If you know of local business openings or closings, please notify us here.

Air Products Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Scott Crocco to retire on September 30, 2021 after 31 years with the company. Melissa Schaeffer will succeed him

Laura McLain, executive director of the Slate Belt Chamber of Commerce, will retire at the end of 2021 after 21+ years of service.

Thomas Ripsam has been named the new CEO of Martin Guitar. He succeeds longtime Chairman and CEO Christian Frederick Martin IV.

. Owners of Tucker Silk Mill to open wine bar and garden in down Easton in early 2022. Kabinett will have a mostly Australian and German wine list, with light fare, and an outdoor patio overlooking the Delaware River.

Community Action Lehigh Valley promoted Dawn Godshall to executive director and Jessica Reimert to deputy executive director for operations, and hired Jaana Kelley as associate executive director for community services.

The Trolley Stop diner opened May 29th at 201 S. McCartney Street in Easton

Bitty & Beau's, a coffee shop that employs people with disabilities, will set up shop at 74 W. Broad St. in Bethlehem.

PPL Corporation named by DiversityInc as one of top utilities in nation for workforce diversity

Semper Pie,14 S. Reading Ave. in Boyertown, hosting grand opening with cheesecake and more on May 22.

St. Lukes OB/GYN Complete Womens Care,9 Daves Way, in Hamburg, will accept new patients starting May 6.

Rolling Hills Recreation mini golf course,4565 Spring Hill Dr. in Schnecksville, will hold its grand opening May 1.

The Red Rose Diner, Route 22 in Phillipsburg, has announced that it will close its doors May 2.

Pizza DOro restaurant on College Hill, Easton reopened on April 21 as Joey D's. The restaurant offers dine-in and takeout options.

The Da Vinci Science Center announced that Lin Erickson, executive director and CEO, has been named a Take the Lead honoree by the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania.

. Deliciously Decorated, 143 S. Main St. in Nazareth, will host a grand opening and ribbon cutting 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. May 8.

Jack Callaghan's is reopening as Cuzin's Pub and Grill at 2027 W. Tilghman St.

. John L. Walsh will retire as President and CEO of UGI Corporation on June 25, 2021. He will continue to serve as a member of UGI's Board of Directors.

. Bru Daddy's Brewing to launch new restaurant, Blended by Bru Daddy's, on downtown Allentown ArtsWalk. Soft opening is planned for May with grand opening in June.

BSI Corporate Benefits, LLC (BSI) promoted Valerie (Val) Lewis to Chief Operating Officer. The nationwide employee benefits consulting firm executes cost control strategies to manage their clients healthcare costs.

. UPMC Health Plan appoints Dr. Amy Meister as chief medical health and wellnessofficer

Center for Vision Loss, a nonprofit in the Lehigh Valley and Monroe County, changes name to Sights for Hope

PPL Corporation names Gregory Dudkin executive vice president and chief operating officer. Stephanie Raymond will succeed him as president of PPL Electric Utilities.

New Vision Theatres Tilghman Square 8 will become Tilghman Square 8. Its anticipated opening is in April 2021.

.Genesis Bicycles in Easton has been sold to Trek Bicycle. Genesis' retirement sale starts Thursday, April 1

European Wax Center to open at the Promenade Shops at Saucon Valley in summer 2021

Split Pine Axe Throwing opens at 627 Hamilton Street in Allentown

Krave 2 Taste opens new location at the Lehigh Valley Mall, next to Verizon. The frappe and smoothie shop will hold a grand opening event on March 27 from 12-3 p.m.

First Commonwealth Federal Credit Union appoints James Gagliano as new chief experience officer

New Bethany Ministries in Bethlehem announced several promotions: Veronne Demesyeux was named Associate Executive Director; Tina Sargent was promoted to Director of Finance and Administration; and Lisa Myers was named Controller.

. PPL Corporation named Best Place to Work for LGBTQ equality on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's 2021 Corporate Equality Index. It's the fifth consecutive year PPL has earned high marks on the national report

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Bitcoin and the world of cryptocurrencies, explained | Business News | wfmz.com - WFMZ Allentown

Bitcoin's value has jumped over $47,000 after improvement in buying sentiment. (Photo: Reuters)

Cryptocurrency prices improved over the past 24 hours as buying momentum surged in the wake of improving investor sentiment. The values of most cryptocurrencies have rebounded after a period of volatility.

Bitcoin, the worlds largest cryptocurrency, crossed $47,000 or 2.95 per cent higher than its value 24 hours ago, at 12:50 pm. Bitcoins market capitalisation jumped to $885 billion and the 24-hour trading volume remained stable at $1.03 billion.

