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• Country musician Zach Lane Bryan released a live album “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” on Dec. 25. 
• On Instagram, he claimed, “monopolies” like Ticketmaster are “stealing from working-class people.” 
• He said he’s doing “all he can” to make his concerts affordable and said other artists should too.

Country music star Zach Lane Bryan name-dropped Ticketmaster in his most recent album title and accused it of “stealing” from hard-working fans. 

The 26-year-old singer, whose album “American Heartbreak,” was number 5 on the Billboard 200 in May, announced his newest release “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” in an Instagram post on Sunday — taking aim at the infamous ticket sales company. 

Bryan also posted a lengthy explanation as to why it had taken so long to set tour dates for the popular album: Ticketmaster’s hold on the ticket sales market made it very difficult for him to keep costs down for fans, he said.

“I believe working-class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows,” the Oklahoma native said in his Instagram post. “I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working-class people.” 

Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. 

A post shared by Zach Bryan (@zachlanebryan)

The live album was recorded at a concert in Red Rocks, Colorado, and includes live performances of some of his most popular songs like “Something in the Orange” and “Heading South.” 

Bryan joins a choir of voices — artists, fans, and politicians alike — that have called Ticketmaster out for so-called monopoly-like behavior. 

In November, after many fans waited in a virtual line for hours to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, tickets listed on the site were much more than the typical listener could afford. Some were being re-sold on the platform for upwards of $40,000. 

Some of these fans sued the company and the US Department of Justice is reportedly considering opening a case against the platform to investigate it for violating antitrust laws, The New York Times reported.

Earlier this month, Mexico’s consumer protection agency slapped Ticketmaster with a fine, after Bad Bunny fans said they were sold fake tickets to the artist’s concert. 

(NewsNation) — The party’s over, the cakes, cookies and candies have been gobbled and now comes the question: what to do with the gift you received but really didn’t want?

According to marketing data firm Inmar, about one-third of retailers are expecting to see between 11% to 20% of the items they sold this holiday season returned. Some estimates put the dollar figure for all of those returned gifts at roughly $170 billion.

Chanda Torrey of Gifter World says she tries to curate gift lists on her website so you’re able to find the perfect presents for even the pickiest people. But if a return is a must, she suggests reading the fine print.

“It’s important. Some places have like a month, some places say three weeks, some places say six months, and they’re all different,” Torrey said. “So, make sure you know what the time difference is.”

With 33% of stores reporting an increase in holiday sales, returns will rise too. That’s where the company Newmine comes in.

CEO Navjit Bhasin explained how artificial intelligence helps retailers cut down on returns. Eliminating merchandise mistakes like sending a black garment instead of a much-wanted, rose-colored item makes for a return and a loss in brand loyalty.

“The best return is the one but it does not have to happen,” Bhasin said. “The moment a consumer like you and I decide we’re going to return this product, the margin is gone. And then the retailers struggle to say, ‘Hey, how do I cost efficiently get the product back into my supply chain? How do I refurbish it? How do I dispose of it?’”

Retailers estimate 10% of all returns are fraudulent, with the No. 1 fraud being wardrobing: the return of used, non-defective merchandise.

Still, many never return gifts even if they don’t like them.

“I am not a big fan of returning,” Torrey said. “In fact, I have bought shoes, got home and discovered that I had two left shoes and was too embarrassed to return them and I’ve done that twice.”

A recent survey of retailers found six in 10 will have stricter return policies this year.

Bhasin suggests considering the environmental impacts of ordering multiple sizes and returning those that don’t fit. Instead, contact online retailers and ask more questions about sizing, colors and product details to make a better purchase.

White it would be preferable to have kept the House through 2024 rather than cede power to the GOP, that party’s state of disarray is a pretty stark reminder of not only why we need to keep voting to prevent them from holding a government office, but of what a party in disarray looks like.

If you want an idea of how extreme the GOP has gotten over the last decade, consider that Mitch McConnell is compromising with Democrats in order to keep the government funded rather than hold the economy hostage for a bunch of things his party has no chance in hell of ever getting.

This is far from saying that McConnell has suddenly become one of the good guys. He’s doing it because his party no longer has a majority in the Senate and that he’s wildly unpopular with a Republican House majority who can’t really do much of anything to him. This is the difference between having a Democratic majority in the Senate and not having one – as the GOP is in disarray and desperate for someone to blame for their failures but doesn’t know who it is.

