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| Wayne LaPierre |
Dumbo’s revenge… Wayne LaPierre, the scourge of gun control activists, is stepping down as chief of the National Rifle Assn. Good riddance.
Tough guy Wayne never did regain his PR footing after a video emerged of his failure to shoot an elephant in a preserve in Botswana.
The video was filmed in 2013 by an NRA crew and was designed to attract hunters to the NRA.
The botched shooting never aired, and the footage was obtained in 2021 by Trace, a non-profit that monitors the gun business, and New Yorker magazine.
It showed LaPierre wounding the elephant and then shooting the immobilized animal three times at point blank range but failing to kill it.
A guide put the elephant out of its misery..
LaPierre’s wife, Susan, was a better shot than hubby. She brought another animal down, cut off its tail and shouted, “victory.”
The New Yorker reported the video showed LaPierre was “a coddled executive who is clumsy with a firearm.”
Wayne will now have plenty of time to sharpen his marksman skills.
Oops, it does it again… Xerox, which has been in a restructuring mode since the 1990s, has announced its latest round of cutbacks as 15 percent of its 23K workforce will be cut during the first-quarter.
The job cuts are part of Xerox’s “Reinvention” survival initiative, which is supposed to deliver a $300M improvement in adjusted operating income by 2026.
“Reinvention” follows Xerox’s “Project Own It” initiative that was rolled out during the second half of 2018 as a transformation project.
Xerox claims Project Own It resulted in $1.8B in gross savings during the 42-month period ended Dec. 31.
CEO Steven Bandrowczak said Jan. 3 that Louie Pastor is returning to Xerox to head its Reinvention Office and the newly established global business services organization. Pastor had stepped down as EVP-chief corporate development & legal officer last year.
Xerox is masterful when it comes to naming retrenchment moves, but its fundamental problem stems from its name becoming a verb for copying during the 1970s.
If Bandrowczak wants to truly reinvent the company, he should ditch the corporate name.
Going overboard on Gay coverage… The New York Times has given a lot of coverage to the travails of ex-Harvard University president Claudine Gay, including precious real estate on its op-ed page in which she told of her “wrenching but necessary decision” to resign.
The Harvard saga may be journalism catnip to the Ivy League writers at the NYT and to the school’s wealthy alumni-donors. But what about the rest of us?
The Times gives scant coverage to the financing shortfall at the NYC public college system. CUNY enrolls 270K New York students, while Harvard draws 25K students nationwide.
On the same day that the NYT gave the op-ed platform to Gay, New York State Health Commissioner James McDonald released a report showing that a quarter of the people in the state go hungry each day.
The Bronx suffers the highest rate of food insecurity. Queens and Brooklyn at 30.9 percent and 30.1 percent, respectively, rank among the top five food insecure counties in the state.
The Times bailed on the food insecurity story.
It did run a front page story on Jan. 2 warning Sunday travelers on the New York Thruway to pack a lunch because the Chick-fil-A outlets along the 570-mile roadway are closed on that day.
That story may be useful to drivers on their way to Cambridge, MA.
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