The largest altcoin Ether also rose 2.41 per cent compared to its value 24 hours ago. It was trading at nearly $3,400 and its market capitalisation increased to $397.41 billion. The 24-hour trading volume was, however, lower at $793 million.

Cryptocurrency highlights | Check yesterday's prices

A majority of altcoins saw further improvement in their valuation over the past 24 hours and only some like Cardano and Polkadot struggled to gain momentum.

Commenting on the broad-based recovery, Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder of Mudrex, a global algorithm based crypto trading platform, said, We are witnessing a solid buying momentum across the cryptocurrency markets.

"After consolidating for some time, the markets are now inching closer towards their highs for the day. Bitcoin went past the $47,000 mark before facing a pull-back, he added.

The largest altcoin, Ethereum, went past the $3400 level. The star performers of the day were Uniswap and Chainlink. Both of these tokens were under a lot of bearish dominance for quite some time.

Cryptocurrency

Price (US Dollar)

24-hour change

Market cap (Billion)

Volume (24 Hours)

Bitcoin

47,145.80

3.19%

$887.10

$1.03 billion

Ether

3,396.93

2.61%

$398.23

$793.31 million

Dogecoin

0.240800

1.57%

$31.58

$844.12 million

Litecoin

181.69

1.43%

$12.45

$98.92 million

XRP

1.09

0.92%

$108.97

$3.39 billion

Cardano

2.39

-0.88%

$77.18

$292.40 million

DISCLAIMER: The cryptocurrency prices have been updated as of 01:10 pm and will change as the day progresses. The list is intended to give a rough idea about popular cryptocurrency trends and will be updated daily.

Click here for IndiaToday.ins complete coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Cryptocurrency prices today: Bitcoin rises over $47,000 as buying momentum stregthens - India Today

Hatewatch found the anonymous donation by analyzing a Bitcoin address belonging to Douglass Mackey, 31, a far-right, pro-Trump internet troll who police arrested at his home in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 27. Mackey posted massive amounts of hate and disinformation online, primarily on Twitter, under the alias Ricky Vaughn, and became infamous for his activism in support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Law enforcement took Mackey into custody on charges of conspiring to threaten or intimidate voters during the 2016 presidential election, according to a press release issued by the Justice Department. Hours after his arrest, far-right pundits including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and overt neo-Nazis rushed to Mackeys defense, misrepresenting him as a conservative journalist who law enforcement nabbed in a witch hunt. Carlson said his arrest was an example of martial law.

Mackeys friends and supporters established his legal defense fund, according to a description on the fundraisers homepage. Archived versions of the website indicate whoever set it up did so in early-to-mid-March. Several prominent far-right extremists, including a former White House official who now serves on a commission focused on preserving sites related to the Holocaust, promoted Mackeys fundraiser on Twitter, Gab, YouTube and other social media platforms, as well as on the neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer. Less than two days after this social media push began on the evening of March 11, an anonymous donor sent Mackey 1.026178 Bitcoin, then worth roughly $58,662.50. Hatewatch found that donors have sent around $63,450 in total to the address listed on Mackeys legal fund since March 11. The donation, which took place on either late March 12 (EST) or early March 13 (UTC), represents roughly 90% of these funds.

Hatewatch analyzed donor information from GiveSendGo, a platform that has marketed itself as a Christian alternative to popular crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe, as well as the Bitcoin address listed on Mackeys fundraising page, and found that his donors have ties to a range of far-right ideologies. One cryptocurrency donor had previously sent money to Bitcoin addresses associated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin prior to donating to Mackey. Likewise, several donors who commented on Mackeys GiveSendGo claimed Anglin, as well as Mark Dice, a prominent right-wing YouTuber, directed them to the fundraiser. In early April, a publishing house run by Matt Forney, a male supremacist author who claimed that beating and raping women is justified, announced it would donate to Mackey the proceeds from an edited volume on the Trump era.

Mackey did not respond to Hatewatch's repeated requests for comment. Likewise, a spokesperson at the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors allege that Mackey conspired to create and disseminate memes meant to encourage voters to cast invalid votes, claiming they could use hashtags on Twitter and Facebook, as well as text messages, instead of going to the ballot box. Mackey allegedly posted a meme of a Black woman that included a call to action, saying: Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text Hillary to 55925. A criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department stated that more than 4,900 people texted the number. However, the document noted that it is unclear how many did so instead of voting.

Mackey conducted this online activity under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn. (Mackey has said he took the name and avatar from Charlie Sheens character in the film series Major League.) As a 2018 Huffpost expos on Mackey noted, Vaughn posted a blend of antisemitic propaganda, such as a Nazi-era cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe, and pro-Trump messaging on his popular Twitter account.

