Liquor Regulators Are Seeking Revenge on Bars That Broke Pandemic Rules

Published

1 year ago

February 23, 2024

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During the height of the pandemic summer of 2020, the proprietors of the Burning Bridge Tavern worked with local officials in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, to host a series of outdoor gatherings for the community.

For their trouble, the bar’s owners got slapped with a series of citations by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), the government agency that oversees and manages the sale of alcohol in the state. The citations were ticky-tack offenses, according to Burning Bridge’s chief financial officer, Mike Butler. Twice, the bar was cited for noise violations because they’d allowed a band playing at the gathering to plug into the tavern’s electricity supply. Another offense occurred when the owners and some family members were drinking inside the tavern, which was closed to the public, during a period when indoor dining was prohibited.

A frustrating situation, but not the end of the world. Burning Bridge’s owners paid the fines associated with the citations and assumed that was that. But then the bar had to renew its liquor license.

“They denied it. They said, ‘Oh, you’re the guys that got all those citations,'” Butler says. “It was a real gut punch.”

Turns out, over the past two years the PLCB has pushed dozens of Pennsylvania establishments that racked up pandemic-?related citations to sign “conditional licensing agreements” to renew their liquor permits. In some cases, those agreements have forced the sale of licensesbut in most cases, as with Burning Bridge, they’ve added additional conditions to the license that could prevent a future renewal from being approved.

While the PLCB cannot revoke existing licenses, the board is empowered to object to the renewal of a license or to demand the license can only be renewed conditionally. “In extreme cases,” PLCB Press Secretary Shawn Kelly says, the PLCB can force the sale of a liquor license, though the board only pursues that option when “there is an operational and citation history that calls for such an agreement.”

Even though Burning Bridge’s owners weren’t forced to sell their license, Butler says signing the conditional licensing agreement has come with real costs: The bar’s insurance premium tripled as a result of being viewed as a greater risk.

Typically, those agreements have been used to curb nuisance bars or force establishments with a history of legal problems, like serving underage patrons, to clean up their acts. Recently, however, the PLCB has taken a hardline stance against establishments that violated pandemic-era rules.

“The people who violated the governor’s mandates and orders should face some consequences,” argued Mary Isenhour, one of the PLCB’s three board members, at a January 2022 meeting where the first several of the COVID-related conditional licensing agreements were approved.

Isenhour was responding to an objection raised by a fellow board member, Michael Negra, who argued that the PLCB should take the view that businesses had “paid their dues” during the pandemic and should not face additional sanction now. Negra left the PLCB in June 2022 and now works for a ?Pittsburgh-based lobbying firm. He did not return requests for comment.

After Negra’s departure, the PLCB has unanimously approved dozens of conditional licensing agreements for COVID-?related violations, including at least 10 that have required the sale of a license, based on a review of PLCB meeting minutes.

Kelly, the PLCB spokesman, maintains that licensees are “under no obligation” to sign conditional licensing agreements.

But any licensee that refuses would face a set of unattractive alternatives: not having the license renewed, or being drawn into a legal battle against the PLCB in state court.

“Do you risk your entire business, your license, the loans, all of that to fight” in a real court, asks Butler. “Or do you just kind of hold your nose and take your medicine? Tactically, for us, we weren’t in a position to say, ‘Yeah, we’ll run that risk.'”

Chuck Moran, executive director of the Pennsylvania Licensed Beverage and Tavern Association, acknowledges that pandemic-era public health orders left many establishments with a difficult choice between following the law and surviving financially. Fairly or unfairly, “those who broke the rules went the wrong way and now they’re paying the price,” he says.

The whole matter raises some complicated questions about how our political institutions ought to handle, with the benefit of hindsight, the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic and policy makers’ response to it.

“The feeling was that our government really isn’t working to try and help us,” says Butler. “At this point, it feels like they’re coming after us.”

UK

‘It shouldn’t be like this’: Full-time workers turning to food banks

Published

18 mins ago

August 11, 2025

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'It shouldn't be like this': Full-time workers turning to food banks

At a community food table in Staffordshire, produce is being handed out for free.

“I need to come here otherwise we’d be living on bread,” Rebecca Flynn told Sky News.

The 51-year-old said: “I’m earning pretty decent money, but it’s not enough.”

It gives you an insight into just how deeply the cost of living crisis is biting – because Rebecca is working full-time as an office manager for a day service for people with learning difficulties.

On top of that, she has a second job going door-to-door on evenings and weekends, selling cosmetics and homeware.

