Latest news with #Macedo
Newsweek
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Dog Goes To Spend His First Influencer Paycheck—Results Are Adorable
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. For most dogs, a trip to the pet store is a treat. But for Ryder, a 3-year-old Dalmatian, his recent visit to PetSmart was a business trip with an adorable twist: he was there to spend his very first influencer paycheck. His owner, Sandra Macedo, 29, captured the heartwarming event in a TikTok video and told Newsweek about the pivotal moment for Ryder—a sweet pup training for a greater purpose. The clip follows Ryder and Macedo on their mission to spend his $85.27 influencer earnings. The footage shows Ryder navigating the aisles of PetSmart, seeming to make his own selections. By the end of their shopping spree, the duo had garnered a collection of toys, with the total coming in at $76.97. Photos from Sandra Macedo's TikTok video of her dog, Ryder, "spending" his first paycheck at PetSmart. Photos from Sandra Macedo's TikTok video of her dog, Ryder, "spending" his first paycheck at PetSmart. @ryderthedal/TikTok Macedo shared her immense pride in watching Ryder "spend" his hard-earned money. "It honestly brings me so much joy being able to spoil him for all his 'hard work,'" she said. "Sure, I plan, film and edit the content, but he's the real superstar." Among his new treasures, one item clearly stood out to the Dalmatian: "His favorite item was definitely the tug toy," Macedo said. "Tug-of-war is his favorite game, so there's no surprise it was a big hit." 'Our Full-Time Job' Ryder's journey to becoming a pet influencer began in 2022 when Macedo got him—her first dog in about eight years. "I started his TikTok account the same month I brought him home, as I wanted to document the entire journey almost like a digital diary," she said. And, beyond the adorable shopping trips, Ryder's influencer income plays a crucial role in ensuring he lives his best life. "[I want to] continue to give Ryder the best life possible," she said. "What started as 'posting for fun' has turned into our full-time job." The opportunities from working with various pet and other brands have "truly improved his quality of life and have allowed me to give him the best-possible care." Macedo is meticulous about how Ryder's earnings are utilized. "The income we make from our social-media accounts go toward his care first," she said. These essential expenses include vet costs, pet insurance, monthly prevention, food, toys, treats, grooming, professional training and more. Macedo's philosophy for Ryder's life is expansive: "As I like to say, their world is as big as we make it, and I want to show him just how big this world is." Looking ahead, she dreams of exploring the country with Ryder, and hopefully one day traveling abroad together. Ryder's influence extends beyond personal gain; he actively gives back to his community, too. "He and I are a therapy dog team in training," Macedo said. The duo have undergone professional training and have already visited elementary schools, nursing homes and a school for adults with developmental disabilities. Their goal is to become a nationally recognized therapy dog team within the next few months. Furthermore, Ryder's platform is used for animal welfare. Receiving products from pet brands—sometimes, more than they can reasonably use—Macedo donates new and gently used toys, food, supplements and more to their local shelter, LifeLine Animal Project. "Giving back is extremely important to me," Macedo said. "Ryder is one lucky dog because of the continuous support from our online community. So, in return, we give back to our local community." Ryder's story is just one example of how pet influencers can leverage their online popularity for both personal enrichment and community impact, proving that even a dog's "paycheck" can spread joy far and wide.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
We've been ostracised for telling the truth about how the liberal elite got Covid so wrong
It is more than five years since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and yet the measures used to respond to it still, it seems, have the capacity to shock. Stephen Macedo, a liberal academic at Princeton University, has just spent months examining how the Western political class got its response to the crisis so wrong – an endeavour that has made him an outlier among many of his peers. Macedo, 68, a professor of politics, says he was 'shocked on a daily basis' by information that he and Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs at the university, unearthed throughout the writing of their book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. 'I have often not been able to believe what I've been reading,' says Macedo. Among the most perturbing facts was a 'pandemic preparedness' plan published by the World Health Organisation in 2019, months before the coronavirus outbreak, followed by a report by Johns Hopkins University later that year, in which both sets of authors were 'sceptical about a whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPIs, i.e. face coverings and social distancing],' Lee explains. A 2011 UK government pre-pandemic plan had reached similar conclusions. And yet these 'interventions' formed a central part of the response to the pandemic in Britain and the United States. Along with Lee, Macedo has become a loud voice in the effort to challenge how the 'laptop classes' defined our pandemic response, and got it badly wrong. In their book, which is published on Tuesday and has been described by The