It’s also probably the best demonstration for why their politics are terrible. It’s a good start but it doesn’t mean we get a break from fighting the GOP as they’re going to only fight back harder than ever – but it shows that if we do, we can and must defeat them for the good of the country.

The post House Republicans in disarray appeared first on Palmer Report.

Hyoung Chang/Getty Images

• Southwest AIrlines canceled thousands of flights on the day after Christmas. 
• The Dallas-based airline accounted for almost 50% of all flight cancellations across the globe.
• The cancellations caused chaos at airports across the country, from Denver to Baltimore.

Southwest Airlines canceled over 2,700 flights the day after Christmas, more than any other US-based airline.

By 5 p.m. on December 26, Southwest had canceled 2,725 flights, or 67% of its total flights, according to FlightAware.

Thousands of flight delays and cancellations swept the U.S. over Christmas weekend as a deadly winter storm took effect, causing heavy snowfall and power outages in the Northeast. 

By Monday night, the airports seeing the most cancellations included Denver, Las Vegas, Chicago Midway, and Dallas Love Field, where Southwest is headquartered. 

Southwest canceled the most flights of any other airline based in the US on Monday, trailed by Delta, which canceled 262 flights, according to FlightAware. United canceled 133 flights. American Airlines canceled only 12 flights, though it recorded 792 delays, accounting for nearly a quarter of all flight delays worldwide on Monday. 

One of every two flights canceled worldwide was a Southwest flight, as the airline’s network collapsed under the strain of the winter storm. 

The cancellations led to chaotic scenes at airports across the country. 

A reporter for 9News in Denver tweeted Monday afternoon that some travelers at Denver International Airport, where Southwest was responsible for hundreds of flight cancellations, had been stranded for days and that the line to rebook was over three hours long. 

—Courtney Yuen (@courtyuen) December 26, 2022

Meanwhile, a reporter for ABC15 in Phoenix spoke with frustrated travelers at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as they learned that there would be no more scheduled Southwest Airlines flights for the next four days. 

—Marc Thompson (@marcthompson) December 26, 2022

In Dallas, a spokesperson for TWU Local 556, the Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants Union, blasted the airline for not investing in the needed technological improvements to avoid massive travel disruptions amid its rapid expansion in the last several years. 

—Brandon Richard (@BrandonLRichard) December 26, 2022

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

• China has turned reefs and islands in the South China Sea into full-fledged military bases.
• Photos taken in October show those bases in great detail, revealing Beijing’s forces and facilities.
• US officials warn that the bases are part of China’s plans to project power beyond its shores.

Want to see what China’s island bases in the South China Sea look like? Take a look at some of the startling images taken by Getty Images photographer Ezra Acayan in October.

They show airfields, radar installations, and military aircraft and warships stationed in the Spratly Islands, which are about 400 miles from the Chinese coast. Beijing has used both natural and artificial islands to build up its military capabilities in the area.

“The function of those islands is to expand the offensive capability of the PRC beyond their continental shores,” Adm. John Aquilino, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, warned in March, referring to the country’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

From those bases, Chinese forces “can fly fighters, bombers plus all those offensive capabilities of missile systems,” such as anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, Aquilino told the Associated Press at the time, calling the islands fully militarized.

Island airbases

An airfield, buildings, and structures on the artificial island built by China at Subi Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

This photo shows an airfield on Subi Reef, which China claimed in 1988 and has built up to create an artificial island large enough to accommodate military installations.

A double runway, hangars, and multi-story administrative buildings are all clearly visible.

Missile boats and anti-ship missiles

Buildings and structures on the artificial island built by China at Mischief Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

This photo of Mischief Reef shows Chinese Type 022 Houbei-class fast attack boats, which are catamarans armed with YJ-83 anti-ship missiles.

Also visible on shore is what might be covered launchers for land-based missiles. Tom Shugart, a naval expert at the Center for a New American Security, told The Telegraph that garages facing the sea could house “angled cruise missile launchers.”

Gun emplacements on Cuarteron Reef

Buildings and structures on the artificial island built by China at Cuarteron Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

In 2016, observers detected gun emplacements on Cuarteron Reef. One of Acayan’s photos shows these weapons stations in greater detail.

You can see several tiered towers, with what analysts have identified as 76 mm naval guns visible on the lower two levels. Above the guns is what could be a gun director, and above them all is a large dome likely housing some kind of radar.

