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Rey Fenix has been angrily tweeting about his experience in AEW after the company added injury time to his contract, meaning the former World Tag Team Champion could not leave at the same time as his brother Penta El Zero Miedo. According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Fenix’s latest outbursts are possibly related to him trying to force AEW’s hand in firing him, therefore freeing him from his contract, which could have up to an extra year of injury time added to it.
“I think right now Fenix is looking at being fired,” Meltzer wrote. “I’ve had discussions with WWE talent in this situation who came up with some wild ideas to get fired so they could go elsewhere but I can also say and there is precedent that it doesn’t work and they don’t get fired.”
According to Meltzer, both WWE and AEW forbid talent from tweeting negatively about the company like Fenix. Fenix’s main complaint has been that he has been forced to book appointments and get treatment for the injury on his own, which while standard practice in AEW, has also been a sticking point with talent in the past, including CM Punk.
Fenix’s brother Penta’s contract has already expired and the former World Tag Team Champion is said to be of interest to WWE. Both brothers were said to be favored by WWE, but Fenix’s injury time meant they wouldn’t be able to come to WWE as a package, as has been the case for most of their career.
The Minnesota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Dec. 14, 2024, results for each game:
12-17-23-52-67, Powerball: 01, Power Play: 2
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
02-08-47-51-52, Star Ball: 03, ASB: 03
Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.
3-0-9
Check Pick 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
23-25-28-30-31
Check North 5 payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Winning lottery numbers are sponsored by Jackpocket, the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network.
Tickets can be purchased in person at gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores. Some airport terminals may also sell lottery tickets.
You can also order tickets online through Jackpocket, the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network, in these U.S. states and territories: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Texas, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. The Jackpocket app allows you to pick your lottery game and numbers, place your order, see your ticket and collect your winnings all using your phone or home computer.
Jackpocket is the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network. Gannett may earn revenue for audience referrals to Jackpocket services. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). 18+ (19+ in NE, 21+ in AZ). Physically present where Jackpocket operates. Jackpocket is not affiliated with any State Lottery. Eligibility Restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. Terms: jackpocket.com/tos.
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President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise by tapping crypto advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC.
Created in 2008, Bitcoin was the world’s first cryptocurrency. For better or worse, Bitcoin’s continued rise to prominence has been less as a new-age form of digital currency and more as a type of high-risk investment. Let’s be honest, how many people do you know who have actually used Bitcoin, or any other type of cryptocurrency, to pay for something?
In its first few years as a digital currency, the value of a single Bitcoin was less than $0.10. In 2017, its price quickly jumped to $2,000, then to $5,000, before eventually breaking the $10,000 mark. This soon triggered a flood of investor dollars seeking quick returns. More importantly, it caught the attention of Wall Street. By 2021, Bitcoin had risen to more than $60,000.
On Nov. 4, the day before the U.S. presidential election, the price of Bitcoin was at $67,811. The day after the election, on Nov. 6, Bitcoin quickly surged to $75,637, a record high. On Dec. 4, it breached the $100,000 mark and closed at $103,340. That’s right. In just one month, Bitcoin had gained more than $35,000, an increase of 52%. So, what caused this sudden surge in Bitcoin?
During their respective campaigns, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris advocated for a more government-friendly relationship with the cryptocurrency industry. This was in stark contrast to the Biden administration, which aggressively used regulatory agencies — especially the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) — to crack down on cryptocurrency exchanges and investors.
But Trump’s support for the cryptocurrency industry was much more vigorous and expansive. In July, at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump vowed to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet.” After he won the presidential election on Nov. 5, investors sent Bitcoin’s price soaring.
A key element of Trump’s strategy is to remove current SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who led much of the Biden administration’s crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry. Gensler will likely be replaced by Paul Atkins, Trump’s presumptive nominee. Atkins is currently CEO of Patomak Partners, a financial consulting firm. He also served as an SEC Commissioner from 2002 to 2008. It’s expected Atkins will be less antagonistic toward the cryptocurrency industry and will be more apt to embrace Trump’s broader deregulation goals.
Trump has also announced that David Sacks will be the nation’s first “AI and crypto czar.” Sacks is a venture capitalist with an expansive list of investing in high-tech companies including PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX and Facebook, among others. In his new role, Sacks will look to refine and provide clarity to the often-confusing U.S. legal framework that governs the cryptocurrency industry.
