Month: May 2021

Categories
Business

529 Plans for Faculty: Store Round and Save Charges

529 Plans for College: Shop Around and Save Fees

However, the outcome could have been different if the bug had occurred during a downturn, said Madeline Hume, a Morningstar analyst. She has recommended that you be familiar with the performance of your plan so that you can assess whether returns seem unusual and be careful when your plan notifies you of any changes. “It’s important to know what communication is coming out,” she said.

The company rates 529 plans on factors such as fees, investment options, and plan monitoring. Most plans are rated gold, silver, or bronze, which indicates that they offer a net benefit to investors. However, eight plans received “negative” ratings, mainly due to excessive fees.

Here are some questions and answers about 529 savings plans:

What college expenses can 529 funds be used for?

Savings in a 529 can be used to pay college expenses including tuition, room and board, mandatory fees, books, supplies, and required equipment.

Can I use 529 funds to pay for student loans?

Yes. According to a law passed in 2019, up to $ 10,000 from a 529 account can be used to repay a beneficiary’s student loan. An additional $ 10,000 each can be used to repay student loans borrowed from the beneficiary’s siblings.

Can grandparents save on a 529 account for a grandchild?

Yes – and an upcoming change to an important grant form, the Free State Student Aid Application (FAFSA), should help make this more attractive. Currently, contributions from 529 grandparent-owned plans are reported by the FAFSA as untaxed cash assistance for the student, which may decrease eligibility for financial assistance, financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz said. However, an updated FAFSA will remove the issue of cash assistance, so distributions from 529 grandparent-owned distributions are no longer on the form. The change is expected to take place at FAFSA in late 2022 for the 2023-24 academic year.

However, the change doesn’t affect another form of tuition grant, the CSS profile, which is required by many more expensive private colleges, Kantrowitz said.

Categories
Health

Jury can hear restricted proof of CEO way of life

Jury can hear limited evidence of CEO lifestyle

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team in downtown San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, May 4, 2021.

MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images | MediaNews Group | Getty Images

Jurors in the trial of Elizabeth Holmes will hear evidence about her extravagant lifestyle as Theranos CEO but with some limitations.

That’s the ruling issued by U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila late Saturday as part of a 100 page response to motions in Holmes’ upcoming criminal trial.

The judge granted in part Holmes’ motion to exclude evidence referencing her extravagant lifestyle outside of her position as chief executive of the blood-testing start-up.

“The Government may introduce evidence that Holmes enjoyed a lifestyle as Theranos CEO that is comparable to those of other tech company CEOs. This includes salary, travel, celebrity, and other perks and benefits commensurate with the position,” Davila wrote in the filing.

However, “references to specific purchases or details reflecting branding of clothing, hotels, or other personal items is not relevant, and the prejudicial effect of that evidence outweighs any probative value,” the judge added.

The ruling is a partial victory for Holmes as prosecutors cannot introduce details about Holmes’ specific purchases and personal items outside of her position as CEO. Holmes lived in an expensive rental home, traveled by private jet, stayed at luxury hotels and employed Theranos-paid assistants to run her lavish shopping sprees.

“Each time Holmes made an extravagant purchase, it is reasonable to infer that she knew her fraudulent activity allowed her to pay for those items,” Davila wrote. “While the benefits of these purchases are not as directly tied to the fraud…it may still be probative of Holmes’ scienter.”

The ruling comes two weeks after Holmes battled it out with prosecutors in court over whether details of her wealth, lifestyle and perks she attained as CEO would be relevant to jurors in her trial.

At the height of Theranos, the start-up was valued at $9 billion and Holmes was touted as the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire. The company collapsed in 2018 following a Wall Street Journal investigation that revealed failings in the blood-testing technology.

Davila ruled on more than 20 dueling motions on what jurors can hear in her trial, scheduled to begin on Aug. 30.

A motion by the government to admit business-related text messages between Holmes and her co-defendant Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was denied by Davila.

Prosecutors say the messages show the two top executives knew how much trouble Theranos was in before it collapsed. In a November 2014 text to Holmes, Balwani describes one Theranos lab as a “f*cking disaster zone,” adding he would “work on fixing this.”

Holmes and Balwani have both pled not guilty to a dozen criminal wire fraud charges in connection with deceiving investors, patients and doctors.