Chinese airborne radar aircraft on runway

A KJ-500 next to buildings and structures on the artificial island built by China at Fiery Cross Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

This photo shows a Chinese KJ-500 airborne early warning aircraft on the runway of Fiery Cross Reef. The KJ-500 is based on the Y-9 transport, China’s equivalent to the US’s C-130 Hercules.

The presence of a KJ-500 shows the Fiery Cross Reef runways are long enough to handle larger aircraft, while the hangars are big enough to accommodate H-6 bombers.

The KJ-500 “plays a significant role” in China’s ability to use long-range weapons, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, head of US Pacific Air Forces, said this spring, adding that “some of their very long-range air-to-air missiles are aided by that KJ-500.”

Port for Chinese warships

An airfield, buildings, and structures on the artificial island at Fiery Cross Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

This photo of Fiery Cross Reef shows the semi-enclosed waters and facilities that make the island a useful naval base.

More than 40 vessels of different types appear to be anchored near Fiery Cross, the Associated Press said in March.

These islands have sports fields

An airfield, buildings, and recreational facilities on the artificial island at Fiery Cross Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

What’s striking about this photo of Fiery Cross Reef isn’t the runway and buildings but rather the sports field, which appears to include a running track and an athletic field.

This suggests a Chinese presence that is significant enough that recreational facilities are needed to maintain troop morale.

The size of the field, which is marked and appears to have light poles, indicates that the garrison is large enough to justify such an amenity.

China’s growing reach

An airfield, buildings, and structures on the artificial island at Mischief Reef on October 25.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

The Spratly Islands are strategically valuable for China. They enable Beijing to project air and naval power hundreds of miles farther than forces on the Chinese mainland can reach. The bases there also allow China to position forces closer to vital areas, such as the chokepoints between the Indian and Pacific oceans.

China has been willing to use force to maintain control of the Spratlys, which are geographically closer to Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. In 1988, Chinese forces seized Johnson South Reef after battling Vietnamese ships and troops over the disputed island.

The US isn’t the only nation concerned by the Chinese bases. Several countries, including Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysia, have made claims in the Spratlys and on other specks of land in the South China Sea. (Vietnam accelerated the expansion of its own outposts in the Spratlys in late 2022, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.)

The value of these bases should not be overstated. Their small size, flat and open terrain, and distance from mainland China leaves them vulnerable to bombardment, blockade, or invasion in time of war. Short of war, however, they are a potent reminder of China military reach into one of the world’s most important waterways.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master’s in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has not filed to run for president in 2024, his adviser Devin O’Malley said on Twitter following a report on Monday by Britain’s Sky News that Pence had filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.

Moscow’s proposals for settlement in Ukraine are well known to Kyiv and either Ukraine fulfils them for their own good or the Russian army will decide the issue, TASS agency quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

“Our proposals for the demilitarization and denazification of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia’s security emanating from there, including our new lands, are well known to the enemy,” the state news agency quoted Lavrov as saying late on Monday.

“The point is simple: Fulfil them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.”

Moscow has been calling its invasion in Ukraine a “special military operation” to “demilitarise” and “denazify” its neighbour. Kyiv and its Western allies call it an imperial-style aggression to grab land.

In September, Moscow proclaimed it had annexed four provinces of Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – after holding so-called referendums that were rejected as bogus and illegal by Kyiv and its allies.

On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was open to negotiations and blamed Kyiv and its Western backers for a lack of talks, a stance Washington has previously dismissed as posturing amid persistent Russian attacks.

Lavrov told TASS that when it comes to how long the conflict will last, “the ball is in the regime’s court and Washington behind it.”

There is no end in sight to the war, which has entered its 11th month and which has killed thousands, displaced millions and turned cities into rubble.

Kyiv has ruled out conceding any land to Russia in return for peace, and publicly demands Russia relinquish all territory. Moscow has insisted it is pursing “demilitarisation” and “denazification” but in reality its aims have not been fully defined.

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has filed a statement of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission to run for U.S. president in 2024, Sky News reported on Monday.

Arizona’s Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs asked a court on Monday to sanction defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake over her failed effort to overturn the state’s election results.

An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Lake’s lawsuit that challenged the counting and certification of the November electoral contest in a bid to be declared the winner despite a lack of evidence of voter fraud.

Hobbs joined a motion by Maricopa County for sanctions on Lake and her attorneys in which the county’s deputy attorney Thomas P. Liddy wrote Lake filed a “groundless” lawsuit for a “frivolous pursuit,” court documents showed.

“Enough really is enough,” Liddy wrote in the motion filed on Monday. “It is past time to end unfounded attacks on elections and unwarranted accusations against elections officials.”

