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The chief executive of John Lewis is stepping down after two years in the job, leaving new chair Jason Tarry as the sole leader of the group.

Nish Kankiwala will become a non-executive director advising the board by March next year, the company said on Monday. He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a non-executive director in 2021 but was subsequently asked to become its first ever chief executive in March last year, in a role created by previous chair Dame Sharon White.

He helped to run the department store business John Lewis and supermarket chain Waitrose during a challenging period when both struggled with increasing competition in the high street and online, high inflation and the fallout from shop closures during the pandemic.

The partnership has sought to diversify, saying it wanted to make almost half of its profits from non-retail activities such as property rentals but, more recently under Kankiwala it has prioritised retail as part of a longer-term revival plan.

This year, it posted its first full-year profit after three consecutive years of losses, and no staff bonuses. At its most recent half-year results in September, the group reported a narrowing of losses and a slight increase in half-year sales, and said that it expected “a significant uplift in profits for this full year”.

Tesco veteran Tarry started as chair in September, replacing White. The standalone role of chief executive will not be replaced.

Tarry will be in charge of the executive team, which includes John Lewis boss Peter Ruis and Waitrose head James Bailey, as well as the partnership board.

Kankiwala said he was delighted to have led the partnership “during this time of pivotal change”. He cited improvements in cash flow — which has allowed the business to make investments such as opening more branches of Waitrose — as one of his achievements.

Tarry said Kankiwala “has been instrumental in accelerating the transformation of the partnership”.

The chair role, which is enshrined in the partnership’s constitution, has widened over the years from activities such as representing the interests of employees and promoting the business, to a more hands-on position running the business.

A FAMILY favourite restaurant chain has been saved from administration after a major buyout.

Hostmore, the UK owner and operator of TGI Fridays, has been sold just weeks after the struggling restaurant business went under.

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Breal Capital and Calveton, which jointly owns the posh restaurant business D&D London, have acquired the chain.

The rescue deal saves 51 of the chain’s 87 sites and at least 2,000 of its more than 3,000-strong workforce.

Buyers have no obligation to purchase the entirety of a bust chain.

TGI says that it is hopeful that it “may be able to secure further locations” following discussions with the landlords.

However, 36 TGI restaurants and over 1,000 staff members remain at risk for the time being.

Julie McEwan, chief executive of TGI Fridays UK, said: “TGI Fridays is a much-loved brand with a rich heritage.

“The news today marks the start of a positive future for our business following a very challenging period for the casual dining sector as a whole.

“We look to the future with confidence that the TGI Fridays brand will continue to attract loyal and new guests.”

A spokesperson for the new owners said: “We are delighted to be working with such an enthusiastic and committed Management Team to both modernise the business and capitalise on the heritage of this iconic Brand.”

The American-inspired restaurant chain continues to operate all sites as usual today.

TGI Fridays plunged into administration on September 18, putting all 87 locations at risk.

When a company enters administration, all control is passed to an appointed administrator – who has to be a licensed insolvency practitioner.

Their goal is to leverage the company’s assets and business to repay creditors.

In TGI’s case, all 87 restaurants were put up for sale.

Hostmore said that it was not expecting to “recover any meaningful value” from the sale of sites.

Since its debut in Birmingham in 1986, TGI Fridays quickly expanded nationwide, winning over diners with its casual American bistro-style experience.

Serving staff were known as Dub Dubs, and taught the art of entertaining their customers with jokes, banter, and other gimmicks like juggling and magic tricks, all performed with impeccable table craft and cheeriness.

A decade ago, the chain was acquired by a private equity firm, which rebranded it by removing all punctuation, resulting in the name being changed from T.G.I Friday’s to TGI Fridays.

In 2021, the company was spun off into Hostmore, a listed entity. The restaurants were briefly rebranded as ‘Fridays,’ but marketing chiefs quickly reverted to the original name after realising that customers still referred to it as ‘TGI’s.’

Recently, the chain’s fortunes have waned, with Hostmore reporting that UK sales have dropped by more than 10% this year compared to last year.

TGI Fridays’ biggest market is the US, where it operates 128 restaurants, including franchised sites.

It also operates more than 270 restaurants in countries around the world.

HOSPITALITY WOES

The hospitality sector has struggled to bounce back after the pandemic, facing challenges including soaring energy bills, inflation and staff shortages.

In January 2023, Byron Burger fell into administration with owners saying it would result in the loss of over 200 jobs.

The Restaurant Group (TRG), which owned Frankie & Benny’s, Chiquito and Wagamama, shut dozens of sites in the same year.

