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"I am a proudly gay man. This is something I've been unpacking and reckoning with in my life for quite some time now," the musician wrote on Instagram.

"I am a proudly gay man. This is something I've been unpacking and reckoning with in my life for quite some time now," the musician wrote on Instagram.

A ghoulish Luigi Mangione fangirl has claimed she would kill her own mom if she became a healthcare executive, after The Post revealed that her mother is a senior manager for CVS Health.

With Commercial Real Estate Still Challenging, Lenders Offload Troubled Loans At A Loss

Authored by Mary Prenon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

While leasing activity and vacancy trends suggest the U.S. commercial real estate market is stabilizing, office values are still well below post-pandemic peaks, recent reports show.

The San Francisco skyline on Jan. 20, 2023. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

As owners scramble to make payments on under-occupied office buildings, many lenders are reluctant to foreclose to avoid the headache of taking ownership and reselling the properties, according to David Marino, cofounder of Hughes Marino, a San Diego-based corporate real estate advisory firm.

According to Cushman and Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services company, national office sublease inventory in the first quarter declined by 13.6 percent year over year, to 101 million square feet, while vacancy may have peaked. Sublease space peaked in January 2023, at 189 million square feet, according to the commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group.

A February report from the financial data and research company MSCI also shows that office prices are showing signs of stabilization, though they are still well below their post-COVID-19 pandemic peak. Commercial property prices rose by 0.3 percent year over year in January, but downtown office values declined by 1.3 percent, and were down by 40.2 percent from three years ago.

Massive Perks

Speaking recently with Siyamak Khorrami, host of EpochTV's "Market Insider," Marino said the commercial real estate market is still challenging, as the pandemic has made remote work a new normal. "The horses are out of the barn and never coming back," he said.

An April 1 report from job search platform FlexJobs shows that remote-job postings in the first quarter increased by 20 percent month over month, with 65 percent of positions targeting experienced workers. The platform predicts continued growth in the work model for the rest of the year.

An April 16 Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that 22.6 percent of workers teleworked or worked from home, a measure commonly described as remote work, in March.

Marino said about 85 percent of companies in the United States have had their leases expire in the past six years and have been able to resize, leaving many office markets with 20 percent to 30 percent availability. As a result, commercial landlords have been offering potential tenants massive perks, including free rent packages.

"I just represented a client in an engineering firm for 14,000 square feet, which is basically space for about 7,065 people. And the landlord that just bought a building down the street was in escrow and wanted to win this deal," Marino said. "They gave us an eight-year lease with a year free. In other words, my client moves in at the end of this year and doesn't pay rent in all of 2027."

In addition, Marino said the landlord paid for all of the tenant improvements to remodel the space, plus a cash moving allowance.

'B' Loans

However, banks and lenders can face an even bigger problem when loans cannot be repaid. Rather than pursuing immediate foreclosure proceedings, many lenders are resorting to creative solutions that allow landlords to retain ownership of these buildings, he said.

Marino noted that there have been "hundreds and hundreds of foreclosures" throughout the country, in particular during the past three years. Typically, he said, commercial loans include a "balloon" provision, which requires repayment or refinancing within seven to 10 years, or the property must be sold.

"What's happened in the last three years is a lot of owners have hit that balloon mark and interest rates went from 3 to 6 percent, so if your occupancy goes from 90 to 60 percent, you're immediately underwater," he said. "Lenders in those situations have generally foreclosed on the properties and resold them at a big discount."

In some cases, lenders don't want to foreclose because they don't want to become landlords. As an alternative, Marino said, they may split an existing loan into two pieces. In this scenario, a lender could, for example, take a $100 million loan and set $30 million of that aside as a "'B' loan," treating it as a different loan.

"What I've seen in the last three years is the lending community getting very creative, trying to salvage what they can," he said. "The lenders don't want to foreclose on the real estate, nor do they want to put somebody into default unnecessarily."

According to Marino, some metro areas are affected more than others. In San Diego, he said, 11 high-rise office buildings have already been foreclosed or are going through a forced-sale process when the loan hit the balloon payment stage.

A couple of those buildings are being converted to residential use, which Marino describes as a "micro trend" and not a significant impact on office inventory nationwide. He noted that close to a third of quality buildings in the city have already transitioned through financial negotiations with lenders.

Downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco have also experienced their share of office building foreclosures, Marino said.

"There's still going to be more, and the developers that own these things, frankly, are handing the keys back," he said. "There [are] some really ugly tax consequences."

For example, he said, if a buyer purchased a building for $200 million with $150 million in debt and today the building is worth only $80 million, the owner would rather walk away.

"These are typically individual assets with their own individual Partnership Agreement, and they're collapsing all over the country," he said.

No Signs Of Systemic Fallout

To Khorrami's question about how this will impact banks and lenders, Marino said it would depend on the percentage of the lenders' assets allocated toward commercial real estate.

"The rollover of the debt is typically distributed over many, many years, so you don't have all these loans really expiring at the same time within one financial institution," he said. "My experience so far is that we're not going to see a collapse of the banking sector because of commercial real estate."

While the road could be bumpy, he said, it's not going to be a trigger effect like it was during the early 1990s. Many of the older vacant office buildings are being sold at land value, minus the cost of demolition to start over and convert them into residential projects.

RentCafe, a rental housing research platform owned by Yardi, estimated in a March report that about 90,300 apartment units were in the office-to-residential conversion pipeline nationwide at the beginning of this year, marking another record year for such projects.