Categories
Business

Warfare footing wanted to appropriate economists local weather change failings

War footing needed to correct economists climate change failings

Economic projections that predict the potential impacts of climate change have grossly underestimated reality and delayed global recovery efforts by decades, according to a senior professor.

Mainstream economists “purposely and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “compiled their own numbers” to fit their market models, Steve Keen, a fellow at University College’s London Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, told CNBC on Friday .

Now a “state of war” is required to repair the damage, he said.

“Basically, economists have completely misrepresented and ignored science, where it contradicts their tendency that climate change is not a big deal because they think capitalism can handle anything,” Keen told Street Signs Asia.

We play with forces that go far beyond what we can actually tackle.

Steve Keen

Fellow at University College London

Keen said the effects of climate change were predicted in the 1972 publication “The Limits to Growth” – a divisive account of the devastating effects of global expansion – but economists ignored their warnings then and since, preferring to rely on market mechanisms .

“If their warnings had been taken seriously and we had done what they suggested and changed our trajectory from 1975 onwards, we could have done so gradually, using things like the carbon tax, etc.,” he said. “Because economists have delayed it by another half a century, we as a species put three to four times the pressure on the biosphere.”

Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland. Climate change is having profound effects in Greenland as the glaciers and the Greenland ice cap retreat.

NurPhoto | Getty Images

As a result, he said, “The only way to reverse this is effectively to mobilize a war-induced foundation to reverse the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere in order to drastically reduce our consumption.”

Referring specifically to a report by economists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was instrumental in outlining global climate goals, including those presented in the Paris Agreement COP21, Keen said even their most serious estimates were a “trivial underestimation of the”. Damage we expect. “

That’s because they “completely and deliberately ignore the possibility of turning points,” a point at which climate change can cause irreversible changes in the environment.

“I think we should throw the economists completely out of this discussion and sit the politicians with the scientists and say that these are the possible outcomes of such a big change in the biosphere. We are playing with forces far beyond what we can . ” actually address, “he said.

Keen’s comments come as world leaders conclude their final day of meetings in the Arctic Council – an intergovernmental forum that addresses wide-ranging geopolitical issues from climate to trade.

Categories
World News

Belarus Forces Down Ryanair Flight Carrying Journalist

Belarus Forces Down Ryanair Flight Carrying Journalist

In Russia – where the state media described the uprising against Lukashenko last year as a Western conspiracy – the arrest of Putin’s supporters met with approval. Margarita Simonyan, editor of the Kremlin-friendly RT TV station, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Lukashenko “played it beautifully”. And Vyacheslav Lysakov, a member of parliament allied with Putin, described the arrest of Protasevich as a “brilliant special operation”.

Belarusian authorities said they ordered the plane to land after receiving information about a bomb threat, even though Vilnius, the plane’s destination, was much closer than Minsk when the jetliner turned. The country’s defense ministry said in another statement that the country’s air defense forces have been placed on alert.

It is known that Mr. Lukashenko and his government use ruse to persecute their political opponents.

Mr Protasevich’s arrest comes months after the largest wave of street protests in Belarusian history failed to depose Mr Lukashenko, who has been the country’s authoritarian leader for more than 26 years.

More than 32,000 protesters were arrested and at least four died during the protests. Hundreds of people were brutally beaten by the police. NEXTA became the leading online outlet coordinating the demonstrations.

With Putin’s support and exceptional violence, Mr Lukashenko managed to crack down on demonstrators successfully, with the country’s security apparatus remaining loyal to him.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya, the main opponent of Mr. Lukashenko during the last presidential election in August, widely viewed as rigged, described the episode with the Ryanair flight as “an operation by the Special Services to hijack an airplane to arrest activist and blogger Roman Protasevich. “

“Not a single person flying over Belarus can be sure of their safety,” she said.

Aviation industry observers predicted a strong response from commercial airlines. “What is unique about this incident is that it was state sponsored,” said Kevin Murphy, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Categories
Business

It’s the Media’s ‘Imply-Too’ Second. Cease Yelling and Go to Human Sources.

It’s the Media’s ‘Mean-Too’ Moment. Stop Yelling and Go to Human Resources.

Perhaps even worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d never heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s appeal, and that she didn’t “get” why he was popular. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in many ways, the city itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, said in an email.