It then went on to sell its Frankie & Bennys and Chiquito brands to Cafe Rouge owner The Big Table group in September 2023.

Italian restaurant chain Prezzo also closed dozens of sites last year.

In April 2024, Tasty, the owners of Italian restaurant Wildwood and Dim T, a pan-Asian restaurant, announced plans to exit around 20 loss-making restaurants after a “challenging” start to the year.

In the same month, Whitbread revealed plans to slash its chain of branded restaurants across the UK.

Pub giant Stonegate has also raised fears about its survival as it races to plug its debts.

Britain’s “rudest restaurant” went bust in September after its parent company, Viral Ventures UK, reportedly racked up more than £400,000 worth of debt.

HonestReporting was born in 2000 in reaction to the appalling mainstream media coverage of the Second Intifada. Since then, Israel has experienced multiple crises and conflicts of varying degrees of severity. One constant has been the negative reporting that has accompanied every incident or Israeli military operation. HonestReporting has been there throughout, calling out media outlets, securing corrections, and educating the public to become better media consumers.

seemingly no end in sight. Along with every organization impacted by October 7, HonestReporting has faced enormous challenges. Yet, we’ve confronted them head-on and emerged even stronger.

Broken Borders: Changing the Parameters of the Media Battlefield

This past year has seen HonestReporting changing the very parameters of the media battlefield. couldn’t have imagined the impact our questions and the resulting content would have. 

Our Broken Borders exposé had the immediate result of removing clearly compromised Gazan journalists from the media battlefield, putting the entire global media on notice. We set out to make it unacceptable to hire Gazan reporters and photojournalists without doing due diligence on whether they are willing or able to carry out their jobs objectively. And in many cases, we succeeded. 

For example: 

• AP and CNN cut ties with freelance photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah after we had questioned his early morning presence at the Israel-Gaza border and inside Israeli communities. A photo we produced showing him being kissed on the cheek by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar also raised serious concerns.

And here is footage of Eslaiah after he crossed into Israel and took photos of a burning Israeli tank. He then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.

Note that he is not identifiable as a member of the press. But AP & CNN deemed it acceptable to use his services. pic.twitter.com/fA0VI2df2i

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 8, 2023

• Reuters distanced itself from freelance photographer Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa after we found an Instagram video of him on October 7 appearing to urge Gazans to cross over into Israel. 

Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa on Oct. 7: “I saw at least 50 female settlers that young people were taking.”

The “female settlers” this @Reuters freelancer is dehumanizing are the innocent Israeli women who were kidnapped, raped & murdered on Oct. 7 by Hamas & Gazans. 🧵 https://t.co/kukpwzOQOv

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 9, 2024

The enormous interest on social media as well as the reaction from media outlets around the globe certainly made this the biggest story we have ever dealt with as HonestReporting’s content became the headlines and HR staff were interviewed and quoted in numerous places. That some of the coverage was decidedly hostile merely demonstrated how the international media were circling the wagons in the face of the questions hanging over some of their number and those in their employ.

HonestReporting has blazed a trail for a new industry of investigative work as many others have followed our lead and put open-source intelligence to work, exposing the agendas of those who have provided some of the most one-sided and biased coverage of Israel. And it’s led to real tangible results. 

For example: 

• As a result of HonestReporting’s expose of his anti-Israel and antisemitic social media history, the main reporter covering the war in Gaza for the AP, Issam Adwan was reassigned pending an investigation. Adwan’s byline has not been seen on AP’s Israel coverage since.

🚨 BREAKING: @FoxNews reports @AP Gaza correspondent Issam Adwan has been removed from reporting duties as a result of HonestReporting’s expose of his anti-Israel and antisemitic social media posts.https://t.co/dUWfg6h0rs pic.twitter.com/zVQm5bdYZ8

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 13, 2023

• CNN announced that it would no longer use a Gaza freelancer Abdel Qader Sabbah after HonestReporting exposed his ties to Hamas.

🚨 News Flash: Not All Journalists Are Who They Seem

Did you know some Gaza “journalists” have ties to Hamas? Meet Abdel Qader Sabbah, a freelancer who worked for CNN until his connections to Hamas were exposed. This isn’t just an exception—it’s the rule. pic.twitter.com/kXq3u5FrQl

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 7, 2024

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While Associated Press, AFP, Reuters and CNN have all had to sever ties or disassociate themselves from compromised Palestinian media employees, there are still international media outlets who trying to get away with hiring journalists who peddle antisemitism or support terrorism. And that includes Palestinian media workers with uncomfortably close relations with Gaza’s Hamas rulers. 

HonestReporting continues campaigning for accountability concerning those journalists who remain in place despite the evidence against them. 