The biggest knock against Biden was that his regulatory oversight over the cryptocurrency industry was too heavy-handed. It forced much of the investment and technological innovation within the industry to flee the U.S. and move overseas — primarily to competing markets in Asia. But there is also significant risk for Trump if his regulatory framework is too lax. The cryptocurrency industry has a long, painful history of fraud, theft and corruption.
Many would likely agree the goal should be to allow investment and innovation within the cryptocurrency industry while also providing a framework of consumer protections. It’s a delicate balancing act. We’ll see if Trump succeeds.
Mark Grywacheski is an expert in financial markets and economic analysis and is an investment adviser with Quad-Cities Investment Group, Davenport.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Any prices or quotations contained herein are indicative only and do not constitute an offer to buy or sell any securities at any given price. Information has been obtained from sources considered reliable, but we do not guarantee that the material presented is accurate or that it provides a complete description of the securities, markets or developments mentioned. Quad-Cities Investment Group LLC is a registered investment adviser with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission.
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President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise by tapping crypto advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC.
Square features an innovative Colorado winemaker who blends tradition with technology by converting 1% of his yearly fiat wine sales to Bitcoin.
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President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise by tapping crypto advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC.
Created in 2008, Bitcoin was the world’s first cryptocurrency. For better or worse, Bitcoin’s continued rise to prominence has been less as a new-age form of digital currency and more as a type of high-risk investment. Let’s be honest, how many people do you know who have actually used Bitcoin, or any other type of cryptocurrency, to pay for something?
In its first few years as a digital currency, the value of a single Bitcoin was less than $0.10. In 2017, its price quickly jumped to $2,000, then to $5,000, before eventually breaking the $10,000 mark. This soon triggered a flood of investor dollars seeking quick returns. More importantly, it caught the attention of Wall Street. By 2021, Bitcoin had risen to more than $60,000.
Mark M. Grywacheski
On Nov. 4, the day before the U.S. presidential election, the price of Bitcoin was at $67,811. The day after the election, on Nov. 6, Bitcoin quickly surged to $75,637, a record high. On Dec. 4, it breached the $100,000 mark and closed at $103,340. That’s right. In just one month, Bitcoin had gained more than $35,000, an increase of 52%. So, what caused this sudden surge in Bitcoin?
During their respective campaigns, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris advocated for a more government-friendly relationship with the cryptocurrency industry. This was in stark contrast to the Biden administration, which aggressively used regulatory agencies — especially the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) — to crack down on cryptocurrency exchanges and investors.
But Trump’s support for the cryptocurrency industry was much more vigorous and expansive. In July, at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump vowed to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet.” After he won the presidential election on Nov. 5, investors sent Bitcoin’s price soaring.
A key element of Trump’s strategy is to remove current SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who led much of the Biden administration’s crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry. Gensler will likely be replaced by Paul Atkins, Trump’s presumptive nominee. Atkins is currently CEO of Patomak Partners, a financial consulting firm. He also served as an SEC Commissioner from 2002 to 2008. It’s expected Atkins will be less antagonistic toward the cryptocurrency industry and will be more apt to embrace Trump’s broader deregulation goals.
Trump has also announced that David Sacks will be the nation’s first “AI and crypto czar.” Sacks is a venture capitalist with an expansive list of investing in high-tech companies including PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX and Facebook, among others. In his new role, Sacks will look to refine and provide clarity to the often-confusing U.S. legal framework that governs the cryptocurrency industry.
The biggest knock against Biden was that his regulatory oversight over the cryptocurrency industry was too heavy-handed. It forced much of the investment and technological innovation within the industry to flee the U.S. and move overseas — primarily to competing markets in Asia. But there is also significant risk for Trump if his regulatory framework is too lax. The cryptocurrency industry has a long, painful history of fraud, theft and corruption.
Many would likely agree the goal should be to allow investment and innovation within the cryptocurrency industry while also providing a framework of consumer protections. It’s a delicate balancing act. We’ll see if Trump succeeds.
In 2004, Peony Lane Wine planted its first plot of pinot noir, a natural wine, in one of the highest elevations for wine-growing in North America—Paonia, Colorado. Owner Ben Justman takes a unique approach to winemaking, marrying a process that dates back thousands of years with a modern-day approach to business operations by accepting Bitcoin transactions and even featuring a Bitcoin-inspired Satoshi’s Reserve wine.
Justman grew up on the pinot noir vineyard he operates today, a vineyard his dad tended to throughout his childhood as a hobbyist. After graduating college, he knew he wanted to start a business, and despite having no background in wine-making, the winery was a natural business opportunity. “We started the winery in 2019 and didn’t sell any wine until 2021. In that time, I committed, made, and invested in three vintages with zero proof of concept, zero proof of my ability to do this,” said Justman. Despite these challenges, Square reports the wine received positive reviews from customers and sommeliers alike.
