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BlackRock throws support behind effort to move pensions beyond ESG

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BlackRock throws support behind effort to move pensions beyond ESG

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BlackRock has thrown its weight behind a coalition of US police and firefighter labour groups that is making the case for getting politics out of pensions, in its latest effort to navigate the backlash to environmental, social and governance investing.

The world’s largest money manager is the only financial group among the founding members of the Alliance for Prosperity and a Secure Retirement, a Delaware-registered non-profit that warns on its website that “politics has no place in Americans’ investment decisions”. After coming under fire over its advocacy for sustainable investing, BlackRock has increasingly highlighted the primacy of investor choice.

A handful of small business and consumer non-profits are also members of the alliance, which launched earlier this year amid a flurry of ESG-related activity. Forty-four state legislatures considered 162 bills in 2023, and 76 more proposals have been put forward this year, according to law firm Ropes & Gray. Roughly 80 per cent of the proposals sought to ban consideration of sustainability factors, while the rest actively promoted it.

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“We are not pro-ESG. We are not anti-ESG. What we are is ‘pro’ letting investment professionals, who have a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries, do the work that they’re supposed to do,” Tim Hill, a retired Phoenix firefighter who is president of the alliance, told the Financial Times. “We are ‘anti’ politicians, from either the right or left, interfering with that fiduciary duty so they can carry out a political, social agenda.”

Hill said the group had been set up to rally pension industry participants in support. “We decided we were going to try and take this different tack of enlisting the industry to assist us, primarily in the financial burden of pushing back and protecting our funds and fund managers,” he said.

BlackRock said in a statement that it was “proud” to back the alliance, adding: “As a fiduciary, our mission is to help more people experience financial wellbeing in all phases of life. The alliance is one of many organisations that BlackRock supports which are committed to helping more Americans retire with dignity on their own terms.”

The $10.5tn money manager has been at the centre of the political fight over ESG since 2020 when chief executive Larry Fink beat the drum for sustainable investing, pledging in his annual letter to make “sustainability integral to portfolio construction and risk management . . . governments and the private sector must work together to pursue a transition that is both fair and just”.

BlackRock became a target for both Republican politicians who objected to what they described as “woke capitalism” and progressives who wanted the firm to go further in forcing its investee companies to decarbonise.

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In the past three years, BlackRock’s stewardship has become much more sceptical of climate-related shareholder proposals. Last year it voted against most of them, saying the others were too prescriptive or were not in the financial interest of its clients. At the same time, assets in the firm’s largest ESG fund have halved since late 2021.

BlackRock revamped its lobbying and public relations operations last year, and Fink has been putting far more emphasis on pensions policy and infrastructure investment. He used his 2024 letter to warn of a looming retirement crisis caused by changing pension and working patterns.

BlackRock’s website lists the Alliance for Prosperity as one of 13 organisations that it is working with to encourage discussion of retirement issues. The group is backed mostly by public safety unions, which have a history of being more conservative on climate and social issues than some of their counterparts in service industries. It also includes a federation of builders’ unions whose pension funds have $800bn in assets, including the US’s largest electricians’ union.

The group has approached more liberal unions, including at least one big teachers’ union but so far none have them have joined.

Hill said that for several years, labour groups and pensioners have grown more concerned that politicians view pension funds as “a pot of money that they could use to enact whatever their current political or social agendas were”.

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“It’s always labour who does the work, pays the political cost, and pays the financial cost to defend [pension systems], typically without any help from the rest of the industry,” Hill said.

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.

One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.

The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said.

All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.

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Several “partnering law enforcement agencies assigned to the Reflecting Pool” working with US Park Police were involved in detaining the two men and one woman — including officers from Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and California.

One of the officers said in court documents that Thiers “admitted to removing a piece of blue sealant from the Reflecting Pool and still had it in his hand when I made contact with him.”

The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.

Lawyers for Thiers and Dennison-Gibby declined to comment. CNN has reached out to Carreno’s attorney.

If found guilty of destruction of property, the defendants could be fined up to $1,000 and face a maximum of 180 days behind bars.

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The New York Times first reported that three additional people had been charged with damaging the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals caused major damage to the pool by gashing the lining after his administration spent more than $14 million on renovations, though he has not provided evidence to support that claim. The officers who charged Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby did not accuse them of gashing the lining.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, DC, last week for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn — unlike Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby – was charged with destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000 which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Crews began draining the Reflecting Pool over the weekend to make repairs, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for the second time in three months.

The move comes after weeks of problems – algae blooms, green-hued water, a chipping bottom and the administration’s allegations of vandalism – that have plagued the iconic landmark, making its woes the subject of national interest.

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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