- Malayalam actor Minu Muneer arrested for defamatory posts against Balachandra Menon, released on bail The Hindu
- ‘Targetted many men using fake cases, expect similar backlash’; Viral Facebook post against actress Minu Muneer Kerala Kaumudi
- Minu Muneer arrested for defaming Balachandra Menon Onmanorama
- Actress Minu Muneer Arrested Over Social Media Posts Targeting Prominent Malayalam Actor: Report Filmibeat
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Malayalam actor Minu Muneer arrested for defamatory posts against Balachandra Menon, released on bail – The Hindu
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Here’s what the Democrats can learn from Zohran Mamdani | Judith Levine
In a lifetime of activism, I have canvassed and phone-banked, raised money, and twisted arms for dozens of political candidates. Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Indian-Ugandan democratic socialist and presumptive winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, is the only one I’ve both supported without reservation and believed could win.
Volunteering for a campaign always teaches you something. Often, it’s discouraging – like the moment my partner and I saw Hillary Clinton’s team selling lawn signs for $25 instead of blanketing Philadelphia by distributing them free, and predicted she’d lose. But the lessons of Zohran’s victory are hopeful for the left and the Democrats – if the party takes them to heart.
Socialism is practical
“A city we can afford.” Zohran’s slogan is unremarkably moderate and unabashedly progressive. In a city whose median income is rising sharply in spite of a 25% poverty rate, only the rich are comfortable, while everyone else, from students to firefighters to families with more than one kid struggle – or leave.
Asked by a local Fox TV interviewer what a democratic socialist is, Mamdani answered: “To me it means that every New Yorker has what they need to live a dignified life – it’s local government’s responsibility to provide that”. His platform includes a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3 million regulated apartments; free childcare starting at six months; no-fare buses; and a $30 minimum wage – about the city’s living wage – by 2030. Basically, he believes life in the city can be easier and happier.
This platform resonates. When you canvass, you ask people what concerns them. A woman with a baby on her hip nodded toward the baby and sighed. I got what she meant. At a shabby industrial building surrounded by new glass towers, a woman descended four flights because the landlord won’t fix the buzzer, or anything else; he’s trying to push out the tenants and sell the lot. She said cheap rent allowed her to start a business, which she feared Mamdani would tax to death. I told her he supported a crackdown on bad landlords and commercial rent control. “Hmm,” she said. By the conversation’s end, I entered “leans yes” in the canvassing app.
Mamdani’s ideas are not pie-in-the-sky. The rent guidelines board, appointed by the mayor, voted 0% increases on some leases in 2015, 2016, and on all leases in 2020, during the pandemic. Democratic mayor Bill De Blasio got universal pre-kindergarten staffed, funded, and full almost immediately upon election in 2014.
Chicago and Atlanta may be moving ahead with municipal groceries. A 2023 pilot program waiving fares on five New York bus routes was largely successful, and its failures can inform the next attempt.
How would Mamdani pay for all this? Impose a 2% tax on the top 1%–residents earning more than $1m annually; and raise the top corporate tax rate to match neighboring New Jersey’s, to 11.5% from 7.25%.
New York has the resources. Nationally, corporate profits have risen 80% since the pandemic. In New York, 34,000 households, a thin skin on the Big Apple, take home 35% of the earnings. Other cities and states have tapped the windfall that companies and the rich have reaped from federal income tax cuts. Combined with such Republican-sounding ideas as eliminating waste in procurement and boosting small business by cutting red tape, Mamdani says these reforms can bring in $10bn in revenue, pay for the services that improve city life and ultimately grow the tax base.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”: that’s socialism 101. “The greatest good for the greatest number”: old-fashioned utilitarianism. These policies are also sensible municipal management.
Moral integrity is good politics
Since founding his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, Mamdani, an east African Muslim, has been a vocal critic of Israel’s occupation. A week after Hamas’s attacks – which he calls a war crime – he joined Jewish Voice for Peace in a protest of Israel’s outsized response. For this position, his closest rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and the rightwing press have hammered Mamdani as an antisemite and a Holocaust denier; on one mailer, his photo was doctored to make his beard bushier and longer. Cuomo kept mispronouncing his name, insinuating that Zohran Mamdani is inscrutably, dangerously foreign.
