🎨Art battle: Louvre vs. Kimbell; GM not Cruise-ing; Guess your chance of a delayed flight

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📣NEWS OF THE DAY:

👉Scheduling note: 817 BIZ will be off the rest of this week to celebrate Thanksgiving with family. We hope you will be with family, too. See you on Mon, Nov 27.

France’s Louvre Museum is soliciting donations as it attempts to beat a deadline to prevent the sale of a $26M painting to the Kimbell Art Museum. Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761) by French artist Jean Siméon Chardin was sold at auction to a buyer representing the Kimbell in March 2022, setting the record for the highest price paid for an 18th century French painting. After the auction, the Louvre got a designation that the piece was a national treasure. Under French law, that means the work can be held for up to 2½ years, allowing the Louvre time to match the auction price before the export ban ends. 

Celebrity bit: Texas leads the country in bitcoin mining, with Fort Worth having a mining operation. It’s no surprise then that Fort Worth hosted the North American Blockchain Summit last week. Among the attendees were Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; 2020 presidential candidate and co-chair of the Forward party, Andrew Yang; independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.  

Indications are that American and Southwest airlines could be facing Christmas season walkouts by flight attendants. It's a protracted, regulated process, but AA has been at it for five years with the attendants' representative. Read the details here.

Big and bigger: Fort Worth-based developer Rob Riner Cos. is building an additional 1.4 million-square-feet at Carter Park East at the southeast corner of the intersection of I20 and I35W, according to The Dallas Morning News. The developer filed with the state last month for two big warehouses at the same industrial park totaling more than 1 million square feet.

GM, which recently suspended its Cruise robo-taxi unit because of a dispute with California regulators, has also suspended its employee Cruise equity program. Designed to help attract and retain talent, the equity program allowed current and former employees to sell their vested equity to GM and other investors quarterly.

Overair, developer of all-electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL), announced a partnership with Arlington Municipal Airport to develop and launch eVTOL operations potentially beginning in 2028. Overair announced a similar partnership with DFW International Airport that includes a feasibility and needs assessment to implement a program for passenger eVTOL operations. 

UNT Health Science Center has received a $2-million grant from Tarrant County to help emerging tech startups successfully apply for federal Small Business Innovation Research funding.

A former Tarrant County College Vice President for Development says she plans to appeal her lawsuits against the college that led to the departure of Chancellor Eugene Giovannini in 2022. 10 original claims have been dismissed or dropped. An appeal would be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. 

Bell Textron Inc. has delivered five of 10 Bell 505 helicopters from a 2022 contract to the Royal Jordanian Air Force (RJAF). Included is a flight training device and a computer-based training package to support basic and advanced rotorcraft flight training at the King Hussein Air College. 

Mansfield-based Mouser Electronics, Inc. has selected the 2023 Create the Future winners. The $25,000 grand prize was awarded to Johannes Dapprich and a team from NeuroPair, Inc. located in Princeton, N.J. They submitted “A New Treatment Approach for Spinal Cord Injury”, which uses a minimally invasive injectable scaffold of aligned magnetic nanoparticles to protect, heal and re-grow neurons damaged in SCI. The top 10 ideas are here.

A proposed Starlin Ranch development at 1109 West Broad St. on 121 acres for sale by Bethlehem Baptist Church has been filed and approved by the Mansfield City Council. The development could include up to 271 single-family homes, 156 townhomes, retail buildings, an amenity center, three retention lakes and an amphitheater. 

Notable & quotable: Pamela Cannell, President & CEO of BoardBuild in Fort Worth, writing from the Upswell 2023 conference: "Trust in the nonprofit sector has decreased this year to 43%. However, trust in the social sector among volunteers is 62%."

Daily digit: The overall cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 people is down nearly 5% this year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. However, that’s still 25% higher than 2019, underscoring price increases since the pandemic.

Significant stat: 24% of flights out of US airports have faced delays so far this year, according to the US Department of Transportation—up from 19% in 2021. That means your flight has almost a 1 in 4 chance of not leaving on time.

Pencil pusher: That would be teacher Aaron Bartholmey. He owns the world’s largest collection of pencils ... nearly 70,000. Bartholmey has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records and has been collecting since he was in the first grade. 

People on the move:

• MereCi Fine Packaging: Hires Karlien Murray as Business Development Representative

• Ranch Hands Rescue: Adds Nate Krieger as Business Development Manager

• U.S. Energy Development Corp.: Hires Jake Plunk as VP of Acquisitions and Divestitures

• Law Insider: Hires Chris Handy as VP-Product Marketing

👉🏼Reminder: 817 BIZ will be off the rest of this week. See you on Mon, Nov 27.

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