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Emily Wilder’s Firing at The A.P. Reminds Us of What We Did not Anticipate

Emily Wilder's Firing at The A.P. Reminds Us of What We Didn't Expect

“I think that’s because it worked, so partisans and actors will continue to use the technique,” said Ms. Ball. “They broke that outrage to get Emily Wilder fired. And then they have the boldness to cry over “culture breakup”. “

This is the current term that political law uses to describe the punishment of people for “wrong thinking”. According to Pew, the majority of Americans are now familiar with the term, but feelings are mixed about whether it is useful, leads to a more accountable society, or gruesome form of punishment, and whether it leads to people’s actions being deliberately out of context.

Part of the problem is how time itself has been warped by the internet. Everything is moving faster than before. Accountability from a person’s employer or affiliated institutions is expected immediately after years of content has been exposed. Who you were a year ago, or five years ago, or decades ago is flattening to what you are now. Time has collapsed and everything is in the present because it takes microseconds to get online. There is little appreciation for context or personal development.

And that happens not only to journalists and politicians, whose jobs invite frequent public deliberation, but also to students and business people, because we are all online so often now.

Some see the benefit in this shift. In the same Pew poll of 10,000+ people, more than half agreed to calling people up for their behavior on social media, saying it would help hold people accountable. “People take a closer look at their actions and force them to investigate what they are doing, why they are doing it and what the consequences of those actions are,” said one respondent.

Ms. Ball remains confident that things will change. “The reactionary culture is harmful and unhelpful and really brutal for everyone involved,” she said. “Much of our society wants to see that we believe in forgiveness, in salvation, in people’s ability to learn, grow, and get better.”

She pointed to the backlash against Mrs. Wilder’s shot; Dozens of staff wrote an open letter to The AP expressing dismay.

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US anticipated to spend $4.7 billion on gasoline over Memorial Day weekend

US expected to spend $4.7 billion on gas over Memorial Day weekend

Americans are expected to spend roughly $4.7 billion on gas during the Friday through Monday of Memorial Day weekend, according to GasBuddy, an app and website focused on finding real-time fuel prices.

That breaks down to about $1.18 billion spent on gas each day, give or take $1 million, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, tells CNBC Make It. 

GasBuddy predicts the national average price of gasoline will be $2.98 per gallon during Memorial Day weekend, the highest price on record for the May holiday weekend since 2014 when gas hit $3.66 per gallon. (AAA is reporting slightly higher averages at $3.04 per gallon, as of Thursday.) 

“Gas prices have been increasing for months due to the continued rise in gasoline demand as a myriad of destinations reopen ahead of the summer driving season. The Colonial Pipeline shutdown only highlighted how much more reliant consumers have become on gasoline since the pandemic hit,” De Haan says. 

Gas prices should start to ease up after Memorial Day, but De Haan warns that a rebound may happen and gasoline prices could rise again around the middle of summer.

If you are planning a road trip this summer, here are a few tips to help you save at the pump. 

1. Compare prices

Whether it’s through GasBuddy or other driving apps that show local gas costs, such as the AAA Mobile app or Waze, it’s worth looking around for the best price. A small difference can add up.

The average summer road trip is 568 miles round trip, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Assuming you have a car with an average 12-gallon gas tank, you’d be saving over $20 if you shave off just 5 cents per fill-up. 

You should also be aware that fuel prices can fluctuate by location. AAA recommends getting gas before you arrive at your destination because many popular beach and vacation locations tend to have more expensive gas prices. 

2. Make sure your car maintenance is up-to-date

3. Drive calmly

Being a zen driver can not only reduce your stress, but it may also help you save on gas. That’s because driving aggressively with lots of lane-changing, braking and rapid acceleration can increase fuel consumption by 30% on the highway.

Driving over 50 miles per hour can also have an impact because it increases the vehicle’s wind resistance. For every five miles per hour you drive over 50, you’re likely paying an additional $0.21 for gas. 

4. Take advantage of loyalty programs

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How Memorial Day Weekend Journey in U.S. Could Be Completely different

How Memorial Day Weekend Travel in U.S. May Be Different

Memorial Day weekend is underway in the US, and it looks decidedly different for travelers than it was a year ago.

More than half of all adults in the United States are now fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A federal mandate stipulates that travelers on airplanes or public transport must wear masks, although most airlines at the time asked passengers to wear them. And this year, far, far more people are likely to be leaving for vacation than they were in 2020.

Darby LaJoye, the acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, said the number of travelers at U.S. airports rose steadily in the spring, reaching nearly 1.9 million last Sunday, almost eight times the figure as of May 17, the comparable Sunday in 2020.

