purchasing Whole Foods

While we spend a lot of time focusing on the benefits of Amazon owning Whole Foods (for good reason), there are some concerns about the new relationship, as well. Namely, critics are worried about the way in which Whole Foods will lower their prices.

Amazon's ability to automate and optimize has been at the root of their success. There are some who believe that Amazon will cut their prices by downsizing their staff. If you haven't been into a Whole Foods lately, they're commonly known for their great customer service. And with such good employee benefits, it's no wonder that they've attracted such a fine staff.

With the tides changing at Whole Foods, they'll likely look for ways to stay competitive with the bigger brands. And this may mean fewer cashier positions.

More on the Way

As the new and improved Whole Foods continues to evolve, you can expect some big changes to come in the future. Make sure you're aware of these perks and benefits so you can get the best value for your groceries.

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What Amazon's Purchase of Whole Foods Means for Your Wallet - ZING Blog by Quicken Loans

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When Amazon launched in 1995, its whole business was about selling books. Fast forward a couple decades and they had transformed into an online superstore that's forever changed the way we shop. And where did they go from there? Well, they went to Whole Foods.

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Posted on March 7, 2018

On the flight from London to Washington, we watched 'The Shape of Water'. Just hours after we reached the American capital, we heard the news we expected. Guillermo del Toro's fairytale, which addressed grotesque difference, disability, machismo and geopolitics, had swept top honours at the Oscars.

It was hardly a surprise but for a while I did wonder why.

Don't get me wrong.

The film is beautifully shot, the vintage feel offset by almost comic book colours (from the days when Riverdale was the all-American home of Archie and the gang) and outrageously overdone (almost cartoonish) villains. Most particularly, Richard Strickland, the square-jawed government guy with a cattle-prod.

Actress Sally Hawkins, who plays the mute cleaner Elisa, is one of the many 'others' in society. She has a disability and needs interpretation to those who will not or cannot understand her. Her best friend, a gay neighbour, is an ageing artist. Her work best friend is an African-American woman. The New York Times reviewer found the film "as gaudy as a musical, bright as a cartoon and murky as a film noir." True. It is all of this and not.

Is it a great film? I wasn't initially sure. But I found myself thinking about it later - for a long time after - and what it might mean and might have meant.

Mr Del Toro has liberated the imagination. It is a triumph.

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The Shape of Water is all about society's many 'others'

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On the flight from London to Washington, we watched 'The Shape of Water'. Just hours after we reached the American capital, we heard the news we expected. Guillermo del Toro's fairytale, which addressed grotesque difference, disability, machismo and geopolitics, had swept top honours at the Oscars.

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Donald Trump. Reuters

Until Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on steel imports into the US, he used to talk about the metal a lot. On the campaign trail, steel was invoked over and over as something almost mythical, something much more than an alloy of iron, carbon and some other elements. Roaring steel production was supposed to put mettle into the American spine once again.

But it may be profoundly unwise to make steel the key to American renewal.

The US steel industry is doing rather well. Production is roughly at the same level it's been for decades (90m to 120m tonnes per year) even though it accounts for fewer jobs because of efficiency gains.

As veteran economics commentator Robert J Samuelson pointed out during the 2016 presidential campaign, "True, dozens of steel plants have closed. But dozens of more efficient plants have opened. Productivity (aka efficiency) has increased dramatically."

This is on account of the rise of mini-mills, as they are called, which use scrap steel as raw material and have a cost advantage over older mills. According to the industry group the American Iron and Steel Institute, from 1970 to 2015, mini mills' share of US steel production went from 15 per cent to 63 per cent, with all the attendant efficiency gains (or lost jobs, to you and me). Consequently, Mr Samuelson's subsequent assertion is as true in 2018 as it was in August 2016 when Mr Trump repeatedly bemoaned the plight of American steelworkers: "If there were no foreign trade in steel, most of those jobs would have vanished anyway. The least efficient vertically integrated (traditional) plants were forced to close. The decisive competition has been domestic, not foreign."

That said, there is undoubtedly a global steel glut. This is mainly because China has accounted for 78 per cent of the rise in steel-making capacity since 2005, according to analyst Lucy Lu of the Peterson Institute.

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Read more from Opinion Iraqi youth are reconnecting with the Arab world through their love of football The lies and self-deceptions at work within Israel's 'moral' army Are you being judged when you enter luxury stores? Four years on, the tragedy of MH370 could happen again The UAE must tell the world about its generous overseas aid programme
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Which brings us back to Mr Trump's tariffs on steel imports. They will be in force for "a long time", he said, urging in the same breath, US steel producers "to grow your industries, that's all I ask".

