Sister Pie temporarily halts daily operations
Famed Detroit bakery Sister Pie is halting its daily operations for now, in part because the business isn't working financially, its owner says.
Why it matters: The West Village bakery draws long lines, has been lauded nationally and is seen as an anchor in its neighborhood, but it's still struggling, reflecting the wider difficulties many local small business owners face.
Driving the news: Starting June 9, the business will close and "enter a period of rest and radical reconfiguration, of exploration and experimentation," owner Lisa Ludwinski announced on Instagram.
It will host occasional pop-ups and events, and continue with special orders and classes, she wrote.
There's not an exact timeline set for resuming daily hours.
What they're saying:"As a business owner and a leader, I'm learning, reminiscing, mourning, growing and searching for hope in the midst of challenge and chaos," Ludwinski wrote.
Catch up quick: Sister Pie opened in 2015 and started offering pie dough classes in 2016. Ludwinski released a cookbook in 2018 that topped the New York Times' list of the year's best baking books.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
6 hours ago
- CNBC
36-year-old travels the world in a Toyota Tacoma: After 3 years on the road, this is her No. 1 takeaway
In 2015, Ashley Kaye's father died and she inherited her childhood home in Waterford, Wisconsin. At the time, she was 27 years old, working in corporate healthcare and transitioning to a consulting job, where she worked 80 to 100 hours a week. "I worked from home, so I just walked from my bedroom to my office to the kitchen and repeat," Kaye, now 36, tells CNBC Make It. "I was a zombie in those times," While traveling, Kaye met someone on a scuba diving trip in Honduras who helped her realize what she wanted was to leave her career behind and travel full-time. "We just hit it off and chatted the whole time I was there. We spoke about the worst of the worst, the best of the best, and financials, too," Kaye says. "He told me he wished he had done it sooner because it's so much easier and cheaper than you think. That changed everything for me. I went home and worked more and more until I quit the next year." Kaye spent the next three years traveling during the covid-19 pandemic. While on a trip to South Africa, she received unexpected news that her aunt was ill and she'd need to fly back home to Wisconsin. "That flight was probably the moment where not a single ounce of my being was like 'Yay, I'm going home.' It was like, 'I don't want to be here. This isn't it for me.'," she says. "I love being on the islands. I love having the ocean near me. That took away the hesitation I had in previous years about selling the house." While Kaye was back home caring for her aunt, she prepared her childhood home for sale and considered her next move. She thought a lot about trying van life and living and traveling with her dog. "Traveling by plane with a dog just sounded like a terrible idea," she says. "I do a lot of photography, so I knew I wanted something where I could reach tougher destinations." While waiting for the sale of her home to close, a couple reached out to Kaye on Instagram to ask about her time in South Africa. They shared their experience overlanding in a Toyota truck with a camper in the truck bed. Overlanding is a form of self-reliant travel that involves adventuring to remote destinations, typically in a vehicle of some type. After doing a bit of her own research, Kaye was all-in and purchased a Toyota Tacoma truck for $42,934, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Kaye picked up the truck in South Dakota and drove it back to Wisconsin to finish packing up her home when it officially sold in March 2023. Now that her new home was the truck, Kaye set off on her first adventure: A drive down to Baja California, Mexico. She stayed there for three months and planned out the renovations she would need to make the truck more livable. "My life is kind of like 'the plan is there is no plan.' Most people plan this type of adventure for years. I didn't even have a truck when I accepted the offer on my house," she says. "It was very spur of the moment, so I needed to take a pause and figure things out." While living in Mexico, Kaye found an American company that made the truck bed replacements that would provide external storage and make it easier for her to live and travel in the Toyota Tacoma. But, the installation couldn't happen until September. In the meantime, Kaye learned as much as she could about the truck and the kind of camper she would need. She estimates that she has spent over $50,000 on the renovations. Costs included purchasing a camper, adding solar power, replacing the truck bed, upgrading the suspension, new tires, customizing a bumper, and installing an electric cooler. When the truck was ready, Kaye decided to journey the Pan-American Highway, starting in Denver. The highway stretches from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina. "It's really an incredible way to travel because you get to set your own pace and if you find somewhere that's beautiful and peaceful you can stay as long as you want," Kaye says. "But there's pros and cons to every mode of travel and a lot of red tape and logistics crossing borders. It can be exhausting, especially when you're alone. You have to find a balance that works for you, but overall, it's definitely one of the coolest adventures of my lifetime." Since living and traveling in the truck full-time, Kaye has visited Mexico, every country in Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and parts of Argentina. In total, she's been to over 20 countries so far. "I don't want to be a cliché and say it's a dream life because it's a lot of work and there are a lot of things that you need to take care of and maintain," she says. "But it's really incredible to be able to wake up and just look at the map and say, 'Should I go sleep inside this volcano or go to the jungle or go to the beach?' You have a lot of really beautiful options, so I can't really complain." After all this time on the road, Kaye says the biggest lesson she's learned is that life is too short. "Ever since I started traveling, [I learned] life is just too short. You don't have to go and quit your career to travel the world but whatever your dreams and goals are in life just start now and everything else is just figuring out a goal," she says. Kaye says when she was younger, it was her dad who taught her that she was capable of anything. "I grew up with my dad raising me and telling me every day 'You can be anything you want when you grow up and you can do anything,'" she says. "He was 57 when he passed away, so he never even got to retire. His passing taught me how to live life because you never know how much time you have in life."