Establishment Democrats – Kamala Harris, Cory Booker – keep running from condemnation of what most of the world calls Israel’s crimes against humanity. This is not just a moral failing. It’s politically unnecessary. A recent Pew poll found that almost seven in 10 Democrats – and half of Republicans under 50 – have negative views of Israel. In a couple of months of canvassing, I met only two people who wouldn’t vote for Mamdani because of his position on Israel-Palestine. One had Hebrew tattooed on his forearm. Among the volunteers, several who were drawn to Zohran for his stance on Palestine, were Jewish.
The question may be moot. In an Emerson poll, 46% of New York voters said their candidate did not need to be pro-Israel. The journalist Peter Beinart believes that Mamdani’s victory suggests that the movement for Palestinian freedom has entered mainstream politics and can be an asset to Democrats.
Confronted repeatedly by false accusations of antisemitism, Mamdani has been frustrated and hurt. Yet he is neither defensive nor evasive. “At the core of my position about Israel, Palestine, anyplace in the world, is consistency, international law, and human rights,” he told Fox. “I believe that justice, freedom, safety – those are things that should be applied to all people.”
In his victory speech, he said: “I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you.” He would “wrestle with” opinions that differed from his own, he added, implying he meant feelings about the Middle East.
Mamdani is a gifted politician – and an honest man who doesn’t dismiss those he disagrees with. A person can be all these, and win.
Fear doesn’t always rule elections
Mamdani’s campaign was partially, appropriately, fueled by economic anxiety. But try as his detractors did to shift the focus, it was not fueled by fear of crime. He does not advocate defunding the police. Instead, he’s proposed a department of community safety, to deal with volatile mental health crises in the subways and to attack hate crimes at their source, leaving cops to pursue violent crime. He recognizes that good public services and personal economic stability, not more police, constitute public safety.
More striking, Zohran mobilized civic pride, solidarity, and joy. These too are winning political emotions.
Young people represent the crises facing working Americans
At the beginning of a canvassing shift, everybody introduces themselves and says why they’re there. I am usually the oldest. As a white person, I’m one of maybe half the group. Many of my comrades’ genders are less recognizable than my own. As a homeowner with an adequate income, I’m in the minority.
“I can’t even afford the Bronx” – the cheapest borough for renters – a recent college graduate with her parents moaned, to knowing laughter. A pregnant woman has “a panic attack” whenever she contemplates paying for daycare. A man in his 30s who drives an Uber 12 hours a day would like to be home when his kids are awake. A first-generation Chinese American fears for her undocumented parents and feels an obligation to elect someone who will protect them.
Their jobs are precarious, their credit cards overcharged. They have no health insurance and wonder if they’ll ever retire their student debt. They come from mixed immigration status families and imagine middle age on a broiling planet. And they are the young voters who turned out overwhelmingly for a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. If the Democrats want the same results, they need to offer these voters, who personify America’s troubled working and middle classes, a progressive vision.
People can overpower money
Mamdani crushed it in presumed Cuomo strongholds throughout the five boroughs. Of course, he ruled in the youth-dominated “commie corridor” from Astoria, Queens to Bushwick, Brooklyn (80%). But he also carried communities such as Asian Flushing, Sunset Park, Elmhurst, and Chinatown Queens, by no means presumed progressive.
In February, Cuomo polled at 33% of potential votes; Zohran had 1%.
By primary day, the pro-Cuomo Super Pac, bankrolled by billionaires including Trump supporters like Wall Street bigwig Bill Ackman, had spent $25m, largely on smear ads. Mamdani’s Pac spent $1.2m, and a Working Families party affiliated Pac put in $500,000.
Mamdani had as many as 50,000 volunteers, who knocked over a million doors. Cuomo avoided the public and the press.
Money isn’t everything.
We don’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils
The general election will be tougher. Mamdani beat a badly compromised rival with only 432,000 votes in a city with 4.7 million “active voters” in 2024, not all of whom vote. If Cuomo runs as an independent, he will double down on the Islamophobia and red-baiting. So will now independent mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa, founder of the quasi-vigilante Guardian Angels. The Republican party is already making Mamdani the poster boy of a Marxist, terrorist, criminal immigrant Democratic party. Wall Street is preparing for battle.