In early 2016, Mackey explained to the white nationalist publication Radix Journal that he saw Trump as an opportunity to push American conservatives further toward the right. Speaking as Vaughn, Mackey said his goal was to introduce ideas of racial consciousness into the mix so that patriotic American conservatives dont feel bad about creating all-white communities and shunning mixed-marriages because we need racial separatism in order to maintain our unique culture and racial heritage.

A month after Mackey called for racial separatism, the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab published a study that included Mackeys Vaughn persona in its list of top influencers shaping election news and coverage online during the 2016 election cycle. In the study, which looked at the intersection of news coverage and social media, Mackey came in ahead of NBC and CBS News, as well as the Drudge Report, a blog and news aggregator popular among conservatives. Indeed, as Mother Jones noted in an October 2016 article, several Trump surrogates and campaign staff followed Vaughn on Twitter at the time of his first suspension in fall 2016.

The anonymous donor who sent Mackey a $58,662.50 donation on March 13 did so after some prominent members of the right-wing media and far-right pundits boosted Mackeys case on social media and in the press.

In the immediate aftermath of his arrest on Jan. 27, right-wing personalities decried Mackeys case as a disgrace. Among them was Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who portrayed Mackey as a conservative journalist. He claimed that federal authorities arrested Mackey because of his online mockery of Democratic politics, mentioning nothing about his advocacy for all-white communities.

You can now be arrested for saying the wrong thing. And at 7 a.m. this morning one journalist actually was arrested for that, Carlson added in a segment aired on the evening of Jan. 27.

Though Carlson told his viewers Mackey was a journalist, Hatewatch was unable to find evidence that Mackey has ever worked in media or as a reporter. HuffPost noted in 2018 that Mackey worked at an economic consulting firm in New York from 2012 to 2016. As HuffPost reported in April 2020, Mackey worked briefly as a consultant for Smartcheckr, the predecessor to the facial recognition firm Clearview AI, in or around early 2018. Tucker Carlson did not respond to Hatewatchs request for comment.

Jack Posobiec, a former correspondent with One America News Network who has collaborated extensively with white supremacists and antisemites, described Mackey as a conservative influencer in a series of tweets from Jan. 27. The same day, Mike Cernovich, a proponent of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory who rose to prominence for his defense of rape, called the case against Mackey show trial stuff and Stalin level.

Far-right and right-wing social media users began posting links to Mackeys legal fund on the evening of March 11 one day after his second arraignment.

Whoever registered the domain associated with the legal fund used a privacy tool to obscure their identity, according to domain registration records. (The homepage of Mackeys legal fund claims friends and supporters of Mackey established it.) Using these same registry records, Hatewatch identified that an anonymous user registered the domain name on April 6, 2018 less than 24 hours after Huffpost ran its expos tying Mackey to his Ricky Vaughn persona. The owner of the legal funds domain name registered it with Epik, a web hosting company and domain registrar founded by Rob Monster that has curried favor on the extreme right.

The Columbia Bugle, a pseudonymous, far-right social media personality former President Donald Trump retweeted on several occasions, was the first to post a link to Mackeys donation page at 5:41 pm EST on March 11. The tweet quoted a prior post from January featuring Carlsons Jan. 27 segment on Mackey. Tor Ekeland, a legal representative for Clearview AI whose law firm is representing Mackey, followed, posting a tweet at 6:27 pm EST with a link to the fundraiser. In the tweet, Ekeland claimed the federal government was prosecuting [Mackey] for a conspiracy to meme.

Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer, posted an appeal to his own website on March 12.

I am hereby calling on all readers to donate to his defense fund, Anglin wrote in the post, going on to call Mackey one of the most influential figures in the entire right-wing.

Hatewatchs analysis of Mackeys donation address found that the anonymous donor transferred 1.026178 Bitcoin then worth roughly $58,259.30 to the address at 1:27 a.m. UTC on March 13, or 9:27 p.m. EST on March 12. The transaction took place less than 24 hours after Anglin encouraged his readers to donate to Mackeys fund.

Hatewatch analyzed the transactions to and from the addresses listed on the homepage of Mackeys legal fund, as well as the address belonging to the anonymous donor. However, the anonymous donors activity offers few clues as to their identity. The 1.026178 Bitcoin donation to Mackey was part of a multi-part transaction that used a coin-mixing technique called a CoinJoin to split and recombine the outputs of several dozen other transactions while obscuring the ultimate source and destination of the funds.