In fact, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, something she had done with unusual success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has ambitious plans to hire 15 to 20 more reporters — but first she had the near-impossible assignment of bringing together a group of traditional radio journalists, used to working for days and occasionally weeks on colorful local features, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy local blog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be less openly hostile to the New York Police Department in their reporting, two reporters said. Ms. Roussel suggested that Ms. Cooper was trying to rein in Gothamist’s habit of adding “an element of editorializing to its coverage that can be interpreted as bias.”

And Ms. Cooper started pushing the radio journalists to pick up their pace and to file stories for the web. That seemed like a reasonable request, but it led to another stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio side, Fred Mogul, filed a story with one paragraph printed in a different font. The editor realized it was Associated Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined through his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism without a review of whether he’d ever done it before.

Ms. Cooper declined to speak to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. But one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper called a virtual meeting Feb. 5 over Zoom to inform the full newsroom of her decision to fire Mr. Mogul. According to a copy of the recording provided to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper told the staffers, “It’s totally OK to be sad.” But then several stunned radio reporters questioned the move, explaining that they regularly incorporated A.P. copy into stories on air and had imported the practice to WNYC’s little-read website, crediting The A.P. at the bottom of the story.

“Go through every single one of our articles and fire all of us, because that is exactly what we have all done,” one host, Rebeca Ibarra, told her.

On Feb. 10, more than 60 employees — including Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to reconsider and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”

Categories
Politics

As Talks Bathroom Down, Hopes for Bipartisan Offers on Biden’s Priorities Dim

As Talks Bog Down, Hopes for Bipartisan Deals on Biden’s Priorities Dim

“We would like bipartisanship, but I don’t think we have a seriousness on the part of the Republican leadership to address the major crises facing this country,” Mr. Sanders said. “If they’re not coming forward, we’ve got to go forward alone.”

Negotiations have also stalled on policing reform, with three lawmakers still unable to reach an agreement on how or whether to alter the legal liability shield for individual police officers — known as qualified immunity — to make it easier to bring civil lawsuits against them for wrongdoing. Disagreement over whether to change that doctrine had doomed attempts to pass policing legislation last summer, amid a national outcry for reform.

Mr. Biden had hoped lawmakers would broker a deal before May 25, the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer. But a breakthrough has remained elusive despite continued, closed-door negotiations between Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California, and Senators Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.

“We want to eliminate qualified immunity, and that is where we’re starting,” Mr. Booker said in an interview broadcast on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “Clearly, you’ve heard very publicly the red lines on the other side. And again, this is one of the big issues that we’re working very hard to see if we can bridge this wide gulf.”

Prospects to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault also dimmed last week, as Republican leaders dug in against the commission in an attempt to doom its prospects in the Senate even though one of their own House members negotiated its details with Democrats.

The Republican leaders of both chambers, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have opposed the creation of such a panel. Mr. McConnell warned that Democrats had partisan motives in moving to set up the commission and would try to use it as a cudgel against Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.

Several rank-and-file Republican senators who had publicly mulled backing the commission quickly fell in line, adopting the argument that the proposal was not truly bipartisan and that the investigation would take too long, underscoring a difficult path for Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold required for passage of the bill in the evenly divided Senate.

Categories
Health

These Sisters With Sickle Cell Had Devastating — and Preventable — Strokes

These Sisters With Sickle Cell Had Devastating — and Preventable — Strokes

Dr. Julie Kanter, a hematologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and director of the university’s adult sickle cell clinic, reviewed the medical records of 5,347 children in 28 medical centers, large and small, including academic and minor medical centers. Depending on the center, only 30 to 75 percent of the children had received the recommended screening. On average, only 48.4 percent received the ultrasound. The prices were independent of the size of the medical center or the academic affiliation.

“The rate is terrible, actually worse than we thought,” said Dr. Canter.

The researchers interviewed parents and caregivers and found that some doctors did not inform parents about the checkups. Some parents, even when told, did not understand its critical meaning. (Dr. Kanter would like to rename the Stroke Screen test to Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound to make its purpose clearer.) Some medical centers with special sickle cell clinics have not been able to consistently track families who missed appointments.

There were also logistical obstacles. Sometimes medical centers that offered the test were far from the homes of children with the disease. Some parents struggled to take time off work to take their children to test. And the centers that ran the tests were sometimes not part of a family’s insurance network.

Ultrasound screens aren’t the only medical care that children with sickle cells receive inconsistently. Hydroxyurea, a low-cost generic drug that has been around since the 1980s, may reduce the risk of irreversible damage to organs and the brain. But unfortunately it is not being used enough. The National Institutes of Health guidelines published in 2014 state that all children and adolescents should attend, as well as adults with three or more pain crises per year or other serious complications.