But whether Mamdani wins or loses, pundits on all sides will avow that what happens in liberal New York stays in liberal New York. It can’t transplant to national, or even statewide, elections. That’s a cynical error.
In his primary night speech, Mamdani promised to use his office “to reject Donald Trump’s fascism, to stop masked Ice agents from deporting our neighbors, and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic party. A party where we fight for working people with no apologies.”
This is not today’s Democratic party. But it has everything to gain from watching Zohran Mamdani and the extraordinary coalition of superhumanly enthusiastic volunteers he has inspired. Theirs are the faces of a political party that democracy, and Americans, deserve.
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‘Like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice,’ how a surprise mineral could change the history of asteroid Ryugu
A rogue mineral found in a dust grain from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, which was visited and sampled by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission in 2020, could upend decades of perceived wisdom about the conditions in which some asteroids formed.
The mineral in question is named “djerfisherite” (pronounced juh-fisher-ite) after the American mineralogist Daniel Jerome Fisher, is an iron-nickel sulfide containing potassium. It is typically found on asteroids and in meteorites called “enstatite chondrites.” These are quite rare and formed in the inner solar system some 4.6 billion years ago, in temperatures exceeding 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 degrees Celsius).
So, imagine the surprise of researchers, led by planetary scientist Masaaki Miyahara of Hiroshima University in Japan, when they found djerfisherite in a grain sampled from Ryugu — a carbon-rich CI chondrite that instead formed in cooler conditions in the outer solar system.
“Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice — indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system,” said Miyahara in a statement.
As a CI chondrite, Ryugu was thought to have experienced a very different history when compared to enstatite chondrites. Ryugu is believed to have once been part of a larger protoplanet, but was blasted off due to an impact at some point in the solar system’s history. Born in the outer solar system, that parent body would have been relatively abundant in water- and carbon dioxide-ice. Enough heat should have also been generated within the body through the radioactive decay of radioisotopes locked up in its rocks — that would’ve melted the ice. Taking place about 3 million years after the parent body formed, that resulting liquid would have chemically altered Ryugu’s composition. But importantly, temperatures from such radioisotopic heating are not expected to have exceeded 122 degrees F (50 degrees Celsius).
And yet, somehow, there is a grain of djerfisherite in Ryugu samples.
(Image credit: DARTS archive /Meli thev via Wikimedia Commons) One possibility is the djerfisherite is not native to Ryugu, and is rather connected to the impact of an enstatite chondrite. The alternative is that the djerfisherite formed in situ on Ryugu — but this could only have occurred in potassium-bearing fluids and iron–nickel sulfides at temperatures greater than 662 degrees Fahrenheit.
Isotopic data could offer a decent idea as to the origin of the djerfisherite, but that data is currently lacking, so there’s no way to say for sure. However, based on their analysis, Miyahara’s team leans towards the likelihood that the djerfisherite somehow indeed formed in situ on Ryugu. How the conditions arose to make this possible remains, however? That’s a mystery for now.
“The discovery of djerfisherite in a Ryugu grain suggests that materials with very different formation histories may have mixed early in the solar system’s evolution, or that Ryugu experienced localized, chemically heterogeneous conditions not previously recognized,” said Miyahara. “This finding challenges the notion that Ryugu is compositionally uniform and opens new questions about the complexity of primitive asteroids.”
Scientists will now be rushing to re-analyze their samples from Ryugu to try and learn whether this discovery of djerfisherite is a one-off, or whether there is more evidence that supports its in-situ formation.
In doing so, scientists won’t just solve a mystery. They will also come to better understand where and how different minerals formed in the protoplanetary disk around the young sun 4.6 billion years ago, how those minerals subsequently mixed and coalesced to form asteroids and planets, and how subsequent chemical reactions on those bodies produced more minerals. In doing so, they can chart the chemical evolution of the solar system.