These include: 

• Palestinian journalist Abeer Ayyoub, who works for the Wall Street Journal and used her X account on October 7 to spread terrorist propaganda and fake news, as Hamas massacred thousands of Israelis. 

• Veteran Reuters video journalist in the West Bank, Hamuda Hassan, who shared terrorist propaganda on October 7 and spread antisemitic content referring to “the ZioNazi Israeli occupation.” 

• CBS News journalist in Gaza, Marwan al-Ghoul, who praised terrorists at an official event of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and had contacts with terrorists as a member of the Gaza City municipality council. 

We will keep reminding both the media outlets and their audiences until it is no longer acceptable to keep so-called journalists like these on the payroll. 

Our impact has also been felt in the legal sphere. HonestReporting’s work has inspired a number of legal cases brought by Israelis and Americans directly impacted by October 7. This includes a lawsuit that accuses the AP of “materially supporting terrorism” by paying “alleged Hamas-associated” photojournalists for images captured during and immediately after the October 7 massacres. The lawsuit focuses mainly on Hassan Eslaiah, the freelance photojournalist who featured so prominently in our “Broken Borders” exposé.

Such has been the concern of the media industry that HonestReporting even impacted the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. While Reuters picked up the prize for Breaking News Photography, according to Ynet News, the Pulitzer Prizes administrator said that Reuters “had willingly shared the HonestReporting website’s report [on Gazan photojournalists infiltrating Israel on Oct. 7] upon entering the competition for review by the award committee.”

We’ve continued to expose more and more journalists over the past year, conclusively proving that the coverage coming out of Gaza is so compromised as to raise doubts over every mainstream media report being filed from the territory.

Fighting on the Social Media Battlefield

But it’s not enough to do the hard work exposing what’s really going on with the media coverage. Reaching a critical mass of people on social media has never been so important. As much as the fighting has taken place inside Gaza and more recently over Lebanon, never before has the connection between the physical battlefield and the battlefield of the media been more significant. Social media, in particular, has been at the forefront of the fight for hearts and minds as the younger generation continues to get their news about the conflict from platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter).

HonestReporting’s social media profile was already rapidly expanding during the course of 2023. After October 7, it hit the stratosphere. From 3.5 million impressions across all platforms during the previous month, October 2023 saw us hit over 56 million, while engagement went up from 0.5 million to over 11 million. 2024 has continued to see impressive metrics. As we’ve produced more and more quality social media content addressing the big issues, so millions of people have seen and engaged with that content. We’ve reached beyond the choir to audiences whose only exposure to Israel and the Middle East may have been via some of the most hostile and even antisemitic accounts.

That’s why HonestReporting has been taking on some of the biggest influencers who have been spreading some of the biggest falsehoods about Israel and the conflict, including: Dan Bilzerian, John Oliver, Bella Hadid, AOC & Nick Fuentes, Mehdi Hasan, Michael Moore, John Stewart & Christiane Amanpour, Joe Rogan, and Jackson Hinkle.

While social media may deal in soundbites, we’ve also produced important longer-form content. After nearly a year of constant Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon, Israel finally and decisively responded. From some of the media coverage, however, it appeared as if Israel had initiated and was responsible for the outbreak of hostilities. That’s why HonestReporting’s collaboration with  LA-based music and pop culture journalist Eve Barlow as far back as March 2024 demonstrated how we were able to preempt the issue and prepare an audience to understand well in advance why Israel might be forced to take action against Hezbollah.

Taking On the Big Issues

There have been so many issues that October 7 and the resulting conflict have thrown up during the past year. And the impact on diaspora Jewish communities around the world has been enormous, including a tidal wave of antisemitism. So many people have looked for usable and digestible information that they can deploy, whether online or even communicating with friends and workplace colleagues.

Issues have included:

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We would all wish that we could turn the clock back to October 6, 2023. While we can only look at the past year with immense grief, g this period. The results that we have achieved on the media battlefield have been tangible and have the potential for long-lasting change.

This war will eventually come to an end. But as we’ve learned over the years, anti-Israel media bias and its impact on both Israel and Jews in other countries will continue. And HonestReporting will be there to confront it.

Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region.

Nearly 2,400 jobs at TGI Fridays’ UK business have been saved after the American-themed restaurant chain secured a rescue deal.

Breal Capital and Calveton have agreed to buy the chain whose UK owner fell into administration last month.

However, more than 1,000 TGI Fridays UK staff will be made redundant as only 51 of the 87 restaurants are being bought under the deal.

The administrators, Teneo, said the other restaurants have been closed with immediate effect.