That number is likely to be exceeded over the holiday weekend, the latest high point in recent waves of returning travelers. The agency predicts airports will likely see two million passengers a day. Mr LaJoye said the increasing number of passengers could lead to longer waiting times at security checkpoints.

AAA, the group of car owners, predicted earlier this month that a total of more than 37 million people would cover 50 miles or more from Thursday to Monday – a 60 percent increase from a year earlier but still 9 percent below 2019. A big one Majority will travel by car.

“We will continue to see a very steady increase as we approach the summer travel season,” said LaJoye. “As vaccinations continue to rise and confidence continues to grow, the country’s planes, trains, buses and roads will be busy.”

To control the spread of the virus, the TSA has built acrylic barriers, installed new machines to allow some passengers to scan their own documents, and adjusted the rules to allow passengers to have up to 12 ounces of hand sanitizer in their carry-on bags.

A year ago there was no approved coronavirus vaccine in the United States, mask requirements were left to local officials and individual airlines, and air traffic was sparse.

Now people 12 and older can be vaccinated, and those who choose to travel have a sense of security of their own that even the most daring travelers haven’t had in the past year. (Still, travel and many other activities can be complicated for younger children and their families).

“Thanks to vaccines, tens of millions of Americans can go back to something normal and visit friends and family,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, at a press conference this week.

This year’s holiday falls at a time when parts of the world like the United States and the European Union may gradually reopen their borders and resume tourism. However, the virus continues to devastate other areas, particularly India, South America and Southeast Asia, where vaccine supplies are scarce and worrisome variants of the virus have been discovered.

Coincidentally, the average number of new cases reported in the U.S. is about the same as it was on Memorial Day last year, about 23,000 a day, although tests were far less frequent than the pandemic initially emerged. In any event, the number had fallen from a recent high in mid-April.

Last year, reports of revelers ignoring mask and social distancing rules over the holiday weekend were legion. Within weeks of some states reopening, virus cases began to surge to record levels. Jumps in virus cases have been observed after other holiday weekends, noted Dr. Walensky this week.

According to Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, is likely to see many viral outbreaks in the US look different after vacation after vaccinating many people. She said she was concerned about “micro-epidemics” in vulnerable areas.

“We could potentially focus these surges in specific communities where there are low vaccination rates and low masking rates,” said Dr. El-Sadr.

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Costco is seeing inflation abound, impacting a slew of client merchandise

Costco is seeing inflation abound, impacting a slew of consumer products

A butcher stores a display case of steaks at a Costco store in Novato, California on May 24, 2021.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Don’t tell Costco executives that inflation is low.

The big box club chain announced that prices for a number of products, including shipping containers, aluminum foil, and a 20% increase in meat prices over the past month, have increased.

“Inflation factors abound,” said CFO Richard Galanti in the company’s earnings forecast for the third quarter on Thursday.

“These include higher labor costs, higher freight costs, higher transport demand as well as the shortage of containers and delays in the port … increased demand in various product categories, some bottlenecks, various bottlenecks from chips to oils to chemical supplies by facilities affected by the Gulf Frost and Storms and in some cases higher commodity prices, “he added.

Costco reported earnings of $ 2.75 per share for the period, well above Wall Street estimates. It also generated $ 45.3 billion in revenue, which also topped the road that looked for $ 43.6 billion.

However, beneath those numbers was a story about how higher prices across the board affected the chain.

On the upside, gas inflation spiked as pump prices rose about 30% across the country this year. In other cases it wasn’t that easy.

Like other companies, Costco struggled to pass the cost on to customers. The company assumes that there could be some margin pressure, although the degree remains to be seen and no material impact has occurred so far.

Economists view the current rate of inflation – a closely tracked measure released Friday – as temporary. They list many of the same factors as the Costco executives, mainly a series of supply chain issues that have led to a surge in products central to the US economy and household consumption.

Galanti cited price increases of up to 8% and cited goods such as pulp and paper, an assortment of plastic products, and soda and cheese. For some clothes, prices rose by 3% to 10%.

Overall, he said the company cut inflation from 1% to 1.5% in March to 2.5% to 3.5% today.

“Some items are higher and some items, the retail prices haven’t changed. And some items have even gone down a little,” said Galanti. “Again we think we’ve done pretty well to control this as best we can, but the inflationary pressures are great.”

Costco has worked with its supplies to keep price pressures under control. But Galanti admitted that “some of [inflation] went through. “

Going forward, items like the warehouse’s $ 4.99 fried chicken and the $ 2.99 40-pack water container could be affected.

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Olympic Pin Buying and selling Is One other Casualty of Covid This 12 months

Olympic Pin Trading Is Another Casualty of Covid This Year

A few years ago, Bud Kling had three rooms added to his house in the Pacific Palisades in California. The builders used extra concrete along with a reinforcing metal beam — and not because Mr. Kling was expecting a crowd. The rooms weren’t for people. They were designed to house and showcase his 30,000-strong collection of Olympic pins, the colorful and endlessly varied souvenirs that have been bought and traded at the Games for decades.