The discovery of djerfisherite was reported on May 28 in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
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Welcome Back, Miss Claire Sullivan
Claire Sullivan would like to reintroduce herself. Well, sort of. It’s not that she’s gone anywhere—in the last year she has created custom looks for Shygirl, Addison Rae, Chloë Sevigny, and Clairo; and Doechii, Sarah Paulson, Rachel Ziegler, Kylie Jenner, and Troye Sivan have all worn Miss Claire Sullivan in magazine editorials. Her latest “collection lookbook” is unlike regular lookbooks: instead of showing clothes that people might be able to purchase in the future, it documents most of the custom work she has done since 2022, presenting it as a body of work.
“Everything we make is ‘one-off,’ so everything that’s here was something that I made for myself to wear to an event, or I made for an editorial and we got it back,” the 31-year old Sullivan tells me during an appointment at her bright and airy studio in Bed-Stuy. “This is a ‘collection’ of all the pieces we’ve done so far. We wanted to see what it looks like to have the Miss Claire world all together, and I think it’s exciting because it kind of opens the door for what the expansion could be.”
The Miss Claire Sullivan aesthetic is high-femme, characterized lots of volume, and expertly draped fabrics that caress the body—with a bit of sequins or a bit of shine for an extra dose of drama. “Somebody shared with me recently that witches say that glamour is a form of protection magic—and I was like, ‘oh my god! I really identify with that’” she explains. “For me, dressing up is literally magic, and to be able to share that with other people through the custom experience is really, really beautiful.”
The 20-look slideshow features many of Sullivan’s most memorable pieces, including the map dress she created for Hailey Bieber to wear during Vogue World promos in 2022—her first celebrity placement—and the tutu Addison Rae wore at last year’s VMA’s, that has been repurposed as a top. She considers her two trademark items to be a tutu made of “angel wings” she had previously fashioned as part of a Halloween costume, and a lace catsuit. “[The catsuit] is one of the first pieces I made that felt like it could be worn casually; and it’s since become a staple,” she adds. Other highlights include a short cotton dress made from men’s shirting, a bodice made from a deconstructed tuxedo jacket, an asymmetrical draped sequin gown, and her Minnie Mouse costume from last Halloween. What emerges is a definite vision of glamour and sensuality with an all-important touch of playfulness.
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These art and fashion happenings are July’s hottest offerings
Boucheron Boutique opens on Rodeo
Venture inside the newest Boucheron Boutique, the luxury French jewelry house’s first Los Angeles location. On Rodeo Drive, the shop’s interior captures a sense of old Hollywood glamour and infuses influences from California’s lush landscapes. At Boucheron’s core, everything comes back to family, as the business has been passed down through generations dating back to 1858. Seated at one of the many round tables, shoppers are meant to feel as if they are unearthing a new part of their luxurious lineage. Opens June 30. 449 N Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills. boucheron.com
Loewe Basket Bag
Loewe’s latest Basket Bags are designed to be nestled in warm pockets of sand, edging a rising ocean tide. The bag, which transfers the feeling of summer to its wearer, is part of the Spanish luxury brand’s annual Paula’s Ibiza Collection. Embracing the free spirit of an island lifestyle, the line pays homage to Paula’s Boutique, a staple designer in Ibiza fashion. loewe.com
FCCW celebrates 10 years
Quilts for Palestine by Laub
(Courtesy of FCCW)
The Feminist Center for Creative Work is celebrating its 10th anniversary by revitalizing some of its most beloved programming. Throughout the summer, the Elysian Valley nonprofit will feature workshops from artists who have grown in tandem with the center and create new connective experiences. Artist Gabrielle Civil is hosting Experimentos en Alegría/Experiments in Joy, a bilingual event that guides participants to transform joy from a feeling to a practice. The next day, Yasmine Diaz will be joined by several artists in a panel discussing the importance of intergenerational friendships, for the Generations in Dialogue: Friendship & Mentorship session. July 12-13. 3053 Rosslyn St., Los Angeles. fccla.org
Moncler X Gilga Farms
Multi-hyphenate Donald Glover brings the feeling of warm citrus groves to Moncler’s typical mountainscape with their new collaboration. Inspired by Glover’s Gilga farm, both an operational space and creative sanctuary, the collection is functional and elegant. The drop features items like a hero duvet jacket that doubles as a sleeping bag and colorful gardening hats. Each piece was designed to be “transeasonal,” with an emphasis on a Southern California summer feel. moncler.com
Louis Vuitton Buttersoft Sneakers
Under the creative direction of Pharrell Williams, Louis Vuitton introduces the LV Buttersoft Sneakers. Its chunky silhouette lies at the intersection of casual luxury and old-school sportswear. The leather, streetwear-inspired shoe, featured in the Men’s Fall-Winter 2025 Collection, brings a high-fashion feel to a leisurely style. louisvuitton.com
Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the Getty
1. Catherine Opie, “Angela Scheirl [now A. Hans Scheirl],” 1993, Silver-dye bleach print, 49.1 × 38.1 cm. (Courtesy of the artist; Regen Projects; The Museum of Modern Art; New York; Gift of Helen Kornblum in honor of Roxana Marcoci.) 2. James Van Der Zee, Untitled, 1927, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. (James Van Der Zee Archive; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Courtesy of the Henry; Art Gallery; University of Washington; Seattle; Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection; gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company) 3. Fabian Guerrero, Jose in Front of Laundromat, Lynwood, CA, from the series “Queer Brown Ranchero,” 2017. Inkjet print, 50.8 × 40.6 cm. (Courtesy of the artist; Getty Museum.)