But grow them how?

Return to old-fashioned mills that employ a lot of workers to make steel from scratch at greater cost than elsewhere in the world? That doesn't make business sense and would be tantamount to forcing today's car companies to return to the labour-intensive processes used by their predecessors in the transportation sector, namely horse-drawn carriage-makers in the 19th century.

In any case, the United States imports only about one-third of its steel and with a healthy US joblessness rate of 4.1 per cent, it's not like there are armies of unemployed American steel workers.

So to the question of American economic revival. The answer is neither a return to traditional steel mills, nor this US first strike in a global trade war. Instead, it is the slow grind of working towards a global agreement to manage excess capacity. And to prepare for the upskilling of American workers and their move towards different capabilities.

Just consider the entrepreneurial imagination demonstrated by Austrian steel producer Voestalpine even at a time of falling global prices. In 2016, it announced that it would build a new steel mill that would not produce commoditised steel but specialist formulations instead, such as those used in cars or electronics. This is the sort of thing that business schools might one day use in their lectures.

In fact, US steel-makers - squeezed by foreign competition, falling prices and far-reaching technological changes - might benefit less from Mr Trump's import tariffs than an inspiring presentation on the fate of buggy whip makers. The buggy whip maker has become an analogy for something obsolete, overtaken by other products more in tune with the zeitgeist and customer's needs. But according to a Harvard professor who studied their plight, it was only a failure of imagination that prevented buggy whip businesses from surviving the changeover from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. They should have thought of themselves as being in the personal transportation business, he wrote, rather than being so wedded to their product.

Steel, of course, is in an entirely different category from buggy whips. It is vital to a country, not a peripheral add-on. And yet, the buggy whip maker is a salutary lesson on the failure to prepare for change.

Mr Trump, alas, is helping American workers to prepare for the past. In his zeal to speak to his electoral base and by boosting steel - a healthy sector of the US economy - he may actually endanger other lucrative American exports (beef, bourbon, sorghum, soya bean) as wrathful trade partners impose their own tariffs.

The end result will be trade skirmishes all around the world, something that Pascal Lamy, former director general of the World Trade Organisation, recently described as fine for the Middle Ages, just not in the 21st century.

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Why it is profoundly unwise to make steel the key to American renewal

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Until Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on steel imports into the US, he used to talk about the metal a lot. On the campaign trail, steel was invoked over and over as something almost mythical, something much more than an alloy of iron, carbon and some other elements.

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Posted on March 2, 2018

For a moment, a very short one, I saw a purpose in Donald Trump's presidency.

As the president accused Democrats and Republican lawmakers alike of being so "petrified" of the National Rifle Association (NRA) they had done nothing on gun control, it seemed it was for this moment that Donald Trump was elected on November 8, 2016.

It seemed as if this was the reason Mr Trump was put on earth. It can often be hard to discern the purpose of any life. That of Mr Trump, born into wealth in the world's richest country but given to little charitable thought or action, has been more puzzling than most. He has lived 71 years in vainglorious self-promotion, oscillating undiscriminatingly between fact and fiction, and making divisive and hateful interventions in political issues facing America. He has lived off branding and re-branding and big debt, and refuses to be bound by the ethical norms of the US presidency.

But then, on the last day of February 2018, there was Mr Trump declaring that he was stronger than the NRA. "They have great power over you people," Mr Trump told Democrat and Republican lawmakers. "They have less power over me."

There was Mr Trump declaring that he would consider raising the age limit for purchasing a long gun from 18 to 21, tougher background checks for gun buyers, greater police power to seize guns from mentally disturbed people and the outlawing of "bump stocks", attachments that enable semiautomatic rifles to fire faster, almost like machine guns.

There was Mr Trump announcing that excessive "checks and balances" shouldn't limit measures to prevent mentally unfit people from buying or keeping guns. "Take the firearms first, and then go to court," he said.

For a moment, there seemed a great and good purpose in Mr Trump's presidency (and his life).

And then I remembered the bipartisan White House meeting Mr Trump convened in January on immigration. He promised to sign any compromise bill presented to him, only to reject it days later.

We have to see what happens.

