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With concerns like high inflation and generating revenue prevalent in today’s unsteady economy, scores of small businesses continue to face challenges as they try to grow. It’s crucial for small businesses to find the best insurance coverage to help protect their assets.

Factors like rising interest rates and consumers looking closer and differently at how they spend money are also prompting entrepreneurs to focus more on their operations and prepare against unforeseen disasters that could severely harm or even shut down their businesses.

With May being Small Business Month, many small businesses can potentially reduce their risk of heavy unexpected financial loss stemming from everything from cyberattacks to employee theft. For instance, cyberattacks reportedly can cost companies an average of $200,000 for each occurrence.

To boot, small businesses are often so busy running their daily operations they may neglect cybersecurity best practices. That can make them prey to cybercriminals trying to profit off their vulnerabilities. And they most likely don’t have the ample resources of larger companies to combat the assaults.

BLACK ENTERPRISE connected with Steve Maliborski, general manager of commercial products at Acuity Insurance, on the topic. He offered recommendations on three different types of lesser-known insurance coverages small businesses may consider that could help protect their assets.

• Cyber Insurance

With larger companies investing in cybersecurity tools, hackers are increasingly targeting small and medium-sized businesses. However, small businesses can help guard themselves with cybersecurity insurance. It generally includes cyber liability and data breach coverage, one of the most common types of cybercrime. “Cyber insurance covers costs to identify the extent of the breach, how you should respond, notification and services to those affected, and any fines you incur.”

The bottom line is the best defense against cybercrime is prevention. Some commercial cyber insurance policies, including Acuity’s, contain resources to help minimize cyber risks. “Cyber insurance will cost you far less than you and your customers being the victim of a cybercrime.” Acuity’s average commercial lines policy starts at $263 yearly.

• Business income and Extra Expenses

Until repairs are made after a property loss, retailers may lose income. Business income coverage helps bridge the gap, while extra expense coverage pays for the added costs needed to resume operations. If the damage is extensive, you may need to shut down operations temporarily. Your income will be impacted during downtime, but your bills and expenses will still need to be paid. The business Income portion pays for the actual loss of income you sustain due to the necessary suspension of your operations. The extra expense portion pays for essential expenses you incur while your regular operations are restored. For instance, if you need to move to a temporary location, the coverage will include relocation expenses and costs to equip and operate the temporary site.

• Employee Dishonesty

A recent Zippia study showed 75% of employees steal at least once from their employer. This coverage will help as it pays for loss or damage to items such as inventory, office equipment, other personal property used in the business, forgery and fraud, money, and other forms of payment. “Employee Dishonesty Coverage provides an extra sense of comfort to your existing financial controls and security procedures by protecting you and your business against internal threats in your business.” Coverage costs can vary quite a lot by state and business type. Yet, an independent agent will be able to provide you with specifics about the coverage, evaluate your risks, and help you determine how much coverage you need.

We got our first look at season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with a teaser chock full of emotion, adventure, and Spock being Spock. But now, the full trailer for Strange New Worlds season two has been released. And in addition to showcasing more of our favorite familiar faces, this trailer also gives us a look at a highly-anticipated Star Trek crossover event. Yes, the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks is going live-action and crossing over into the Strange New Worlds universe. In the trailer for season two, we get a glimpse of live-action Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler, played by Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid. We can also expect to see animation coming into the live-action world of the show.

You can watch the full Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season two trailer below.

The synopsis for the season shares a bit more about what we can expect to see. It notes:

Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), Spock (Ethan Peck) and the rest of the Enterprise crew are back exploring strange new worlds and boldly going where no one has gone before.

Short and to the point! But the trailer promises we’re going to go deep into the crew’s adventures. A blog post on Star Trek‘s official website notes that “In Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, under the command of Captain Christopher Pike, confronts increasingly dangerous stakes, explores uncharted territories and encounters new life and civilizations. The crew will also embark on personal journeys that will continue to test their resolve and redefine their destinies. Facing friends and enemies both new and familiar, their adventures will unfold in surprising ways never seen before on any Star Trek series.”

In addition to a season trailer, Paramount+ also released a clip showcasing the beginning of the trial of Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn). Starfleet arrested Number One at the end of the first season after learning she is an enhanced human, something wholly illegal. The clip shows various members of the crew giving testimony as to Una’s alleged sedition. While La’an (Christina Chong) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) highlight Una’s sterling character, Spock (Ethan Peck) alludes to her hiding something. We’ll have to wait for the season to find out what he says.

Well, that’s basically everything we love most about Star Trek. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season two releases on June 15. The series streams exclusively on Paramount+.