Atop the Santa Monica Mountains, the Getty Center presents “Queer Lens: A History of Photography.” It’s the first-ever exhibit in the U.S. to explore photography’s role in documenting the lives of the LGBTQ+ community. With photos traversing anywhere from the 19th century to today, visitors get a peek into what gay clubs were like in the Prohibition era and can see the beginnings of the Gay Liberation Movement. In the perpetual face of homophobia, the Westside art institution brings queer visibility to its forefront, as both a historical record of survival and an affirmation of the community’s impact. On view through Sept. 28. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. getty.edu
Snow Goose by Canada Goose
In Haider Ackermann’s second seasonal collection with Canada Goose, the creative director introduces the Snow Goose Capsule. Drawing from the brand’s nearly 70-year archive, this line brings back classic styles, but with an emphasis on summertime. Each piece is more breathable than ever and is meant to symbolize a connection to the natural world. Between the nylon shorts, light rain gear and outdoorsy cotton pants, Canada Goose asserts its style authority year-round. canadagoose.com
Takako Yamaguchi at MOCA
Takako Yamaguchi, “Procession,” 2024, oil and metal leaf on canvas, 40 × 60 in.
(Gene Ogami; Courtesy of the artist; Ortuzar; New York; and as-is.la; Los Angeles.)
L.A.-based artist Takako Yamaguchi is unveiling her first solo museum show in the city at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Over the course of her 40-year career, her paintings have grappled with Eastern and Western artistic influences as a way to understand cultural ownership and ethnic identity. The exhibition spotlights her signature abstract figurations and natural landscapes. On view through Jan. 4. 250 South Grand Ave. Los Angeles. moca.org
Brain Dead Tennis Equipment Collection
When gearing up for a tennis match, Brain Dead offers options for the fashionable underdogs. In its latest tennis equipment collection, the L.A.-based streetwear brand adds a few more staple pieces — like a seersucker jacket and a fully equipped racquet tote — to its growing selection of tennis wear. This line is meant for those who bring a certain level of style (and skill) to the courts. braindead.com
Digital Witness Dance Party at LACMA
Still from “FKA Twigs, Cellophane,” directed by Andrew Thomas Huang.
(Courtesy of LACMA)
Right before LACMA’s “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” exhibit closes, the museum is throwing a techno dance party in celebration. In line with the show, which tells the history of digital manipulation tools, the party will immerse attendees in technologically influenced aesthetics, both visually and sonically. Tokimonsta, an L.A. local and experimental DJ, will be behind the turntables, and fellow artist Andrew Huang will do large-scale projection mapping around the space. As the music rages on, the event will also allow visitors to live out their “Night at the Museum” fantasies — offering after-hours access to the exhibition. July 12. 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles. lacma.org
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July’s Night Sky Notes: Spy the Scorpion
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
As summer deepens in the Northern Hemisphere, a familiar constellation rises with the galactic core of the Milky Way each evening: Scorpius the Scorpion. One of the twelve zodiacal constellations, Scorpius contains many notable objects, making it an observer’s delight during the warmer months. Here are some items to spy in July:
- Antares: referred to as “the heart of the scorpion,” this supergiant has a distinct reddish hue and is visible to the naked eye. If you have good skies, try to split this binary star with a medium-sized telescope. Antares is a double star with a white main-sequence companion that comes in at a 5.4 magnitude.