“There’s nothing more I can do. Unless I win the lottery or get another job. It should be noticed that people are in this state,” she says.

“Local councils, local governments, they need to see what’s going on, come to ground level. It’s 2025. It shouldn’t be like this.”

But it’s not just Rebecca working all hours and needing food handouts to survive.

Alex Chapman is the co-founder of the Norton Canes Community Food Table, and says a third of the people who use it are working full-time.

“It’s mad that you’re working a good job and you think you’d be able to afford everything and go on holiday and everything like that, but in reality they’re struggling to put food on the table,” he says.

“We’re seeing a massive increase in the people that are using the food table. We see them in their work outfits. Professionals, nurses – you don’t expect them to be struggling because they’re working full-time. People who aren’t working – you expect them to be struggling. But it’s across the board.”

The food table is in Cannock Chase.

Sky News analysis of local authorities gives an insight into why people are feeling dissatisfied their salaries are no longer delivering the comfortable lifestyles they thought hard work and a good job would deliver.

Over the past few years, Cannock Chase has gone from being a middle-class part of Britain to one of the lowest-earning areas in the UK.

In 2021, UK average annual salaries were just short of £26,000 – Cannock Chase was almost identical, according to Sky News analysis of Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Since then, the UK average wage has increased by 21.6% – or more than £5,000 a year – keeping pace with high inflation.

But in Cannock Chase, salaries have only risen by 8.4% – meaning on average people are now £300 worse off per month than the average worker across the UK.

SEE HOW YOUR AREA HAS COPED WITH THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS

It won’t have escaped your attention that prices have gone up, by a lot – by a fifth since 2021, the highest sustained rate since the 1990s – with some of the biggest rises among essentials like energy and food.

But, across the whole country, wages have actually done a pretty good job at keeping up with inflation. The problem is that the wage increase is an average, made up of highs and lows, while the price rises affect us more uniformly.

That means if you haven’t had a pay-rise, you will quite quickly find that you can’t afford as many of the things you used to.

People in places like Brentwood in Essex, the Cotswolds in rural Gloucestershire, and Melton in Leicestershire, have seen their wages increase at twice the rate of prices in the last few years, on average.

But on the other end of the scale are places like Cannock Chase, where inflation has been more than double the rate of wage increases.

It used to be a place where average earnings pretty much exactly reflected the UK midpoint. Now, people in Cannock are about £300 worse-off every month than the average person.

See how your area compares with our look-up.

Louise Schwartz, who has two children, describes herself as middle-class. After 20 years in the classroom she now has three jobs, working 50 hours a week as a teaching coach, at a software firm and giving private music lessons.

Her husband is an estate agent. They have a mortgage and three cars and together earn around £80,000 a year.

She says the family loves travelling together but can’t afford to go on holiday this year: “It makes me feel sad for my kids, more than anything, that we can’t give them a week away.

“We have food on the table, we’ve got heating, we’ve got cars to drive. But there are definitely some luxuries that we’ve cut back on recently.

“We don’t do expensive supermarkets. We don’t do expensive brands. We do whatever’s on offer for that particular week. My eldest son has started driving, which has then had an impact on my daughter’s horse-riding lessons.”

Louise adds that the family have a hot tub in the garden that they bought years ago, but because of the cost of electricity, they don’t use it.

I ask her: “What does it say that a teacher and an estate agent both working full time can’t afford to go on holiday this year?”

She replies: “I think a lot of people might not be surprised by that because I think people are probably in a similar position but maybe we just don’t talk about it.”

Full-time workers tell us again and again they thought their lifestyles would be more comfortable – that the work ethic would be delivering more than it is.

It seems the dissatisfaction is not only what one person described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, but also the lack of what people refer to as “pleasure money”.

Heidi Boot is what you might call the backbone of the middle classes – running a small business full-time called HB Aesthetics, a salon that does eyebrows, eyelashes and nails.

“I feel like everybody is stretching their appointments. People are working so hard for their money and they’ve got nothing to show for it. They’ve paid all their bills and now they’ve got nothing left to spend on themselves,” she says.

“It shouldn’t be that way. But because I see it all the time I feel like it’s just the normal now.”

The constituency of Cannock Chase has always voted the way of the country – and at the last election showed significant support for Reform.

The financial woes will worry the government, which insists it’s taking action to give workers more money in their pockets.

But there’s no denying the despairing mood of middle England in the political battlegrounds that brought Labour to power.

UK

‘Shocking and brutal’ on priest may be linked to man’s murder

Published

42 mins ago

August 11, 2025

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'Shocking and brutal' on priest may be linked to man's murder

A man’s death may be linked to a “brutal” attack on a priest in a church, police have said.