New York Times as 'an invitation to have a reckoning', Macedo and Lee argue that, in the face of a global emergency, democracy and free speech failed. We meet at Princeton, in New Jersey, on a grey spring day, earnest undergrads clutching coffee cups passing along the cherry blossom-lined streets. The authors explain that their goal is 'not just to look back for looking back's sake' but to reflect on where the liberal political class veered off course, and set out the change of approach they believe is required ahead of the next global emergency. The Johns Hopkins analysis, they point out, warned that the evidence base for controlling a future pandemic was 'poor' and that politicians should be careful not to promise results 'that may not pan out'. It also advised them to 'weigh the costs' of simply shutting everything down – from isolating humans, who are social creatures, to closing businesses, and the risk of learning delays for children being kept out of school. But despite being written just months earlier, the report 'seemed to afford little interest at the time the pandemic struck'. Border closures, contact tracing and quarantine were 'not recommended under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic [but] these very recent documents don't seem to have been consulted,' says Lee, 56. 'The evidence base was weak at the beginning of Covid, and it's weak now.' As mask-wearing spread across Britain and some households even began cleaning newly bought groceries, for fear of catching Covid from the air or even their shopping, governments in the UK, US and beyond disregarded what surely should have been considered essential literature, and elevated scientists to policymakers. A paper written by epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of University College London in March 2020 projected that, without a lockdown, 2.2 million people would be dead by August. Lee describes the report as 'powerfully influential', saying it was 'heard around the world'. Though at that stage Ferguson was 'a long-time mathematical modeller who had some longstanding views on the efficacy of NPIs that were not necessarily embraced by the whole of public health,' he became a defining voice of the UK – and global – pandemic response. Along with measures such as mask-wearing, 'follow the science' became gospel within Boris Johnson's government. This mantra, too, was 'profoundly misleading', Lee says, given the 'lack of a scientific base for the policies that were adopted'.He adds: 'Science can never tell us what to do. It can inform decisions, but policy choices always involve value judgments.' That catchphrase – which essentially allowed political leaders to defer decision-making responsibilities to a narrow cohort of academics – served their interests, 'because it was a way for them to avoid being held accountable'. At the time, there appeared to be a singular response to the crisis. Where was the debate over what was working, and what clearly wasn't? Any such nuance was swallowed up by the 'wartime mentality', says Macedo. The mindset was, 'We have to defeat this thing: if we fight them on the beaches, if we fight them hard enough, we can do it… The debate became excessively polarised and moralised.' Between premature policy consensus, unwillingness to re-examine decisions and excoriation for those who did speak out, there ensued a 'moral panic – that those with doubts were somehow morally deficient,' says Lee. It is clear now, Macedo continues, that 'there was not sufficient respect for dissent. We would have been much better to have asked the sorts of questions that dissenters were raising'. Failure to do so 'hurt us, which hurt our policy responses, which hurt our ability to course-correct over the course of the pandemic as we learnt more, and had greater reason to course-correct'. Had those frank discussions taken place, the entire outlook both during Covid and in the years after – from deaths to economic woes – could have looked altogether different. Ninety-three per cent of people in the UK backed the first lockdown, with similar numbers supporting NPIs including social distancing of two metres, washing hands for 20 seconds at a time, and isolating if they or a family member had symptoms. Macedo acknowledges that the apparent certainty of such protective measures in what was then a fearful climate made it easy to get swept up in groupthink: 'I was rolling along with it,' he recalls. Lee, meanwhile, 'could think of a whole lot of reasons at the time we were sent home from the university [in March 2020] why this might not work. You're trying to co-ordinate the whole of society?' she laughs. 'I didn't think this was reasonable.' Covid measures were meant to benefit the masses, yet a clear class component persisted. 'People making the policies were educated elites, journalists, academics; we could be doing this on our laptops,' says Macedo. 'A lot of work was done by educated classes, and so there's a blindness there. If you don't have to work outside the home, then it's easy to forget all the people who do.' Where there was divergence from the measures taken up by most of the West (Italy's early lockdown also provided a blueprint for many countries, the academics note), backlash followed. Republican states such as Georgia and Florida reopened quickly after the first lockdown, and didn't pursue such strict measures again (Democrat-leaning states, on average, shuttered for two and a half times as long). But by the time of the vaccine rollout in late 2020, there was 'really not a difference in the Covid mortality rate across red states and blue states', says Lee. The pair worried that highlighting pandemic errors would leave them 'ostracised; we'd never publish a book, nobody would listen. And we've had a little bit of that from some places', says Macedo. Since its initial release in the US, in March, academic friends 'who have been my mentors for years and who have always read everything I wrote, and commented… they just seem to be either totally uninterested, some of them, or worried [about voicing an opinion]'. Reception has overall been largely positive, they add, from publications on both sides. Yet even where there is acceptance that things could have been handled differently, there is a lack of interrogation into what went wrong, and why. 