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘This is the looting of America': Trump and Co's extraordinary conflicts of interest in his second term
The South Lawn of the White House had never seen anything like it. The president of the United States was posing for the world's media against a backdrop of five different models of Tesla, peddling the electric vehicles with the alacrity of a salesman on commission. 'I love the product, it's beautiful,' Donald Trump said as he sank into the driver's seat of a scarlet Model Y. With the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, beside him, he went on to enlighten the American people that some Tesla models retail for as little as $299 a month, 'which is pretty low'. That same day, within hours of the White House's makeover into a Tesla showroom, the New York Times revealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump. The massive injection of capital would enhance the nearly $300m Musk had already spent getting Trump elected. Related: 'I have never seen such open corruption': Trump's crypto deals and loosening of rules shock observers A week after the commercial on the South Lawn, on 19 March, Trump's commerce secretary, the billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick, went on Fox News and exhorted viewers to 'buy Tesla'. 'Who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk's stock?' he gushed. 'He is probably the best person to bet on I've ever met.' At the time Lutnick made those remarks, he had yet to divest himself from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm he had led for 35 years. He was talking up stock in which he still had a vested interest – Cantor held $300m in Tesla shares, a stake that has since soared to $555m. And the commerce secretary was also bigging up his friend Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink businesses are regulated by the commerce department that Lutnick now controlled. Eight days in March, three friendly billionaires, one of them the world's most powerful person, another the world's richest person. Doing what friends do: scratching each other's backs. Even though Musk later fell out with Trump – in a shocking social media spat that roiled US politics – the imagery remains powerful and highly symbolic of Trump's second term in the White House. Between them they committed in those eight days acts that, had they occurred during any previous presidency – including Trump's own first administration – would have provoked howls of protest concerning quid pro quo. Yet those eight days represent just a tiny slice of the graft and possible misconduct that is unfolding. The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One has become the paradigm of the blitz of ethical dilemmas unleashed by Trump. The Pentagon last month accepted possession of the plane, which will be transferred to Trump's presidential library once he leaves office. That Trump doggedly accepted the Qatari 'palace in the sky' despite widespread condemnation speaks volumes about how indomitable he feels at this moment. He has shrugged aside the rebukes even of devoted Trump supporters, including the rightwing commentator Ben Shapiro, who bridled at the transfer's grubby appearance, calling it 'skeezy stuff'. It also shows Trump's disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause's clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. Yet the luxury jumbo jet is also just the thinnest edge of a very fat wedge. There has been so much more that has flown, if not under the radar, then partially obscured from sight amid the ethical blizzard of corruption and influence. There have been multimillion-dollar TV packages, real estate deals in Arab petrostates, dinners with the president going for $5m a pop, plum job offers for contributors to Trump's inaugural fund, cryptocurrency ventures attracting lucre from secret foreign investors, 'drill, baby, drill' enticements for oil and energy donations – the list goes on, and on … and on. Trump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. 'They have mastered the technique of flooding the zone – doing so much so fast that they are overwhelming the ability of ethics groups and institutions to respond.' Chris Murphy, the Democratic US senator from Connecticut, has delivered two long speeches on the floor of his chamber in which he has itemised Trump and Co's most controversial transactions. The record already stretches to scores of entries, chronicling what Murphy calls Trump's 'efforts to steal from the American people to enrich himself and his friends'. In an interview with the Guardian, the senator said that Trump's was a 'pay-for-play administration. That's the underlying theme. You pay Donald Trump money, he does favors for you. That's old-fashioned corruption.' Clark's analysis is even more pointed. 'People talk about 'guardrails' and 'norms' and 'conflict of interest', which is all very relevant,' she said. 'But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.' *** Trump signaled that he would be a president like no other at the start of his first term, when he became the only occupant of the Oval Office in modern times to refuse to divest his assets by putting them into a blind trust. Though presidents are not bound by conflict of interest laws applying to other elected officials, the norm has been for incumbents to set themselves high standards, the archetype being Jimmy Carter's sale of his peanut farm. Trump, by contrast, put his assets in a trust that remained under the control of his family, with him as its sole beneficiary. He incurred numerous accusations of first-term conflicts of interest, as foreign officials from 20 countries descended on his hotels, while Secret Service agents in Trump's security detail were made to pay premium rates, pouring at least $10m into his bank account. Such unprecedented disregard for time-honored ethical boundaries was shocking at the time. Now it looks merely quaint. 