The post STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS Clip Starts the Trial of Number One appeared first on Nerdist.

If you haven’t seen the latest iteration of the Fast and the Furious franchise, you are somehow missing out on everything all at once. As has been stated in an earlier review, the newest installment, Fast X, is bigger, faster, and, heck, even more car-packed than previous entries. However, the problem is that it is also more homophobic.

In the new movie, Jason Momoa stars as Dante Reyes, the Portuguese son of former Fast Five villain, Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). Almeida first made his appearance as the then-antagonist in Fast Five when the Fast family stole his safe and took it on an excursion through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, likely killing a bystander or two. Now, following Almeida’s late character, Momoa’s performance can easily be deemed exceptional, yet campy and charming.

Momoa plays the maniacal Reyes with the intensity of Heath Ledger’s Joker and the subtle corniness of every Schwarzenegger villain circa 1985–1990. Where things get weird, however, is when Momoa, the writers, or both, throw in a dash of queer coding to make Reyes that much more “menacing.” 

For those new to the term, “queer coding” is when a character is played as fitting the stereotypical trappings of being LGBTQ+ without the connection ever being made explicit. Further, queer coding in particular seems to occur most frequently when the character is meant to be a strange, villainous “other.” Think Jafar from Aladdin being depicted as an eyeliner-wearing, primly dressed sorcerer placed opposite a plucky, makeup-free street urchin modeled more like a California surfer bro. Think Scar from The Lion King being given more effeminate mannerisms, a lithe figure, and arched eyebrows as opposed to Mufuasa and an adult Simba being broader in physique and stereotypically coming off as distinctly more masculine. Heck, think Ursula of The Little Mermaid being modeled after drag queen Divine. And of course, Disney is not the only company to have engaged in this practice (although they really seem to enjoy doing it); they are just a part of a larger problem — our view that queerness, homosexuality, or anything that runs against heteronormativity is creepy, weird, or scary. 

Enter Jason Momoa.

Now, to say Momoa plays Reyes as queer-coded is not a stretch. Just a brief glance at reviews will reveal some interesting word choices. Vanity Fair applauds Momoa’s “flamboyant” take on the character. Forbes similarly uses the very same word. And The Verge notes that Reyes’ wildness “smacks more of gay panic” than anything. “Flamboyant,” of course, could be applied to straight people as well as queer people, but when the character, like Momoa’s, is the only male character in the film to don pig-tails while he paints his toenails and the nails of two male corpses he has propped up next to him, then, well, “flamboyant” just seems like a polite euphemism. 

People that have seen Fast X will likely point out that Momoa’s character is never shown to be attracted to other men (although one wonders what ended up happening with those spa-day corpses) and, indeed, that Reyes only ever flirts with Isabel (Daniela Melchior), a woman who does not reciprocate his feelings. But the thing about subtext is that it’s, you know, subtext. It is a point made at the periphery of stated intention. At its best it is meant to evoke a feeling in an audience without insulting their intelligence by spelling out every single intention behind a work of art. At its worst, whether done consciously or not by an artist, subtext can lead audiences to a series of harmful equations like “nail polish + man = bad,” or “long hair + outlandish style = strange,” or, most interestingly, “atheist = villain.”

I bring up this last issue because it underlies the main conflict in Fast X; while all the main heroes like Dom (Vin Diesel), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), or their son Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) reiterate that they “have faith,” Reyes is presented as explicitly atheist in a monologue where he explains that he was legally dead for two minutes and saw nothing. As a result of this experience, he seemingly “lost” faith, and he has become a nihilistic terrorist since. 

So, on one hand, we have the faithful, family-oriented group wherein “family” implies a mom, a dad, and children surrounded by a loving network of other equally straight, equally faithful mommies, daddies, and children. On the other hand, we have the “flamboyant” atheist-terrorist who literally tries to blow up the Vatican at one point while doing a sacrilegious Christ-like pose. I lied — it’s not subtext. It’s overtext. It’s beating us over the head with several points, and it really just won’t stop. Add to this that Dom’s crucifix necklace becomes the currency various characters exchange with one another to show that they, too, have “faith” and that Reyes explicitly taunts Dom for trying to be a “saint” who must perform miracles to save his only begotten son. All these factors combine to result in a film so wildly anti-queer in its effect that Mel Gibson making Satan a hairless, effeminate weirdo actually comes off as subtle.

Now, none of this is to say that Jason Momoa or the screenwriters set out to revitalize a harmful trope that was on the decline. Likely, homophobia is so ingrained in our society that, in order to make a character truly villainous or “other-ized,” they must seemingly flow against the currents of our social order. That means foes who are presented as “queer,” in every sense of the word, are usually done so with an emphasis on the sexual connotation of the word. 