- Messier 4: one of the easiest globular clusters to find, M4 is the closest of these star clusters to Earth at 5,500 light years. With a magnitude of about 5.6, you can spot this with a small or medium-sized telescope in average skies. Darker skies will reveal the bright core. Use Antares as a guide star for this short trip across the sky.
- Caldwell 76: If you prefer open star clusters, locate C76, also known as the Baby Scorpion Cluster, right where the ‘stinger’ of Scorpius starts to curve. At a magnitude of 2.6, it is slightly brighter than M4, albeit smaller, and can be spotted with binoculars and the naked eye under good sky conditions.
Lastly, if you have an astrophotography set up, capture the Cat’s Paw Nebula near the stinger of Scorpius. You can also capture the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex in the nearby constellation Ophiuchus. Brilliant Antares can be found at the center of this wondrous structure.
While many cultures tell tales of a ‘scorpion’ in the sky, several Polynesian cultures see the same stars as the demigod Māui’s fishhook, Manaiakalani. It is said that Māui didn’t just use his hook for giant fish in the sea, but to pull new islands from the bottom of the ocean. There are many references to the Milky Way representing a fish. As Manaiakalani rises from the southeast, it appears to pull the great celestial fish across a glittering sea of stars.
While you can use smartphone apps or dedicated devices like a Sky Quality Meter, Scorpius is a great constellation to measure your sky darkness with! On a clear night, can you trail the curve of the tail? Can you see the scorpion’s heart? Use our free printable Dark Sky Wheel, featuring the stars of Scorpius on one side and Orion on the other for measurements during cooler months. You can find this resource and more in the Big Astronomy Toolkit.
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Executive Vice-President Virkkunen hosts dialogue on EU data policy
Today, Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, is hosting an implementation dialogue focusing on EU data policy including the Data Act, Data Governance Act, and Open Data Directive, to gather insights on where current policies can be simplified or streamlined.
Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen said:
“Today’s dialogue represents the first step in simplifying our digital rules for all citizens and businesses. I look forward to hearing the views of EU consumers and businesses and reflecting together on how we can create an even more cohesive and simple approach to data policy.”
The Commission has invited stakeholders to participate in this dialogue, including public sector bodies, companies using public sector information, data intermediation service providers, small and medium enterprise representatives, European consumer associations, and companies manufacturing connected products.
This dialogue will help prepare work on the Digital Simplification Omnibus, set to be presented later this year. It will also feed into the EU’s Data Union Strategy, aimed at strengthening Europe’s data ecosystem.
Read more information on the implementation dialogues.
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Shoppers are trading down to private-label store brands without even realizing it
That marks a shift from decades ago, when supermarkets would use inexpensive packaging and stripped-down branding to send the message that they were “passing the savings on to you,” Myers explained.
It has long been common for some name brands and private-label operators to share manufacturers for certain goods, meaning that many of their competing packages contain the same products. The difference is that while Nabisco or General Mills, for example, have to spend on marketing and store placement fees for their items, Aldi or Costco don’t.
But the bare-bones packaging associated with private-label goods is increasingly a thing of the past — sometimes replaced by approaches that name-brand competitors criticize. Last month, Mondelēz International sued Aldi, alleging trademark infringement. The snack-maker accused the discount supermarket of “blatantly” copying the packaging of Oreos, Wheat Thins, Nilla Wafers and Ritz crackers for its private-label alternatives.
But in other instances, even store brands that don’t resemble well-known rivals have enough shelf appeal to attract shoppers on their own merit. The result is eroding brand loyalty for major incumbents. In First Insight’s survey, 47% of shoppers said they tried a store brand specifically because it was a “dupe” of a name-brand product, and 84% said they now trust private labels’ quality at least as much as national brands’.
Price, of course, remains a key factor in private labels’ appeal.
During the worst of the post-pandemic run-up in inflation, consumer goods giants such as Procter & Gamble raised prices on customers. Faced with steeper costs from supply-chain snarls and labor shortages, many companies bet that shoppers would shell out more to stick with products they knew and liked. And for a few years, many of their better-heeled customers did just that. But the winds have shifted, and in recent years shoppers have been reprioritizing value.