'In the first Trump administration there were ethical lapses,' said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center watchdog organization. 'With this new administration, there's not just a disregard for ethics rules, there's contempt.' The conversion of political power into cash began even before Trump re-entered the White House. Weeks before the inauguration, Melania Trump sealed a $40m deal with Jeff Bezos for an Amazon Prime 'behind-the-scenes' documentary on her life. Trump banked millions of dollars of his own by leveraging his status as president-elect to browbeat tech companies. He settled disputes over the freezing of his then Twitter and Facebook accounts in the wake of the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, prising $10m out of his friend Musk, and $25m from Meta. Trump used the months leading up to November's election to test-run what, as Murphy noted, has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as the Washington Post revealed, offered them a 'deal' in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House. He kept his promise: on day one of his new administration he discharged a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions. Donors to his record-breaking $239m inaugural fund have also found Trump to be a grateful benefactor. Warren Stephens, an investment banker who gave $4m, was rewarded with the role of US ambassador to the UK; Jared Issacman, a billionaire pilot and close associate of Musk's, gave $2m to the fund and was tapped to lead Nasa (he was abruptly yanked from the appointment last month after he was reportedly discovered to have been been donating to Democrats). It's over the line, unlawful, corrupt and unethical. It is un-American Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution The pattern has continued into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Three months into the administration, Trump's eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members' club named Executive Branch which commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000. Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers. Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at $1m a seat. Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available, yours for $5m. For a seasoned observer such as Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution, the sheer mass of problematic transactions puts the administration beyond the pale. 'It's over the line, unlawful, corrupt and unethical. It is un-American.' Eisen has experience dealing with knotty ethical issues. He was special counsel for ethics during Barack Obama's first year in the White House. Obama notes in his autobiography, A Promised Land, that Eisen earned himself the title of Dr No, so strict was his approach to conflicts of interest. He would tell White House officials hoping to attend outside events that 'if it sounds fun, you can't go'. Eisen told the Guardian that he prevented Obama from refinancing his family home in Chicago. 'He was regulating the banking industry at the time, in the midst of the Great Recession.' The contrast between such almost pedantic strictures and the free-for-all in today's White House astonishes and dismays Eisen. 'If my somewhat tongue in cheek motto for Obama was 'If it's fun, you can't do it,' then the motto of the Trump White House seems to be 'If you can make a buck, grab it.'' Exhibit one of such conduct, Eisen suggests, is the Trump family's dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania. Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together, Eisen believes that the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to 'one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation's history'. Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the 'crypto capital of the planet'. He was more circumspect in front of his faithful followers about the big plans his sons were simultaneously developing to cash in on the currency. Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his early executive orders created a 'strategic bitcoin reserve' designed to bolster the industry. At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals. 'We have a president whose net worth now includes very substantial investments in cryptocurrency who at the same time is loosening regulations on the crypto industry,' Eisen said. We've been pretty successful in this country rooting out corruption, or at least pushing it into the shadows. Now it happens out in the open Democratic senator Chris Murphy The unrivalled magnetism of the US presidency helped Trump to blast his nascent meme coin, a currency almost entirely reliant on hype, into the stratosphere. It rocketed from $6.50 on inauguration day to a peak of $73. Then, when it predictably plummeted back down to below $10, he used his presidential allure brazenly once again to boost the coin. This time he announced a 'private intimate dinner' for the top 220 $Trump investors, followed by an exclusive White House tour for the top 25. The ensuing scramble for a seat at the presidential dining table reportedly earned the Trump family $148m. The $Trump meme coin is an ethics regulator's waking nightmare. There is little transparency around who is channelling money into it, and even less around the potentially nefarious motives of investors. The same might be said about the Trumps' other big crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which was launched last September by Trump's sons. The president himself is listed by the company as its 'chief crypto advocate'. Federal law sets tight rules against foreign parties donating to presidential campaign or inaugural funds. Yet there is nothing to prevent outside interests with connections to foreign governments engaging with World Liberty and its new product, the USD1 stablecoin. One of its biggest backers is the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun (best known for paying $6.2m at a New York art sale for a banana taped to a wall, then eating it). Before the inauguration, Sun pumped $75m into World Liberty. A few weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused an investigation into him for alleged securities fraud. USD1 is currently valued at $2.3bn, the lion's share of which comes from a $2bn transaction by MGX, a firm which happens to be chaired by the intelligence chief of the United Arab Emirates. That a company with ties to the government of an Arab petrostate should be able to make such a giant investment in a crypto venture generating profit for the sitting US president and his family goes against the grain of decades of robust accountability work countering conflicts of interest. 