Comment on Slow recovery takes toll on small firms

Remember this moment because it probably won’t last: A U. S. lottery jackpot is projected to soar above $1 billion, and that’s still a big deal. Friday’s Mega Millions drawing is worth an estimated $1.15 billion, evoking headlines and likely luring more people to convenience stores with dreams of private spacewalks above the earth. It doesn’t seem to matter that the nation’s top 10 jackpots — not including this one — already have boasted 10-figure payouts.

MIAMI — Florida condominium owners are looking at higher costs from condo associations in the new year, a consequence of a safety law passed by state lawmakers in 2022. It requires associations to have sufficient reserves to cover major repairs and to conduct a survey of reserves every decade. Because of the law, older condos — found largely in South Florida, according to state records — are facing hefty increases to association payments to fund the reserves and repair costs. Gov.

WASHINGTON — Most Americans believe health insurance profits and coverage denials share responsibility for the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO — although not as much as the person who pulled the trigger, according to a new poll. In the survey from NORC at the University of Chicago, about 8 in 10 U.

DALLAS — Parts of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas were under severe weather watches early Friday as the National Weather Service predicted a storm system in the Gulf of Mexico could bring high winds, hail and possible tornadoes to the region. “Heavy showers and thunderstorms continue to race across Louisiana and the Gulf waters at this time, with SETX in the clear for the rest of tonight.

More than 18,500 games will have been released onto the PC gaming platform Steam in the year 2024, according to SteamDB. Dividing that by the number of people covering games at Ars, or the gaming press at large, or even everybody who games and writes about it online, yields a brutal ratio. Games often float down the river of time to us, filtered by friends, algorithms, or pure happenstance.

Historic preservationists thought their demands had been answered this summer when the federal government appeared to green-light the rehab of the two century-old office towers it’s owned on State Street for nearly two decades. But security restrictions governing how the buildings are used going forward have raised questions about the future of the structures. The groups had fought for years to save the Century and Consumers buildings at 202 and 220 S.