The warehousing market, meanwhile, appears to be booming, Marino said. He noted that the rise of online shopping has created an escalating demand for huge warehousing space.

"You look at an Amazon distribution building, and some of these things are a million square feet," he said. "They're some of the biggest buildings in the country."

The issue is that construction, including land acquisition, permitting, and design, can often take up to three years, he said.

From 2020 to 2025, Marino noted, 1.2 billion square feet of warehouse buildings were being constructed across the country. In another five years, he predicts, the country could see an unprecedented amount of massive warehouse construction.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 09:20

The Issue: Black athletes encouraged by the NAACP to boycott universities in redistricting southern states. How absolutely maniacal to encourage black athletes to avoid bettering themselves at southern universities — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, you have carried your racist rants too far (“The NAACP vs. Black Athletes,” Editorial, May 21). Your fear tactics are disgusting and...

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Chris Jericho didn’t know exactly what he was walking into by being a part of the Minnesota Vikings’ schedule release video for this coming season.

1 In 4 Cars Sold Globally Is An Electric Vehicle

Electric vehicle adoption continues to accelerate worldwide, reaching new milestones in 2025.

As Statista's Tristan Gaudiaut details below, according to the IEA Global EV Outlook 2026, published on May 20, global sales of electric cars, including plug-in hybrids, surpassed 21 million units last year, more than doubling since 2022, when annual sales first exceeded 10 million.

As the chart shows, EVs now account for roughly one in four passenger car sales globally, meaning their market share climbed to 25 percent in 2025, up from just 2 percent in 2018.

You will find more infographics at Statista

This rapid growth has been driven largely by China, which remains by far the largest market.

With more than 13 million electric vehicles sold in 2025, the country alone accounted for around 60 percent of global sales.

While adoption has also increased steadily in the rest of the world, with nearly 8 million units sold – largely in Europe and the United States – the data highlight China’s dominant role in shaping the global EV market.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 08:45

Doug McCain, a Navy pilot and the eldest child of late Sen. John McCain, has died suddenly at the age of 66, his family announced.

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German Taxpayers Bled Dry: Mass Migration Cost €40 Billion In 2025

Via Remix News,

Migrants cost German taxpayers — just at the federal level — €24.8 billion in 2025, according to new data in the “refugee costs report” from the German Federal Ministry of Finance. However, the true sum is much higher.

The €24.8 billion is strictly the federal bill. The actual, combined national cost of migration for Germany is that €24.8 billion plus the massive, separate billions that the individual states and municipalities had to pull from their own local tax revenues to cover their own deficits brought on by mass immigration.

Welt notes that the total figure is indeed much higher, since it does not include states and local communes, but Welt does not provide this combined data.

Nevertheless, previous years indicate that this number is at least €15 to €20 billion. That means any total figure is likely well over €40 billion, but as in previous years, it may actually go as high as €50 billion.

The total costs cover several areas, including the federal government’s contribution to the refugee and integration costs of states and municipalities. One controversial issue is exactly how much money the federal government is transferring to the states and municipalities, which they argue is not enough to cover all their costs.

Essentially, the federal government only pays out a flat rate per initial asylum application, amounting to €7,500 from the federal government, allocated via a modification in the VAT distribution. This advance payment reached €1.25 billion for 2025. Additionally, the report assumes that the federal government holds a claim for repayment from the states totaling €250 million for 2025.

However, this only covers a fraction of the cost. The states indicate that the total costs in the area of flight and migration are significantly higher than the VAT resources available to them on the basis of the flat rate.

Of course, all of these expenses only cover specific areas like housing, direct social benefits, and integration courses. The true cost is still far higher than €40 billion to €50 billion.

The costs, for instance, do not cover expenses associated with the substantial foreign prison population. They also do not cover the need for the vastly increased police forces and counter-terrorism efforts. There are also “gray areas” that lead to other hidden taxes on Germans brought on by mass immigration. For instance, mass immigration has led to vastly higher housing prices, more road traffic, crowded hospitals, and longer wait times for medical treatments.

Germans are even paying higher health insurance premiums now due to mass immigration.

The head of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds (GKV-Spitzenverband) has repeatedly criticized the federal government for creating a massive multi-billion-euro deficit that forces them to raise premiums, with the core of the complaint revolving around “non-insurance benefits.” These are social welfare benefits mandated by the government that are paid out to people who have not paid regular insurance contributions into the system. This includes long-term unemployed citizens and refugees.

When asylum seekers first arrive in Germany, they are not members of the statutory health insurance system. Under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act, their healthcare costs are covered, with local municipalities and state social offices paying their bills. 

The financial friction begins once a migrant’s asylum application is approved, or if they have been in the country for 36 months without a final decision. At this point, they transition into the standard welfare system, known as citizen’s money.

Once on welfare, they are fully integrated into the statutory health insurance system. This is where the GKV-Spitzenverband argues the math breaks down, with the government only paying €108 per person per month for welfare recipients, the majority of which are migrants and those with a migration background, when the care actually costs between €300 and €350 a month.

This has resulted in a multi-billion euro deficit, which the insurance companies say now needs to be passed on to Germans actually paying for their health insurance.

In short, Germans are being squeezed from all sides due to mass immigration, and despite claims that foreigners would pay the pensions of Germany’s aging population, this is clearly unrealistic. Instead, Germany’s elderly may now be expected to work even longer, with a strong movement in the government to raise the retirement age to 73.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 08:10

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The movie, which came out in 1976, will be screened at this year's upcoming Tribeca Festival in honor of its 50th anniversary.

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