'We've been pretty successful in this country rooting out corruption, or at least pushing it into the shadows,' Murphy, the US senator, told the Guardian. 'Now it happens out in the open.' And it doesn't stop there. Over the past few months Trump's second son, Eric, has been frenetically traveling the globe in search of real estate deals, throwing to the winds the pledge Trump made in his first administration to eschew any foreign business transactions. In his second administration, Trump has made no such promise. All he has conceded this time, in a document released by his lawyers in January, is that the Trump Organization will avoid cutting business deals with foreign governments. Even that boundary has been pushed close to breaking point. Eric Trump sealed his first deal since Trump re-entered the White House in April. It involves the construction of the Trump International Golf Club & Villas outside the Qatari capital, Doha, as part of a $5bn luxury beachside resort. The company managing the development, Qatari Diar, is owned by the sovereign wealth fund of the Qatari government. Two weeks after the Trump Organization announced the deal, the president himself arrived in Doha as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East. He declared the trip a huge success, having drummed up trillions of dollars of business and investments for the US. *** The Guardian invited the White House to comment on complaints that the president has blurred his public duties with his family's personal profit-making activities to a degree never before seen in the US. A White House spokesperson replied with a statement which they asked us to print in its entirety, so here goes: 'There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children. It is shameful that the Guardian is ignoring the GOOD deals President Trump has secured for the American people, not for himself, to push a false narrative. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.' The argument that there is no conflict of interest because Trump's business is handled by his children, specifically his sons – Don Jr leading on crypto and his social media empire, Eric on real estate – is an interesting one. Sons seem to be de rigueur, to the extent that members of Trump's inner circle who lack them might feel the need to borrow one. Take other key figures in Trump's cabinet, which is packed with so many banking and energy billionaires that it ranks as the richest presidential cabinet in modern history. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who has a personal fortune of about $2.2bn, has been involved in various accusations of conflict of interest since he encouraged Fox News viewers to 'buy Tesla'. At the start of this year Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick led for almost four decades, increased its investment in Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world. Cantor's stake rose by several hundred million dollars to $1.3bn, research by the watchdog has found. At the same time, Lutnick was actively helping Trump create his strategic bitcoin reserve, a move that greatly strengthened the cryptocurrency. Last month, Lutnick divested himself of his Cantor stake, but he did so by transferring his ownership to his two sons. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon Lutnick, 27, and Kyle Lutnick, 28. Or take Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine-skeptic health secretary. Under intense pressure from Democratic senators, he agreed to divest his 10% stake in any payout from an ongoing lawsuit in which he is engaged against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil. Government officials are not allowed under federal law to participate personally in official matters in which they have a financial interest. So what did Kennedy do? He transferred his stake in the case to one of his adult sons. And then there's Mehmet Oz, the multimillionaire physician better known by his TV name, Dr Oz, whom Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. As the Washington Post has reported, Oz co-founded a health benefits company, ZorroRX, that helps hospitals save on prescription drugs. This would have been an indisputable conflict of interest, because in his job as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz wields huge sway over hospital drug policies, and thus ZorroRX profits. Since taking up the position Oz, whose wealth is put at up to $300m, has divested himself of some of his investment portfolio and is no longer mentioned on ZorroRX's website. His fellow co-founder of ZorroRX, however, is still listed as the firm's head of medical affairs. That's his son, Oliver Oz. Under federal conflict of interest law, there is no prohibition on adult children managing the interests of parents who hold public office. Yet the spirit of the law does force us to reflect on why so many Trump administration leaders are so fond of handing sensitive money-making portfolios to their sons. 