'You would think there'd be an intellectual interest in these questions; the reputational stakes are high here,' according to Macedo. 'But the longer people are dug in, the worse it is.' There remains, he feels, 'a kind of reluctance. But cracks are opening.' One area where the dial has shifted is the lab leak theory. Was it too quickly dismissed? 'There's no question about that,' says Macedo. In January 2020, scientists described the genetic sequence of the virus as tantamount to 'a recipe for creating Covid'; emails between Anthony Fauci (then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), Francis Collins (former director of the National Institutes of Health) and Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust) described the leak of a Sars-like virus from a low-security lab as a 'likely explanation'. By the next month, however, the notion was being described as a 'racist conspiracy theory'. Why? The belief among public health figures was that 'it'll be bad for international harmony; it'll be a distracting debate. The scientists in the Slack messages [exchanged between those discussing the matter] say, 'imagine the s--- show if anybody suggests that the Chinese originated [it] in a lab, even by accident''. To Lee, 'it's so interesting that there is not much public outrage' about what is, at best, surely deeply questionable decision-making. (Organisations including the CIA now openly support the lab leak theory.) Macedo calls the situation 'very strange. We don't purport to fully understand it… but it does seem to us that that debate has been singularly one-sided.' Of concern to the academics now is that, in the face of another global threat – pandemic, killer comet – it is all but inevitable that closed-minded thinking will take hold once again. 'There needs to be a wider reckoning here so that we make broader decisions next time,' they say. The big decisions must involve some public deliberation too, Macedo says, given that it was the public being 'asked to make sacrifices'. They are hopeful that their book 'provokes a kind of rethinking' and hopefully leads to a 'willingness… to acknowledge mistakes that were made, and to do better'. In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee is published on Tuesday Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Telegraph
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
We've been ostracised for telling the truth about how the liberal elite got Covid so wrong
Five years on from the pandemic and yet Covid and the measures used to respond to it still, it seems, have the capacity to shock. Stephen Macedo, a liberal academic at Princeton University, has just spent months examining how the Western political class got its response to the pandemic so wrong – an endeavour that has made him an outlier among many of his peers. Macedo, 68, a professor of politics, says he was 'shocked on a daily basis' by information that he and Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs at the university, unearthed throughout the writing process. 'I have often not been able to believe what I've been reading,' says Macedo. Among the most perturbing was a plan published by the World Health Organisation in 2019, months before the pandemic started, followed by a report by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) later that year, in which both were were 'sceptical about a whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPIs, i.e. face coverings and social distancing],' Lee explains. A 2011 UK government pre-pandemic plan had reached similar conclusions. And yet these 'interventions' formed a central part of the response to the pandemic in Britain and the United States. Along with Lee, Macedo has become a loud voice in the effort to challenge how the 'laptop classes' defined our pandemic response, and got it badly wrong. In their book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, published on Tuesday and described by The New York Times as 'an invitation to have a reckoning', the two men argue that, in the face of a global emergency, democracy and free speech failed. We meet at Princeton, in New Jersey, on a grey spring day, earnest undergrads clutching coffee cups passing along the cherry blossom-lined streets. Macedo and Lee explain that their goal is 'not just to look back for looking back's sake' but to reflect on where the liberal political class veered off course, and set out the change of approach that is required ahead of the next global emergency. The JHU analysis warned that 'public health officials would need to advise politicians that there's a poor evidence base here, and that they shouldn't go out and make promises for results that may not pan out, and that they needed to weigh the costs' of simply shutting everything down – from isolating humans, who are social creatures, to closing businesses, and the risk of learning delays for children being kept out of school.