Officers have begun a murder investigation after receiving a report that a man was found dead in Co Down.

The discovery was made at an address in the Marian Park area of Downpatrick at about 12pm on Sunday.

Police have arrested a 30-year-old man on suspicion of murder and he is in custody.

This comes after a priest was left in a serious condition in hospital following a “brutal attack” in a church in Downpatrick on Sunday morning.

It was reported to police that at about 10.10am, a man walked into St Patrick’s Church and hit Fr John Murray on the head with a bottle.

Superintendent Norman Haslett, district commander for Newry, Mourne and Down, said officers suspect the murder may be linked to the attack on the priest.

“Inquiries are at an early stage and, at this time, we suspect this may be connected to a serious assault in the St Patrick’s Avenue area of Downpatrick on Sunday,” he said.

Detective Chief Inspector David McBurney said it was a “brutal attack” on the priest and appealed for people with information to come forward.

Sinn Fein MP for South Down, Chris Hazzard, said the attack on the priest and the death of the man in Downpatrick were “deeply shocking”.

“The death of a man, along with the vicious attack on Fr Murray in St Patrick’s Church, has deeply saddened and horrified the local community,” he said.

DUP MLA for South Down, Diane Forsythe, condemned the “disgraceful attack on a religious leader in a place of worship”.

Of the two incidents, she said: “There is no place for violent attacks in our society.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the entire community as they process this devastating murder as well as the serious assault earlier today.”

Alliance South Down MLA Andrew McMurray said the incidents had left many in the local community “in shock on what should be a day of peace and rest”.

Anyone with information about the man’s death or the assault on the priest is urged to contact the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Technology

SoftBank founder Son makes his biggest bet by staking the Japanese giant’s future on AI

Published

2 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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SoftBank founder Son makes his biggest bet by staking the Japanese giant's future on AI

Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the SoftBank World event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Masayoshi Son is making his biggest bet yet: that his brainchild SoftBank will be the center of a revolution driven by artificial intelligence.

Son says artificial superintelligence (ASI) — AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans — will be here in 10 years. It’s a bold call — but perhaps not surprising. He’s made a career out of big plays; notably, one was a $20 million investment into Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in 2000 that has made billions for SoftBank.

Now, the billionaire is hoping to replicate that success with a series of investments and acquisitions in AI firms that will put SoftBank at the center of a fundamental technological shift.

While Son has been outspoken about his vision over the last year, his thinking precedes much of his recent bullishness, according to two former executives at SoftBank.

“I vividly remember the first time he invited me to his home for dinner and sitting on his porch over a glass of wine, he started talking to me about singularity – the point at which machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence,” Alok Sama, a former finance chief at SoftBank until 2016 and and president until 2019, told CNBC.

SoftBank’s big AI plays

For Son, AI seems personal.

“SoftBank was founded for what purpose? For what purpose was Masa Son born? It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI,” Son said last year.

That may go some way to explain what has been an aggressive drive over the past few years — but especially the last two — to put SoftBank at the center of the AI story.

In 2016, SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in a deal worth about $32 billion at the time. Today, Arm is valued at more than $145 billion. While Arm blueprints form the basis of the designs for nearly all the world’s smartphones, these days, the company is looking to position itself as a key player in AI infrastructure. Arm-based chips are part of Nvidia’s systems that go into data centers.

In March, SoftBank also announced plans to acquire another chip designer, Ampere Computing, for $6.5 billion.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is another marquee investment for SoftBank, with the Japanese giant saying recently that planned investments in the company will reach about 4.8 trillion Japanese yen ($32.7 billion).

SoftBank has also invested in a number of other companies related to AI across its portfolio.

“SoftBank’s AI strategy is comprehensive, spanning the entire AI stack from foundational semiconductors, software, infrastructure, and robotics to cutting-edge cloud services and end applications across critical verticals such as enterprise, education, health, and autonomous systems,” Neil Shah, co-founder at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“Mr. Son’s vision is to cohesively connect and deeply integrate these components, thereby establishing a powerful AI ecosystem designed to maximize long-term value for our shareholders.”

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

SoftBank’s stock performance since 2017, the year that its first Vision Fund was founded.

There is a common theme behind SoftBank’s investments in AI companies that comes directly from Son — namely, that these firms should be using advanced intelligence to be more competitive, successful, to make their product better and their customers happy, a person familiar with the company told CNBC. They could only comment anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

It started with and brain computers and robots

As SoftBank launched “SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision” in 2010, Son spoke about “brain computers” during a presentation. He described these computers as systems that could learn and program themselves eventually.