'By giving over to your son, you are immediately raising questions about how separate you are going to be from the success of this business,' said Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center. 'Will you be focused on what's best for the public, or will you be guided in your decision-making by what would most benefit your family?' *** In the last analysis, what matters most perhaps about the financial dealings of the Trump administration is what impact they are having on the American people. In particular, what is it doing to the 77 million voters who put their trust in Trump and sent him back to the Oval Office? Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would 'drain the swamp', liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated. Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump's own first administration. They include Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. She approved the gift of the Qatari luxury jetliner as 'legally permissible', having herself worked as a lobbyist for Qatar. Trump's other great pledge was that he would put the wellbeing of 'forgotten' working people before that of the vested elites. His appeal was pitched at the millions of rural and working-class Americans who have languished from mounting income inequality, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the globalised economy, and what he claimed was the negative effects of millions of undocumented immigrants. Evan Feinman has witnessed personally and up close how this promise has fared in Trump 2.0. For the past three years, Feinman was busy leading a $42.5bn program created by Congress to bring affordable high-speed internet to every American home and business that needed it. The project was vast and ambitious, on a par with the rural electrification drive that transformed the heartlands of America in the 1930s. Located within the US commerce department, its success is critical to the future prosperity of millions of Americans, especially those in hard-bitten rural areas of the sort that solidly backed Trump in the last election. Studies have shown that giving families access to the internet improves the grades of school students, increases college enrolment and reduces the likelihood of households falling into debt. It also helps older Americans stay in their own homes and avoid residential care. By the inauguration, the broadband project was well under way, with several states only weeks away from breaking ground and laying the cables. Then Lutnick took over the reins of the commerce department. Within a days of his confirmation, Lutnick met with senior managers and informed them he wanted to scale back on the use of fibre optic and switch to satellite. According to an account of the meeting that was given to Feinman by someone present, Lutnick specifically inquired after his friend Musk, the CEO of Starlink, which provides internet services through low-Earth orbit satellites. Days after that, Feinman was told he was being let go. His contract was up for renewal, and it wasn't being extended. 'I was dismayed,' Feinman told the Guardian, insisting that his distress was not so much related to his own dismissal but out of concern for the Americans who would be harmed by the shift. By his reckoning, satellite internet would not only be slower than broadband, it would also be much more expensive – costing users an extra $840 a year in fees. 'For Americans in rural locations, that's going to really hurt. Many of the president's strongest supporters – up to hundreds of thousands of families who voted for Trump – are going to see slower, more expensive internet services, and all to the benefit of the wealthiest man on earth.' According to some estimates, Musk's Starlink stands to make $10bn to $20bn should the shift from broadband to satellite internet go ahead. The episode has left Feinman 'deeply saddened. I see my nation harming itself in ways that are inexplicable and entirely avoidable.' He fears for rural Americans who will pay the price. 'These are communities who put their trust in this administration. They are going to find that their trust has not been honored, and it will be to their significant future detriment.'
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
Meta Warns Iran May Block WhatsApp Amid Snooping Allegations
Meta (META, Financials) expressed concern that Iran may move to block WhatsApp following claims by Iranian state media that the messaging platform is being used by Israel for surveillance. The U.S. tech company strongly denied the allegations, calling them false reports, and warned they could be used as a pretext to restrict access to its services at a critical time. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with META. Meta said, We're concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most. The company emphasized that WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning that neither Meta nor third parties can access the contents of messages. It also clarified that it does not track users' exact locations or log who is messaging whom. The statement came in response to Iran's state-run IRNA urging citizens to delete WhatsApp, claiming the Zionist regime is exploiting the app to gather private data. In a broadcast shared by Rudaw, an IRNA host warned viewers about potential surveillance targeting individuals linked to sensitive sectors, including nuclear science. While Meta confirmed it does not provide bulk data to any government, it acknowledged that metadatasuch as contacts and device informationcan be shared under specific legal requests. Meta also pointed to over a decade of transparency reports outlining such disclosures. WhatsApp, along with Instagram, was previously banned in Iran in 2022 during nationwide protests. That ban was lifted two months later as part of reforms introduced by President Masoud Pezeshkian to expand internet freedoms. This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
