Tausi Insider

People shop for Black Friday deals in Pico Rivera, Calif., on Nov. 25. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images Cautious shoppers hunted for the best deals at stores and online as retailers offered new Black Friday discounts to entice consumers eager to start buying holiday gifts but weighed down by inflation. Due to elevated prices for food, rent, gasoline and other essentials, many people were being more selective, reluctant to spend unless there was a big sale. Some were dipping more into savings, turning to “buy now, pay later” services that allow payment in installments, or running up their credit cards at a time when the Federal Reserve is hiking rates to cool the U.S. economy. Sheila Diggs, 55, went to a Walmart in Mount Airy, Maryland early Friday looking for a deal on a coffee maker. To save money this year, she said the adults in her family are drawing names and selecting one person to shop for. “Everything’s going up but your paycheck,” said Diggs, who manages medical records at...

Canadian shoppers are out deal-hunting during a muted Black Friday as decades-high inflation weighs on consumers and prompts some to rein in spending. Retailers have stretched deals over several weeks and offered similar discounts online, taking some of the frenzy out of the holiday shopping event. Several big box stores in the Toronto area, such as Best Buy and Walmart, lacked the usual early morning lineups that once epitomized Black Friday. Malls in the area appeared busy around lunchtime, but not swarming with the crowds and queues seen in previous years. Few stores appeared to have lines of waiting customers. “We’re seeing a dilution of Black Friday as a physical shopping event where you go to the store early in the morning,” retail analyst Bruce Winder said Friday. “It’s finally sort of hit that tipping point where it’s much less about the day and it’s more about the shopping period.” Inflation-weary shoppers were expected to turn out in record numbers for deals on Black Friday...

Crews cleanup the area near a leak in the Keystone pipeline, in Washington County, Kan., on Dec. 9. The Associated Press TC Energy Corp. TRP-T has received regulatory approval to restart the remaining segment of the Keystone pipeline that has been shut down since suffering its worst oil spill in the pipeline’s history on Dec. 7. The Calgary-based company said Friday the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has approved a restart plan for the 154-km stretch of pipeline that runs from just south of Steele City, Nebraska to Cushing, Oklahoma. The company said its restart plan will take several days and will include rigorous testing and inspections. It did not provide a date for when the entire pipeline system will be fully operational again. Immediately following the spill, which saw 14,000 barrels of oil released into a creek in Washington County, Kan., TC Energy shut down the Keystone pipeline system, which stretches 4,324 km and helps transport Canadian and U.S...

Twitter Inc said on Wednesday that there was no evidence that data recently being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in the company’s systems. Twitter said the data of 5.4 million of the accounts had been compromised by a bug it discovered early last year, which it previously fixed and disclosed over the summer. Another 600 million pieces of user data “could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident,” Twitter said in a blog post. “There is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources,” it said. The social media company told users in August last year that a system vulnerability revealed Twitter accounts of users by submitting their email address or phone number, after the company learnt about it through a bug bounty program months earlier. In December, media reports...