Justman is a big believer in Bitcoin. He not only empowers customers to pay for his goods with it, he has converted 1% of all fiat wine sales to Bitcoin in the last three years using Square as an early adopter. “That 1% of Bitcoin, it’s cool to go sell wine and then come home with a little bit of Bitcoin,” said Justman.
He’d like to increase how much he converts to Bitcoin in the future as the winery’s sales grow, but for now, he leaves what he converts untouched. These sales are converted to Bitcoin and appear in his Cash App Bitcoin balance. This process is so automated as a part of Justman’s business operations that he hasn’t purchased Bitcoin on an exchange in the last few years.
Justman says Bitcoin is one of the fundamental human inventions in monetary technology that can move society forward. “I think of it as if my business succeeds and Bitcoin succeeds, great. I win. If my business fails, and this is the only business I’ve ever really run, and Bitcoin succeeds, I win,” said Justman. If Bitcoin fails in his lifetime, he says, then he’d worry about his ability to access financial freedom without it. Justman is aligned with the mission of Bitcoin, creating freedom from relying solely on fiat money. He uses his business to help spread awareness and found that customers paying in Bitcoin are willing to be patient when it comes to a much more friction-full checkout experience.
As of now, he says a small but not insignificant amount of his online sales occur in Bitcoin. “I’ve never or hardly ever met Gen Zers that are into Bitcoin,” said Justman. When it comes to customers, his winery is typically an older demographic. “It’s more millennials through boomers. I mean there’s a lot of 60-plus-year-olds that are really psyched to buy my wine with Bitcoin.”
From 2021 to 2024, Peony Lane Wines was available exclusively in person at farmers’ markets and online. Justman started selling exclusively at farmers’ markets, on the road six days a week throughout the summer, and navigating hardships like wine going bad or having to extend the aging of certain batches by a few years.
“All of my capital was invested in the wine whether it was being made or aging,” said Justman, who also sells wine online. “I’ve been slowly whittling that down to where first it was five farmers markets, then four, then three, now I’m at two a week during the summer.” Selling wine in person gave him the gift of seeing people’s reactions to the product firsthand, exposure that led to sales without a ton of upfront capital. However, hitting the road six days a week made it hard to scale the business. One of the keys to taking a step back from in-person sales was tapping into the Bitcoin community.
The Bitcoin community isn’t the only one helping grow his business. He continues to learn about Bitcoin and winemaking regularly, listening to personal finance podcasts and Bitcoin podcasts, and reading marketing-focused business books. Justman also often looks to a group of neighboring winemakers who share a mission to grow awareness of Colorado wine in the U.S. Farmers’ markets allow new and returning customers to try his pinot noirs and maybe a neighboring stand’s cabernet sauvignon too. He hopes in the coming years Peony Lane Wines scales up, becomes known for pinot noir, and the region broadly gains more recognition for its wine industry.
This story was produced by Square for its publication The Bottom Line and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Mark Grywacheski is an expert in financial markets and economic analysis and is an investment adviser with Quad-Cities Investment Group, Davenport.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Any prices or quotations contained herein are indicative only and do not constitute an offer to buy or sell any securities at any given price. Information has been obtained from sources considered reliable, but we do not guarantee that the material presented is accurate or that it provides a complete description of the securities, markets or developments mentioned. Quad-Cities Investment Group LLC is a registered investment adviser with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission.
Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.
President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise by tapping crypto advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC.
Mark M. Grywacheski
Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.
Life isn’t quite so simple anymore for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
The two socialites-turned-businesswomen, both 43, have separately created empires in fashion (Richie’s House of Harlow brand), music (Hilton is a successful DJ with a new pop album, “Infinite Icon”), television (Richie’s comedy series “Great News” and Hilton’s reality turn on “Paris in Love“) and beyond. It’s a far cry from the twentysomething OG nepo babies on one of the OG reality shows, “The Simple Life,” which transplanted them into rural American towns and revolutionized reality TV with their blonde ambition and antics.
Hilton and Richie reunite onscreen more than 20 years after their hit Fox show for the three-episode “Paris & Nicole: The Encore” (now streaming on Peacock).
“We were both just in a place of saying to ourselves, ‘We really loved doing that show. Twenty years feels like a perfect time to celebrate it. And let’s do a reunion,'” Richie says, seated next to Hilton. They traded sunny Los Angeles for a floral greenroom backstage at “The Drew Barrymore Show” in New York, from where they call in.