Bloomberg
10-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Macedo on Authentic Restaurant Brands' M&A Strategy: Choppin' It Up
Authentic Restaurant Brands wants to be national but it's going to get there by being regional across the country, CEO Alex Macedo tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Choppin' It Up podcast, Macedo sits down with BI's senior restaurant and foodservice analyst Michael Halen to discuss the company's unique strategy of acquiring strong regional brands and helping them improve sales and profits instead of supercharging unit growth. He also comments on the M&A market and why it's become increasingly difficult to scale up national brands in a cost-effective way.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Billionaire televangelist slashes price on $14.6M Florida condo amid scrutiny over church wealth: report
The wealthiest religious broadcaster in the world is looking to offload his luxury condo in Florida. The beachfront residence of Brazilian billionaire televangelist Edir Macedo in the ultra-exclusive Porsche Design Tower Miami is now listed for just under $14.6 million after a price cut, according to public real estate records. Macedo, founder and bishop of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), is no stranger to lavish living or controversy. His net worth is estimated at $1.8 billion, ranking him 1,901st on Forbes' real-time billionaire index. By comparison, Kim Kardashian's net worth is $1.7 billion. Palm Beach, The Wall Street Of The South, Has A Hot Luxury Real Estate Market The Porsche Design Tower, a $560 million architectural marvel completed in 2017, is famous for its car elevators that transport luxury vehicles directly into private condo garages. In 2013, The Real Deal reported that "nearly two dozen of the homes — 22 — under contract will belong to billionaires."The tower has a mandatory homeowners association with monthly fees ranging from $4,277 to $12,069. Macedo's neighbors over the years have included international celebrities like Lionel Messi, Colombian pop star Maluma, Mexican actress Thalía and Andrea Romanello Ferdinand, daughter of Patrick Romanello, who The New York Times reported was "alleged to be an associate of the Bonanno crime family." Read On The Fox Business App But the Florida condo might not be the only real estate Macedo's family holds in the U.S. According to a property intelligence database reviewed by watchdog group the Trinity Foundation, another Sunny Isles Beach condo worth $9.6 million is linked to the family. Yet, according to the Trinity Foundation's research, the Miami-Dade County property appraiser lists only a shell LLC as the owner with no names publicly attached. The Trinity Foundation, a nonprofit that investigates religious fraud, has long tracked Macedo's financial activities. "Macedo's empire includes media companies, banking interests, and international real estate," the group noted, citing his control of Brazil's Record TV network and Banco Renner. The Universal Church isn't just active in Brazil. It operates worldwide, including in Portugal, Mexico and the United States. The church even built a modern version of Solomon's Temple in São Paulo, Brazil. Despite its clear wealth and power, the church's "Contact Us" page on its U.S. website claims "the Universal Church does not provide financial aid programs."Their 24/7 livestream available on the Universal Church's website currently offers "Blessed Water" for sale, which purports to heal everything from depression to cancer. According to the Trinity Foundation, the organization also owns four private jets and a helicopter, assets rarely seen in the nonprofit religious world. Macedo's empire has had legal troubles. In 2008, he and nine of his associates were charged in Brazil with laundering roughly $2 billion. As reported by The Associated Press, "The church allegedly used fake companies to launder the money, moving the assets abroad and then returning them in the form of loans used by Macedo and his accomplices to buy businesses, prosecutors said." Brazilian courts ultimately did not convict Macedo or his co-defendants. More issues surfaced in 2019, when authorities in Angola charged four leaders of Macedo's church with financial crimes, including money laundering. According to Ver Angola, the fallout led to the expulsion of 22 Brazilian church members by Angolan immigration Fox Business On The GoThe Universal Church of the Kingdom of God did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for article source: Billionaire televangelist slashes price on $14.6M Florida condo amid scrutiny over church wealth: report Sign in to access your portfolio