The sanctions would be in the form of a financial penalty imposed by a judge for violation of a court rule or misconduct.

Lake and her lawyers did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

Lake’s lawsuit had targeted Hobbs, who is currently Arizona’s secretary of state and becomes governor next week, along with top officials in Maricopa County. Her suit claimed “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election” in Maricopa, the state’s most populous county.

In a separate court filing, Hobbs also asked the Superior Court in Maricopa County to award her over $600,000 to compensate for fees and expenses accrued in defending against Lake’s lawsuit.

Lake, a former television news anchor, was one of the most high-profile Republican candidates in the midterm elections to embrace former Republican President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

She lost the governor’s race to Hobbs but refused to concede and continued making unconfirmed claims about election improprieties on her Twitter feed.

Lake was one of the most prominent of the Trump-aligned Republican candidates who lost battleground state races in the midterm elections.

A blizzard that paralyzed western New York over the Christmas weekend has killed more than two dozen people, local officials said on Monday, as crews struggled to dig out the snow-bound region around Buffalo from its fiercest winter storm in decades.

With snow continuing to fall on top of more than 4 feet (1.2 meters) dumped on Buffalo since the blizzard took shape on Friday, New York’s second-largest city stood as ground zero for a storm the governor called an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster.

The toll of confirmed storm-related deaths climbed to 27 in Buffalo and the rest of Erie County on Monday, up from 13 the night before. The fatalities included cases of people found in snow banks and in cars or who had died from cardiac events while plowing or blowing snow, county executive Mark Poloncarz said.

More deaths have been reported, Poloncarz said, but it remained for the county medical examiner to determine if they were directly attributable to the weather.

At least 60 lives have been lost in weather-related incidents nationwide, according to an NBC News tally, from an arctic deep freeze and sprawling storm front that extended over most of the United States for days, as far south as the Mexican border.

The larger storm system has wreaked havoc with travel across the country over the holiday weekend, stranding passengers as thousands of flights were canceled.

The greater Buffalo region, on the edge of Lake Erie near the Canadian border, was hardest hit.

Nearly 50 inches (1.27 meters) of snow was measured at Buffalo Airport as of Monday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

Although blinding winds that created white-out conditions for more than two days had abated by Monday, snow kept falling, with additional accumulations of up to a foot (30 cm) forecast through Tuesday in areas south of Buffalo and north of Syracuse.

Roadways remained littered with cars, buses, ambulances, tow trucks and even plows buried beneath towering drifts, complicating efforts to clear snow-blanketed streets and reach stranded residents in need of medical care. Authorities deployed high-lift tractors as hospital transports.

Despite a countywide ban on personal road travel that remained in effect on Monday, hundreds of motorists had to be rescued from their vehicles over the weekend

A few of the grocery stores that had been closed for days reopened on Monday, and people trekked more than a mile (1.6 km) through the middle of otherwise impassable streets to get there.

The severity of the storm, notable for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather, grew out of a combination of meteorological factors that supercharged one another.

Howling winds, numbing cold and “lake-effect” snow – the result of moisture picked up by frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – produced a storm that New York Governor Kathy Hochul said would go down in history as “the Blizzard of ’22.” She and local officials ranked it as the worst Buffalo-area snowstorm since a 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people.

President Joe Biden tweeted on Monday that he had spoken to Hochul on the phone and that his administration would provide resources to help the region cover the daunting expense of storm rescue and recovery.

“My heart is with those who lost loved ones this holiday weekend. You are in my and Jill’s prayers,” Biden said.

Hundreds of National Guard troops were assisting local emergency personnel and state police on Monday as crews rescued people still trapped in cars and homes without electricity, performed wellness checks and delivered food and basic needs.

Poloncarz said many emergency workers had themselves become trapped in the snowy onslaught over the weekend, requiring special teams to be dispatched “to rescue the rescuers.”

Thousands of people in Erie County had power restored as of Monday morning, Poloncarz said, though some 14,000 customers were still without power statewide, according to poweroutage.us.

Poloncarz pleaded for motorists to heed the driving ban in order to keep free of traffic those narrow street routes that had been cleared for emergency and utility workers struggling to weave through an obstacle course of buried cars and snow banks.

“There are cars everywhere, everywhere, pointing the wrong direction on roads. They’ve basically been plowed in and they need to be dug out and towed. It’s going to take time to clear those,” Poloncarz said.

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