“They’re saying, ‘What I’m paying for what I’m getting is not worth it,’” Petro said.
After an earlier series of price hikes on cereals, snack bars and pet food, General Mills said last week that its main focus now is on juicing sales volume. “To do that, we’ll invest further in consumer value,” its CEO assured investors.
Michael Swanson, chief agriculture economist at Wells Fargo’s Agri-Food Institute, said the grocery wars largely hinge on what shoppers pay attention to.
When you look at the raw sticker prices on store shelves, it’s easy to notice how sharply they’ve climbed. Grocery prices have risen more than 23% over the last five years — but households’ average spending power has outpaced it, he pointed out. In “real,” or inflation-adjusted, terms, groceries are broadly cheaper than they’ve been in years. (While it surely didn’t feel that way for many families, 2024’s Thanksgiving dinner was its most affordable in nearly 40 years, farm data showed.)
“Whenever you get a pay raise, that’s a good thing. Whenever you see your favorite food go up, that’s a bad thing,” Swanson said. “But we really are very bad at tracking the relative change of those two things.”
Still, Swanson doesn’t expect shoppers’ diminishing brand loyalty or hunt for low prices to push name-brand products off supermarket shelves anytime soon. In fact, grocery stores typically rely on branded products to set price points for customers, he said.
“The only reason you know that private label is a value is because you glance right next to it in the refrigerator section and that something else is 25 or 40% more expensive,” Swanson said.
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Reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley defiant after Trump pardons | US crime
A reality TV star who was imprisoned for defrauding banks of tens of millions of dollars before being pardoned in May by Donald Trump says there is nothing for him to be sorry about.
“I don’t have an apology to give you or anyone else over the money that I’ve made,” Todd Chrisley said in an interview with ABC News that was posted online Monday.
Speaking to the network alongside his wife, Julie, who was also imprisoned and then pardoned by the president, Chrisley’s comments were some of his most extensive comments yet about his and his spouse’s abbreviated experiences behind bars.
He joked that his first post-pardon shower back home was as exciting as his “first sexual encounter”. And, as his family begins planning to return to television with a new reality show on Lifetime, he said “it doesn’t matter what someone else’s opinion” of him is.
“No one’s opinion of me has ever caused me to question who I am at the core,” the former co-star of Chrisley Knows Best said to ABC News. “So I don’t worry about someone else’s opinion.”
Chrisley Knows Best aired on USA Network from 2014 to 2023, depicting Todd as a wealthy real estate developer and entrepreneur who was raising a family with Julie in their suburban Atlanta mansion.
But in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, the federal government charged the Chrisleys with tax evasion and bank fraud. Jurors in 2022 convicted the couple of defrauding banks of at least $30m, leaving Todd to be sentenced to 12 years in prison and Julie to seven years.
The couple’s daughter Savannah Chrisley was a vocal Trump advocate as he successfully ran for a second presidency in November 2024. Trump then pardoned Todd and Julie on 27 May, a little more than four months after he was sworn back into the Oval Office.
Trump personally called Savannah to inform her of her parents’ pardons, according to a White House video.
The Chrisleys’ pardons freed them from prison after serving less than three years. Their pardons came amid a series of clemencies that Trump gave to supporters in what evidently was a broader rebuke against a justice system that had convicted him of criminally falsifying business records months before he retook the White House.
Some particularly criticized the Chrisleys’ pardons because an appeals court had upheld their jury convictions.
Nonetheless, as ABC News noted, Todd argued that the makeup of the couple’s jury was questionable and the president was right to pardon him and Julie.
Julie recounted to the network that she had made some everlasting friendships while incarcerated. “I have met some amazing women … that I will be friends with till the day that I die,” she told ABC.
Yet, unsurprisingly, Todd said he and his wife were relieved to be out of prison early as they weigh whether to move to South Carolina and film themselves converting a mansion into a hotel.
“You don’t realize how much your freedom means to you until you don’t have it,” he remarked.
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Long-term weight change among breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy: a longitudinal study over 13 years | Breast Cancer Research
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