A recent survey of 2,200 sickle cell patients in eight locations, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that only 48 percent of patients were taking hydroxyurea regularly. Interviews with doctors who had not prescribed the drug revealed that many were unfamiliar with the drug, while others feared that hydroxyurea, which is also a cancer treatment in much higher doses, could cause cancer, although at the lower level of sickle cell disease it could cause cancer. Dose is not the case.

Another recent study of Medicaid patients in North Carolina found that only 32 percent of the 2,790 Medicaid patients with sickle cells even had a prescription for hydroxyurea, and only 31 percent of those patients were taking the drug regularly.

Categories
Business

Ranch Rider Spirits’ canned craft cocktails boomed through the pandemic

Ranch Rider Spirits' canned craft cocktails boomed during the pandemic

Brian and Quentin at Ranch Rider Spirits.

Source: Ranch Rider Spirits

Ranch Rider Spirits’ cocktail line is as Texan as possible.

The canned cocktails were built and bred in the beating heart of Austin, Texas and are the craft of co-founders Quentin Cantu and Brian Murphy. Ranch Rider Spirits offers four downright Texan craft cocktails with no preservatives or additives in simple 12-ounce cans.

Originally from Texas, Cantu completed a six-year stint in Washington, DC, where he worked in politics before heading out to the Lone Star State in 2016 to befriend Murphy.

“I think we were really hungry to learn new skills outside of class and outside of our previous careers,” Cantu told CNBC. Armed with the basics of business, Cantu and Murphy launched their first company – a food truck that offered healthier options to students on the sprawling UT campus.

“We went out at 6am, bought food, cooked that day, and then went to class and did it all over again with very little sleep,” said Cantu, explaining that the two started business while doing a full deal . Course load of UT’s demanding MBA program.

As the demand for meals cooked on board the food truck, affectionately known as the “Ranch Hand” increased, Cantu and Murphy expanded the business with a range of handmade cocktails.

“I think we hit a nerve,” said Cantu of the relatively quick success. “We met a lot of unknown consumer demand for something that wasn’t beer, but also wasn’t spiked seltzer.”

To keep up with demand, the two pondered how to further scale the happy accident of a potential alcohol business.

“We didn’t want to just open a bar. We wanted to make sure the product we made could be enjoyed by everyone for a longer period of time,” Cantu told CNBC, adding that a canned product gave them flexibility in pursuing e-commerce -Sales as well as doing business with health-focused grocery stores like Whole Foods.

Ranch Rider Spirits

Source: Ranch Rider Spirits

In January 2020, with the grace of Austin Angel investors, Cantu and Murphy launched their first cans in the local market. Four months later, as the coronavirus pandemic raged, forcing restaurants and bars to close, Cantu and Murphy saw soaring demand as diners brought cocktail culture home.

“Obviously people quarantined at home and spent a lot more time online during the pandemic, so we really invested in digital marketing, which we both got from our previous careers before business school,” explained Cantu.

Online alcohol sales rose a whopping 243% in the third week of March, according to data from Nielsen published by Bloomberg.

Data from IWSR and Nielsen showed that ready-to-drink retailers saw sales surge during the coronavirus pandemic, according to BevAlc Insights of alcohol e-commerce platform Drizly.

During a 23-week period amid the August 8th coronavirus pandemic, the ready-to-drink sector saw off-premise dollar sales grow 86.8% year over year, according to Nielsen.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the sector saw 21.5% growth for a 52 week period ending February 29, according to Drizly.

“When you think about the value proposition of a canned cocktail like Ranch Rider, when you want to go to the lake or pool with friends and have a liquor-based cocktail, you don’t want to bring a glass bottle, you don’t want to bring ice, you don’t want fresh limes and Bring side dishes, “Cantu explained.

Ranch Rider Spirits ranked second among Drizly’s best-selling 2020 brands, beating ready-to-drink offerings from industry giants like Ketel One, 1800 Tequila, Jim Beam and Cutwater Spirits.

In its first year of business, Ranch Rider had sales of approximately $ 4 million, nearly quadrupling its conservative projections.

“Much of our growth has been organic because we’ve focused on slowly cultivating audiences, mostly in Texas, that appreciate the craftsmanship of our product,” said Cantu.