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein famously doubted that gravity was a force. In 1915, he posited that gravity was not a force but rather an effect of the warping of space and time in the presence of mass. Though an unorthodox idea in his time, this proved revolutionary. Einstein’s theory of general relativity showed mathematically that gravity is not really a force of attraction between all objects with mass, as 17th-century physicist Isaac Newton thought.

Newton thought that gravity was like magnetism. He gave us the following equation for gravity:

With the advent of modern physics, the scientific community reduced apparently diverse phenomena — like electricity, magnetism, tension, friction etc. — to four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. Scientists believe these are responsible for all observations of energy-matter interactions.

However, gravity behaves differently from the other three. Further, general relativity has resisted all attempts to harmonize it with quantum physics, which explains the other three forces. Mounting evidence suggests that gravity is not a force at all. If true, this breakthrough could solve one of the oldest problems in physics.

What we currently know about gravity

According to some astrophysicists, the problem is that quantum theory still cannot adequately explain gravity. We don’t know how to calculate gravity’s behavior at the high energies or small scales where particles exhibit their inherently quantum nature.

Attempts to explain gravity using quantum physics — “quantum gravity” — present a hypothetical particle called a graviton. The graviton determines the force of gravity on a thing. Because of a mathematical issue, no full quantum field theory exists about gravitons. Similarly, there is limited understanding of how the quantum field that underpins gravity — assuming one exists — behaves at all under any circumstances.

For this reason, one might think that gravitons under quantum mechanics may be virtual, meaning they’re difficult to detect and don’t follow expected patterns. However, gravity waves have been observed, proving their existence.

With that said, researchers are postulating intriguing observations at the microscopic level. These fascinating suggestions could potentially reconcile the disconnect between gravity and quantum mechanics.

Some 100 years ago, Einstein proposed an effect called “gravitational lensing.” According to his theory, a strong gravity field, such as those created by a star or galaxy, should bend light and create something akin to a lens. Some interpret this phenomenon as the result of gravitational pull by these massive bodies. Others may explain it as being the result of the dependent force of gravity on cosmic energy and warpage, caused by the curvature of space. Either way, the effect is now widely used to peer behind massive objects throughout outer space.

In 2018, the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Virgo detector made an amazing discovery. Scientists directly detected gravitational waves — which LIGO describes as “ripples in space-time” — as well as light generated from a neutron star collision. The scientific community had never before seen a cosmic event in gravitational waves and light.

A contentious solution

Now to discuss a rather contentious hypothesis within the scientific community Gravity may be a dependent force. Since quantum theory fits other observed forces but not gravity, the issue may be that gravity simply is not an independent force.

Energy and matter are inextricably intertwined, with energy comprising an estimated 75% of the known universe. Perhaps all primary forces are subsets of energy under a unified theory.

Scientists have observed that the currently estimated 13.8 billion-year-old universe, with its billions of galaxies, gravitational black holes, neutron stars and other massive objects, continues to expand at an accelerating rate. This constant acceleration, combined with the warping curvature of space and time, could be the cause of gravity. This concept would be consistent with Einstein’s theory, but extended to a larger, rapidly expanding framework.

The prevailing scientific opinion in the 1920s held that the universe was static. When Einstein tried to produce a general theory of relativity, he found that it seemed to predict an eventual gravitational collapse of the universe — a concept now commonly called the Big Crunch. To produce a model in which the universe was static and stable — which Einstein then believed was the proper result — he introduced the cosmological constant, a mathematical “fudge factor” labeled “Λ” (the Greek letter, lambda). Then in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the observable universe was, in fact, expanding. Confronted with this new knowledge, Einstein called his proposed cosmological constant “the biggest blunder of [his] life.”

However, this may not have been such a massive mistake, if our verified assumption concerning the universe’s accelerating expansion were to replace his “static universe” assumption. Perhaps an updated Gravitational Constant (GC) that quantifies and explains the dependent nature of gravity on the warpage of space could modify the “G” in the earlier equation.

Each answer raises more questions

Where do we go from here? If we assume the above hypothesis that gravity is just a dependent force, all primary forces could be concordant with quantum mechanics. Perhaps the answer is that all assumed forces are dependent forces — dependent on cosmic energy and the warpage caused by the curvature of space.

Additionally, dark energy and dark matter still need to be sufficiently defined. Perhaps that is our equivalent fudge factor to Einstein’s. It could explain the lack of observed mass in the universe and energy required for an accelerating and expanding universe, and therefore gravity.

Quantum physics presents us with obstacles. But with every discovery we make, we come closer to fully understanding the truth of our universe.

[Beaudry Young and Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.