And then came robots. Major tech figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla boss Elon Musk are now talking about robotics as a key application of AI — but Son was thinking about this more than a decade ago.

In 2012, SoftBank took a majority stake in a French company called Aldebaran. Two years later, the two companies launched a humanoid robot called Pepper, which they billed as “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.”

Later, Son said: “In 30 years, I hope robots will become one of the core businesses in generating profits for the SoftBank group.”

SoftBank’s bet on Pepper ultimately flopped for the company. SoftBank slashed jobs at its robotics unit and stopped producing Pepper in 2020. In 2022, German firm United Robotics Group agreed to acquire Aldebaran from SoftBank.

But Son’s very early interest in robots underscored his curiosity for AI applications of the future.

“He was in very early and he has been thinking about this obsessively for a long time,” Sama, who is author of “The Money Trap,” said.

In the background, Son was cooking up something bigger: a tech fund that would make waves in the investing world. He founded the Vision Fund in 2017 with a massive $100 billion in deployable capital.

SoftBank aggressively invested in companies across the world with some of the biggest bets on ride hailing players like Uber and Chinese firm Didi.

But investments in Chinese technology companies and some bad bets on firms like WeWork soured sentiment for the Vision Fund as it racked up billions of dollars of losses by 2023.

Vision but bad timing

The market questioned some of Son’s investments in companies like Uber and Didi, which were burning through cash at the time and had unclear unit economics.

But even those investments spoke to Son’s AI view, according to the former partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund.

“His thought back then was the first advent of AI would be self-driving cars,” the source told CNBC.

Again this could be seen as a case of being too early. Uber created a driverless car unit only to sell it off. Instead, the company has focused on other self-driving car companies to bring them onto the Uber platform. Even now, driverless cars are not widespread on roads, though commercial services like those of Waymo are available.

SoftBank still has investments in driverless car companies, such as British startup Wayve.

Timing clearly wasn’t on Son’s side. After record losses at the Vision Fund in 2022, Son declared SoftBank would go into “defense” mode, significantly reducing investments and being more prudent. It was at this time that companies like OpenAI were beginning to gain steam, but still before the launch of ChatGPT that would put the company on the map.

“When those companies came to head in 2021, 2022, Masa would have been in a perfect place but he had used all his ammunition on other companies,” the former Vision Fund exec said.

“When they came to age in 21, 22, the Vision Fund had invested in five or six hundred different companies and he was not in a position to invest in AI and he missed that.”

Son himself said this year that SoftBank wanted to invest in OpenAI as early as 2019, but it was Microsoft that ended up becoming the key investor. Fast forward to 2025, the Vision Fund — of which there are now two — has a portfolio stacked full of AI focused companies.

But that period was tough for investors across the board. The Covid-19 pandemic, booming inflation and rising rates hit public and private markets across the board after years of loose monetary policy and a tech bull run.

SoftBank didn’t see that time as a missed opportunity to invest in AI, a person familiar with the company said.

Instead, the the company is of the view that it is still very early in the AI investing cycle, the source added.

Risk and reward

AI technology is fast-moving, from the chips that run the software to the models that underpin popular applications.

Tech giants in the U.S. and China are battling it out to produce ever-advancing AI models with the aim of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a term with different definitions depending on who you speak to, but one that broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans. With billions of dollars of investment going into the technology, the risk is high, and the rewards could be even higher.

But disruption can come out of no where.

This year, Chinese firm DeepSeek made waves after releasing a so-called reasoning model that appeared to be developed more cheaply than its U.S. rivals. The fact that a Chinese company managed the feat, despite all the export restrictions for advanced tech in place, rocked global financial markets that were betting the U.S. had an unassailable AI lead.

While markets have since recovered, the potential of surprise advances in technology at such an early stage in AI remains a big risk for the likes of SoftBank.

“As with most technology investments the key challenge is to invest in the winning technologies. Many of the investments SoftBank has made are in the current leaders but AI is still in its relative infancy so other challengers could still rear up from nowhere,” Dan Baker, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC.

Still, Son has made it clear he wants to set SoftBank up with DNA that will see it survive and thrive for 300 years, according to the company’s website.

That may go some way to explain the big risks that Son takes, and his conviction when it comes to particular themes and companies — and the valuations he’s willing to pay.

“He (Son) made some mistakes, but directionally he is going in the same driection, which is — he wants to be sure that he is a real player in AI and he is making it happen,” the former Vision Fund exec said.