“Paris had sent me a photo of this little boy (who) was 3 when we shot with him in Arkansas, (who) is now 23,” Richie says. The two “got together and talked about how we felt about” the possibility of honoring the show’s 20th anniversary. “We’ve been asked to do a 10-year reunion (and) we’ve been asked to do it all over again, which you simply can’t do” in a smartphone, social-media era.
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Richie says in plotting a reunion, they agreed on “a nod to ‘The Simple Life.'” The show, which premiered in 2003 and ran for five seasons, thrust the childhood friends into the real world, forcing them to milk cows, work at Sonic and wear camo. It also made them incredibly famous. It’s transcended the early aughts and found its way to modern day, as moments from the series became viral TikTok fodder and younger generations adopted the pair’s Y2K fashion.
‘The Simple Life’:Are Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie returning to reality TV?
In “Encore,” they revisit Altus, Arkansas, a destination in Season 1 of “Simple Life,” bringing adult versions of their high jinks to the town’s residents, dive bar Alligator Rays (where Richie infamously poured bleach on the pool table) and, of course, Walmart.
The show was “so much fun, so carefree, so wild,” Hilton says, “and just looking at my life now, I’ve been through so much. I’ve grown so much as a person.”
They still bring a zany, madcap energy to “Encore” as they embark on creating an opera around “sanasa,” a made-up word and song from their youth made famous on the original series (“I think the world would be a better place if everybody sanasa-ed,” Hilton says).
“Let’s throw ourselves in a world that we don’t know anything about and go up for another adventure,” Richie says. Participants often look to the camera, wondering if they’re getting “Simple Life”-ed; as with the original, Hilton and Richie are always in on the joke.
The reunion is mostly lighter fare for Hilton, who’s taken on political advocacy since her 2020 “This is Paris” documentary revealed the abuse she says she faced at a Utah school in her teens. But a rift between the two friends during and after “Simple Life” was widened, in part, by unrelenting tabloid media.
“The media was just so toxic in the early 2000s and they loved to invent stories, exaggerate, create rifts between people (and) feuds. They loved pitting women against each other, and Nicole and I were always targeted by the media in those ways,” Hilton says, calling it “painful for people just to be making up so many stories all the time.”
“Well,” Richie pauses before getting serious about their falling out. “It sucks being separated from somebody that you love, and so I think when you really hear about someone, you always find your way back, because it’s not fun (being apart).”
Paris Hiltonopens up about abortion, Harvey Weinstein in memoir: Must-read revelations
But the friends have evolved. “Back then, it was more about going out partying, having fun,” Hilton says. “Now, my favorite thing to do is just to be at home in bed with my babies and my puppies and my husband chilling on the weekends and cooking. I (couldn’t) care less about going to all the parties and things like I did back in the day.”
Richie, the less nostalgic of the two, says she hadn’t rewatched the show before texting with Hilton. But now it “puts a smile on my face. When I see these younger versions of us, I’m just looking at the look in our eyes: We did not know what the next day was going to bring. What a fun time to be in your early 20s, to just not know what was coming your way, but (knowing) that you were with your friend and you were going to take (on) an adventure and do it together.”
For Richie, “The Simple Life” success “was a big surprise, because we didn’t know. Even Fox didn’t say, ‘This is going to be the biggest show.’ They were taking their chance on a new style of show. “Then immediately it was go time” as “the show took off, and then we were on the road again, and then we were gone for another month,” Richie says. “It was a really crazy time.”
The hotel heiress’ mom Kathy Hilton, now a reality TV star in her own right on Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” wasn’t entirely on board with the show.
“When I told my mom that I got a call about doing this reality show, she immediately said, ‘No, do not do it,’ and was very against it,” Hilton says. “But then the night after it aired, she called me and she said, ‘Oh, my God, I was wrong. The show is incredible. You and Nicole are comedy gold. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever watched,’ and she was very proud. So I’m happy that I didn’t listen to her.”
They’re both now moms themselves: Richie to 16-year-old daughter, Harlow, and 15-year-old son, Sparrow, and Hilton to son Phoenix and daughter London, both 1.
“‘The Simple Life’ is very, very special to me. … I love watching it with my husband (Carter Reum), I love watching it with my kids,” Hilton says. “My baby Phoenix, he loves just singing the song ‘Sanasa’ now. And it’s just the cutest thing in the world to hear him sing it.”
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