Yes, Fast X is a big-budget Corona and car commercial that probably spent about a week or so really working out its script beyond getting its characters in position to set up parts two and three, but that doesn’t mean it’s beyond criticism. The Fast movies have combined to make a $7 billion franchise; that means, however silly they are, they are getting millions of views, and often those views are children who are soaking up the themes these films impart. If the theme is “gay atheists want to destroy the world,” that’s a huge problem, and the overly stereotypical push of queer misconceptions in the film is an understatement. Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes is a harsh example of a meltdown when it comes to adequate LGBTQ+ representation. 

Fast X is currently in theaters. 

There was nobody like her. An unstoppable force, one of the fiercest performers of our time, Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll, has passed away at 83-years-old.

It was that trademark alto voice that could detonate at any time on stage, her strong cheekbones and magnetic smile, and those legendary legs; more than 150 million records sold nationwide; 12 Grammys; honored at the Kennedy Center; etched in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her life became the basis for the 1993 film What’s Love Got to Do with It, the HBO documentary Tina in 2021, and a Broadway musical that she called her public farewell.

Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock, grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, where the population just inches over 10,000 people. Performing came naturally for Turner, as she explained in her 2019 autobiography Tina Turner: My Love Story. She describes music-filled shopping adventures — being 4 or 5 years old and being paid by salesgirls to sing radio songs she had memorized — and the excitement of leading her cousins, half-sister Evelyn, and sister Alline in pretend stage shows.

At the age of 16, Turner moved to St. Louis, Missouri, with her mother and sister Alline. She began going to Club Manhattan where she first met Ike Turner. As depicted in What’s Love Got to Do with It, one night she joined Ike and his group on stage for an impromptu performance of B.B. King’s You Know I Love You, and well, the rest is history.

There’s been no secret about the abuse, both personally and professionally, that Turner endured at the hands of Ike Turner. She was one of the first celebrities to speak publicly about domestic abuse. “Looking back, I realize that my relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out that I was going to be his meal ticket, his moneymaker,” Turner wrote in My Love Story. She described how she was a last-minute replacement to sing on A Fool in Love — which became their first hit in 1960 — and was impressive enough that a record label executive told Ike to make Tina the group’s focal point. “What went through Ike’s head when he heard that advice?” she said. “He had to find a way to protect his interests, and that’s when the trouble began.”

Turner was forthcoming about the years of emotional and physical abuse, as well as being financially ruined by her 20-year relationship with Ike Turner. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw, and other injuries that frequently sent her to the hospital. She lost everything, including her money. Yet, in her forties, at a time when most of her musical peers were winding down their careers, Turner reinvented her image, and her life.

In 1984, her solo album Private Dancer was released. At the time, MTV music videos were new and a staple for artists, if they wanted any kind of exposure. It was all about the visual. It was the video for What’s Love Got to Do with It that reintroduced us to Turner’s greatness. She called love a “second-hand emotion,” as she did that signature strut through New York City streets, with spiky blonde hair, a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt, and stiletto heels. Hello!

Other hits on that album — Better Be Good to Me, Let’s Stay Together, and Private Dancer — all reminded us that Turner was a force to be reckoned with. The album solidified that she could not be denied; could not be ignored; and was not under Ike’s thumb anymore.

In 1985, she co-starred in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which blessed us with another hit song, We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome). Her light just kept shining, even after her 50th anniversary tour. We can’t forget that Proud Mary performance at the 2008 Grammy Awards with Beyoncé, which has been circulating on social media since word of Turner’s passing. Looking back, it was as if Turner were passing the torch to the next generation. Queen Bey clearly understood the assignment.

What I love about Tina Turner is that second-act in her forties. It’s truly a masterclass for women, particularly Black creative women, as we often doubt ourselves once we’ve reached a certain age. We measure our level of success based on what we’ve been through. We give up dreams and goals because we think we’re too old. We wait for society to inform us when or if we can be relevant. We listen when told we should just have a seat and be quiet. Tina Turner showed us that our stories never stop being written; we can find the strength to reinvent, restart, and be triumphant in our own right.

As we celebrate Tina Turner’s incredible life, her legacy is not one of victimhood. She’s an example of how a little Black girl from Nutbush, Tennessee, came to own her truth in the midst of pain and trauma to become the woman she was meant to be. Her legacy is that of countless awards and accolades, for sure. But we will remember how we have been changed by her resilience, fortitude, and unmatched talent. We are grateful that we had the honor and opportunity to witness such a force in our lifetime. Tina Turner will always be simply the best.