(As it turns out, we didn't have to wait long. Late on March 1, Mr Trump met NRA leaders and described the meeting as "great." The NRA itself tweeted that the president was not in favour of gun control measures.)

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For a very brief moment, I saw a purpose in Donald Trump's presidency

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For a moment, a very short one, I saw a purpose in Donald Trump's presidency.

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Posted on February 22, 2018

Gun control is a domestic issue for America but climate change is not.

On guns, only the American public can force the Trump administration and the Republican Party to start down the road to change.

But on climate change, the world must force the US government to realise that it cannot behave like a disruptive global citizen and get away with it.

I've said this before: why is no one talking of a carbon tax on US exports?

US president Donald Trump's opposition to the Paris climate agreement led him to withdraw his country in June from the 2015 voluntary pledge by nearly 200 nations to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. It made a pantomime villain of the United States, which played the role to the hilt at the Bonn talks and more recently at Davos. To Bonn, Mr Trump's America ostentatiously sent a champion for clean coal to a conference that's steadfastly opposed to fossil fuels. As one news report put it, the Trump White House "staged a forum promoting fossil fuels and nuclear power ." And US State Department negotiators in Bonn worked hard to prevent big future payouts by rich countries to poor ones to help with climate change measures. In Davos, Trump administration officials went around suggesting that fossil fuels powered "freedom", a ludicrous, almost cartoonish way to describe the basic thrust of what they want - leave us alone to "dig coal", use oil and gas and pollute as we've always done.

The outrage expressed by climate change campaigners is obscuring a key fact. With the best will in the world, renewable energy will not usurp the place of fossil fuels at least until the middle of this century. In 2015, the International Energy Agency estimated that the share of global energy provided by renewables-a mere 14 per cent in 2012-would increase only slightly by 2040. It would go up to roughly 19 per cent, the Agency suggested.

But things have progressed much faster and better than the estimate. Scientific American in April 2015 that "wind and solar installations have been running at nearly twice the rate of the IEA's projections for long-term capacity growth, suggesting that its projections of renewables' share of global energy are much too low."

It may take a whole for oil to overtake coal and so it would probably make sense to have clean coal as an interim measure, if we can somehow do it.

"Somehow" is the key word. Coal can never really be clean for all the PR big bucks thrown at it.

Some would say that Trump is spinning fairy stories by selling clean coal as a solution to climate change. May be it's self-delusion. But a pleasant one.

I don't agree with the Trump administration's climate change denialism but it's right on this particular point - we do need clean interim fuels. It is right, if only for the wrong reasons.

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Trump is wrong on guns for teachers & on climate change. Only one is a domestic issue

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Gun control is a domestic issue for America but climate change is not. On guns, only the American public can force the Trump administration and the Republican Party to start down the road to change.

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Posted on February 7, 2018

The other day I heard Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt denying he doesn't care about the environment.

Instead, he said to The New York Times podcast, he was simply restoring the EPA to a regulatory body. He was enforcing the rules, not "weaponising" climate change slogans. Mr Pruitt suggested that the EPA's role in the United States, the world's second biggest producer of carbon dioxide, is to enforce the rules r ather than avenge attacks on our environment.
If the American people want the EPA to function differently, they should ask their Congressmen to pass the right laws. It's laws, Mr Pruitt added, that can give the EPA authority to serve in any particular way. In the absence of climate change laws, he said, the EPA should just continue to do its job, which is to enforce the rules. There's no two ways about it. The callousness of the Trump administration's approach to climate change stands out very clearly. Legally, you can't fault their reasoning. Congress has been lax in not doing what it should've done. There are no climate change laws on the books. President Obama tried to get that legislation but couldn't. In the absence of laws, the EPA has tried very hard to work to its original purpose - preventing various states across America from polluting and poisoning themselves and the country in a race to the bottom, as they compete for commercial investment. That's what the EPA was set up to do in 1970 and in the absence of climate change laws, it's only right that it continue to keep any eye on the tendency of big companies to pollute. But Mr Pruitt's EPA is moving slowly (or not at all) in taking action against polluters, especially when compared to the Agency's record during the Obama and Bush administrations. Mr Pruitt cites the rules but the pretence of simply enforcing the law doesn't fool too many people.

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Do you believe the 'originalist', not-my-job line of Trump's environment czar?

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The other day I heard Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt denying he doesn't care about the environment. Instead, he said to The New York Times podcast, he was simply restoring the EPA to a regulatory body. He was enforcing the rules, not "weaponising"