The March 13 donation appears to be the largest single transaction involving the publicly viewable cryptocurrency addresses listed on Mackeys legal fund.

The promotional blitz around Mackeys legal fundraiser attracted donors with apparent ties to the multiple wings of the far right.

Two days after the large anonymous donation, on March 15, an anonymous Bitcoin donor who had previously made payments to the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Andrew Anglin donated $282.37 (or 0.005 Bitcoin at the time) to Mackeys fund. Hatewatchs analysis of the donors history revealed that the same donor had sent $190.71, or 0.006 Bitcoin, to the National Alliance on Jan. 4.

Donors on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding platform, cited Anglin and other far-right extremists for driving them to Mackeys fundraiser. Hatewatchs analysis of GiveSendGo data from March 11 to July 1 found that donors contributed $10,251 a little less than half of the nearly $23,000 raised on that platform as of this writing through that platform between March 12 and 14, the same time Anglin and others launched their promotional blitz. Far-right YouTuber Mark Dice directed donors to Mackeys GiveSendGo as well on April 1. Dice included a link to Mackeys GiveSendGo page in the description of the video on YouTube, which received nearly 250,000 views. Between April 1 and 2, GiveSendGo users, some of whom cited Dice by name, donated a total of $3,200 to Mackey.

On April 1, Terror House Press, a publishing house founded by Matt Forney, announced it planned to donate to Mackey the proceeds for an edited volume about Donald Trump. Writers who contributed to the edited volume include people adjacent to white nationalist and anti-democratic neo-reactionary movements. Its contributors include pseudonymous white nationalist podcaster Borzoi Boskovic, who co-hosts a podcast on white nationalist podcasting network The Right Stuff; Nick B. Steves, formerly of Social Matter, a neo-reactionary blog popular among white nationalists that was co-founded by a former Daily Caller reporter who eventually left for a Peter Thiel-backed think tank; and Bronze Aged Pervert, a far-right internet personality whose work has been praised by former White House officials. Since April, Terror House Press has donated $330 to the fund.

Photo illustration by SPLC

Original post:
Mystery Donor Backing Pro-Trump Disinfo Troll With Bitcoin - Southern Poverty Law Center

Widely followed crypto analyst Benjamin Cowen has a timeframe for when Bitcoin could finally be off to the races on a rally past all-time highs.

In a new strategy session, Cowen identifies the 20-week moving average (EMA) as the place where Bitcoin will need to hold the line in order to maintain bullish momentum.

So the $42,000-$43,000 range is in fact where we would ideally like to hold the line. And weve already tested it, so if from here we move up, well then technically, speaking we had a test of the bull market support band, and it happened in September.

The analyst says that if BTC can hold the critical level around the 20-week moving average, then fresh rallies should be in the cards for the flagship cryptocurrency. But even if Bitcoin breaks down through the major support, Cowen says that Bitcoin simply needs a bit more time before regaining the level.

If we hold it, then we have clear skies ahead. If we dont, probably just three more months, and then we should be off to the races.

Besides the 20-week moving average which Cowen believes is the bull-market support band, the analyst also identifies the eight-week moving average as a potential indicator that the next leg of Bitcoins bull market is underway.

If we hold the line at the eight-week moving average on the weekly timeframe, which is now $45,200, then that could be a really strong indication that we are on another leg like this (BTC move from $20,000 to $60,000), and this was just the first pullback.

I

Featured Image: Shutterstock/NextMarsMedia

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Heres When Bitcoin Could Be Off to the Races, According to Crypto Analyst Benjamin Cowen - The Daily Hodl

Three hundred thirty-one years ago, the first piece of paper money was printed in the United States. The Massachusetts Bay Colony supposedly issued those first bills to fund military action in King Williams War. Flash forward to today, and those bills are as ubiquitous as the British pound or Chinese renminbi. In recent years, however, there have also been talks that those bills may be replaced with a newer form of money altogether: cryptocurrency.

What is cryptocurrency? Is it really likely to replace our current cash system? Stacker answers all these questions and more in our closer look at Bitcoin and the world of cryptocurrencies. Using news reports, financial websites, and industry resources, weve answered the 10 most pressing questions you have about cryptocurrencies. While the topic is a complex one, weve done our best to discuss it in layman's terms and have avoided the more highly technical aspects that tend to bog down the discussion rather than carry it forward.

So read on to learn who invented this new form of money, how its mined, and what, exactly, Elon Musk has to do with it all. Youre sure to walk away with a better understanding of what Bitcoin is and how it affects your life.

You may also like: History of the supermarket industry in America

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Bitcoin and the world of cryptocurrencies, explained | Multimedia | henryherald.com - Henry Herald