Austin’s craft culture

Ranch Rider Spirits

Source: Ranch Rider Spirits

The funky, upbeat heart of Texas is home to the University of Texas, the annual SXSW (South by Southwest) technology conference, multiple arts and music festivals, and has become a mecca for startups that are in some ways leaving Silicon Valley.

The city thrives on a vibrant terrace culture powered by food, drinks and live music.

“The culture of Texas, and Austin in particular, is a culture of craft,” Cantu explained. “There’s a high premium here and appreciation and respect for craftsmanship, and we never wanted to lose sight of that value as it drives our growth.”

To ensure full accuracy of the production process, Cantu and Murphy built a 20,000 square foot facility about 40 minutes outside of Austin.

“We felt that it was important to touch and feel everything that goes into our product. We didn’t want to outsource this process to someone else, and I really think a lot of people in Austin really appreciate that attention to detail . ” he added.

“Real citrus fruits, real spirits”

Canned Cocktails from Ranch Rider Spirits Co.

Courtesy Ranch Rider Spirits

Last week Ranch Rider Spirits unveiled their fourth canned cocktail called “The Buck”, a recipe from Moscow Mule made from six times distilled vodka, freshly squeezed organic ginger, freshly squeezed lime and mineral water.

“The Buck” contains 5.9% alcohol and 119 calories and follows “Ranch Water”, a cocktail based on reposado tequila with a dash of sparkling water and freshly squeezed lime juice. The legendary West Texas cocktail “The Chilton” is the place where the freshly squeezed lemon juice shines next to a pinch of sea salt and vodka.

The portfolio is rounded off by the “Tequila Paloma”, in which reposado tequila, freshly squeezed grapefruit, lime, orange and mineral water merge.

“We printed this on the label of each can, but we’re just keeping it stupid. We use real citrus, real liquor, no additives, no preservatives, no sugar at all,” explained Cantu. “It tastes fresh because it’s not artificial and it’s not made in a laboratory,” he added.

Categories
Entertainment

5 Current Science Fiction Motion pictures to Stream Now

Five Recent Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now

Questions, questions: at their best, science-fiction films ponder and ask, then are so compelling that you forget you ever wanted an answer. This month’s selection will particularly reward viewers who have no patience for easy resolutions — or distinct genre classifications.

Stream it on Netflix.

The Taiwanese director Cheng Wei-Hao’s ambitious movie will frustrate viewers who like their genres neatly defined. Set in 2032, it follows the efforts of the prosecutor Liang Wen-Chao (Chen Chang) to solve the gruesome death of a local business tycoon, slaughtered by his estranged son — at least that’s what it looks like. A giant question mark also hovers above the dead man’s second wife, Li Yan (Anke Sun, chilly and unsettling).

Liang is especially desperate to figure out what happened because he has cancer and this could be his last case.

Nothing in the convoluted plot is at it seems, and “The Soul” careers wildly from one red herring to another, from horror to procedural to science fiction to melodrama to thriller to romance, and back again.

For the most part Cheng succeeds in keeping his disparate themes in the air: It’s like watching someone juggle a knife, a ball, a pin and a glass, only occasionally dropping one. And underneath the “oh no, they didn’t!” plot twists, the movie’s bittersweet concern is our inability to accept the inevitable and let things — or people — go.

Buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu.

Some movies come preloaded with lengthy exposition. Others dispense information in a slow, steady drip. And then there are those that dare audiences to embrace a state of puzzlement. “Doors” squarely belongs to that last category, and your reaction to it will vary based on your tolerance for unexplained events with a whiff of the metaphysical. If the last part of “2001: A Space Odyssey” drives you crazy, stay away from this anthology effort, in which millions of the title objects appear overnight, with no clue about their origin.

The best of the movie’s three distinct parts are the first and last. In the introductory “Lockdown,” the director Jeff Desom conjures up a mini-horror movie as a group of kids taking a test must figure out what to do about a door that popped up in a hallway. Saman Kesh’s meandering “Knockers” takes place after millions of people have disappeared through the doors and into … another reality?

“Lamaj,” directed by Dugan O’Neal, is back on solid footing as Jamal (Kyp Malone, from the band TV on the Radio) monitors a door deep in the woods. One day, the door talks to him — not to explain what is happening, though. For that, we still have to use our imagination.

Buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu.

There’s little science in this new Swedish movie, and even less fiction: It’s hard not to think that the events could happen all too easily.

“The Unthinkable” squarely belongs to the pre-apocalyptic genre: Mysterious explosions paralyze Stockholm, the Swedish power grid collapses, nobody can figure out what’s happening, and in no time the country completely falls apart. As is typical in survival tales, the movie — which is credited to the film collective Crazy Pictures — follows a small group of archetypes trying to make it through the ordeal: a tormented guy (Christoffer Nordenrot, who helped write the screenplay) trying to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart (Lisa Henni), herself desperately looking for her small daughter; a conspiracy theorist (Jesper Barkselius) who may or may not be right about what’s happening; a high-ranking government official (Pia Halvorsen) trying to do the right thing.

The movie’s first third feels like a fairly run-of-the-mill family drama, complete with flashback to traumatic childhood events. And then the machine clicks into high gear and you’re too distracted by the impressive set pieces to be bothered by the murky explanations — an unnecessary coda during the end credits feels like a jokey cop-out. And the biggest question remains unanswered: How the heck did Crazy Pictures pull this off on a $2 million budget?

Stream it on Hulu.

Try not to get stuck on the convoluted plot — time-travel paradoxes are hell on screenwriters. What matters in this Australian eco-dystopia is the human element. More specifically Kodi Smit-McPhee’s performance as Ethan, a lowly worker who is sent from 2067, when an oxygen-starved Earth is in its death throes, to a time centuries ahead that may hold the key to salvation. Tall and slightly gaunt, with wide-spaced eyes that give him a haunted look, Smit-McPhee — first noticed 12 years ago as the young boy in the adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” — does not resemble the he-men usually assigned to single-handedly rescue the world. But that’s exactly what makes him so distinctively appealing here.

Seth Larney’s film does not always make sense, and you wish it made better use of Ryan Kwanten and Deborah Mailman in key supporting roles. But Smit-McPhee is a strong anchor. That Ethan accepts the mission less for the sake of saving humanity and more for that of saving a single person (his wife), makes terrible sense.

When a crisis hits onscreen, characters often seem to instantly become experts in survival, no matter their jobs — remember, Tom Cruise was a simple longshoreman in “War of the Worlds.”

But what if the folks facing an alien invasion were woefully inept, for a change? That’s the case in this very funny satire from Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. A couple of Brooklyn hipsters, Jack (John Reynolds, from “Search Party”) and Su (Sunita Mani, “GLOW”), are spending an off-the-grid week upstate when mysterious fur balls crash-land from space. Lacking follow-through and entirely devoid of practical skills — the movie suggests that an overreliance on smartphones is partly to blame — our two earthlings sink rather than rise to the occasion, and soon Su and Jack are on the run, screaming, from the killer “pouffes” (whose resemblance to the Tribbles of old “Star Trek” cannot be fortuitous).

The movie pokes fun both at science-fiction conventions and coddled millennials, while besting many other comedies by miraculously not running out of gas halfway through.

Categories
Health

U.S. Covid instances hit lowest stage since June 2020

Dr. Scott Gottlieb says lift them for outdoors

People crowd outdoor dining at a restaurant as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions are eased in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S., April 4, 2021.

Emily Elconin | Reuters

Covid cases in the U.S. have dropped to their lowest level since June as the nation prepares for Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the summer travel season.

The seven-day average of new infections is about 26,000 as of Sunday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That is the lowest number since June of last year.

The decline of cases is a hopeful sign, especially as many Americans plan to travel, spend days at the beach and gather with friends and family over the summer. It is the latest in a series of milestones that signal a reopening economy and a gradual return to a more typical way of life.

Cases of Covid have fallen as more people across the country get vaccinated. About 49% of the U.S. population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, and 39% of the population is fully vaccinated as of Saturday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those age 18 and older, 61% are at least partially vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Retailers, including Target, Walmart and Macy’s said this week that consumers’ purchases reflect that people are becoming more mobile and social again. They said a growing number of customers have returned to stores to browse or bought merchandise they previously skipped over, from new outfits to from teeth whitener.

The CDC’s new public health recommendations also ushered in change earlier this month for Americans who had been wearing masks for months. The federal agency said people who are fully vaccinated do not need to cover their face in most indoor and outdoor settings. That prompted many retailers and some states, including New York, to drop mask requirements for those vaccinated and align with the new policy.