Even when the builders were finished, Mr. Kling, a 74-year-old tennis coach, still had far more pins than he could fit in his home. He also owns about 100,000 “trading pins” — multiples of the same pin that can be swapped — and he hauls some of them to the Games. His stash is stacked in his garage and in rented storage space.

“I have a very patient wife,” said Mr. Kling, unnecessarily.

When organizers of the Tokyo Olympics announced that the 2020 Games would be delayed for a year and, in March, that no overseas spectators would be allowed into the country, few were as despondent as Mr. Kling and other hard-core Olympic pin traders. To them, the Games are only partly about sports. For every minute they spend watching competition, they spend one minute — maybe two — trading pins, either in impromptu scrums outside venues or at designated trading centers.

The collapse of the pin trading market will hardly register in the ledger of losses incurred by the Tokyo Games, an enterprise that the country’s organizers say will cost more than $15 billion. About $3 billion of that stems from renegotiating contracts caused by the yearlong delay. But stuffing the national coffers hasn’t been the point of hosting since the price tag for throwing the world’s largest gathering started to soar more than a decade ago. Countries vie for the Games hoping for the ultimate look-at-me moment, a slick, multiweek advertisement aimed at the entire planet.

Tokyo will get a healthy portion of self-promotion if the Games go ahead, which organizers vow will happen despite national polls suggesting that an overwhelming number of people in Japan — who are contending with a prolonged fourth virus wave — would prefer another delay or outright cancellation.

For Olympics goers around the world, these Games will be remembered as the party they had to skip. That includes about 250 pin traders, people who plan their lives around the two-year interval between the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Never heard of Olympic pins? They are a portable, wearable bit of promotion and branding for athletic delegations, national Olympics committees, corporate sponsors, news media outlets and cities bidding for the Games. (The New York Times makes its own pins and gives a couple dozen to reporters covering events.)

To the unmoved, the pins are the kind of $7 memento you toss in a drawer, or a wastepaper basket, as soon as you return from the Games. Thousands of people buy pins, and many spontaneously trade them once they see a trading hive outside a venue. Host countries cater to both casual and ardent fans by producing vast quantities of pins, which are sold at souvenir shops.

Japan was prepared for pin-crazed crowds. The country’s organizers have made 600 different officially licensed pins, a spokesman at the Games said, and there are 12 souvenir stores set up around Tokyo. Now, demand for this bounty is an open question. It’s not just that Japanese fans will be the only ones admitted to the Games. Trading is such a hands-on, face-to-face activity that there are worries that it might be discouraged — or even banned.

The press office at the Games would not comment other than to send along a “playbook,” published in February, outlining safety protocols. Pin trading wasn’t mentioned, but one of the principles stated that attendees should “keep physical interactions with others to a minimum” and “avoid closed spaces and crowds where possible.” That makes pin trading all but impossible.

For years, Coca-Cola, a longtime Olympic sponsor, has built pin trading centers on the grounds of the Games. A spokeswoman said there would be pin-related promotions, including a chance to acquire pins representing Japan’s 47 prefectures. Whether the company will open and host a pin trading center in Tokyo, the spokeswoman said, is still under evaluation.

For years, Mr. Kling has been recruited by Coca-Cola to help oversee and manage its pin trading centers, a volunteer position that has made him the unofficial pin czar of the Games. Among his many roles is to enforce etiquette and unwritten rules. That means ensuring that tables are shared fairly, counterfeit pins are weeded out and newcomers aren’t overcharged.

“Occasionally I’ll hear an older guy tell a kid, ‘My pin is much bigger, so you need to trade me two for it,’” he said. “We don’t want anyone grinding down an 8-year-old.”

Some are in it for the money. There are more than 80,000 eBay listings for Olympic pins. These speculators had a golden moment in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, when, for reasons that nobody ever explained, the organizers failed to produce enough pins. A trading frenzy ensued. A few people earned $40,000 in a few days. The pin economy had a tulip mania moment.

“Guy I know made a down payment on his house with money he earned in Nagano,” said Sid Marantz, a pin trader who has been to 17 Olympics and is another regular volunteer at Coca-Cola pin trading centers.

At 76, Mr. Marantz is retired from a family business that sold food ingredients, like salt and sugar. He got his hands on his first pin when his parents took him to the 1960 Olympics in Rome. He was a huge fan of Rafer Johnson, an all-rounder out of U.C.L.A. who won gold in the decathlon that year.

“I was just swept away by the whole thing,” he said.

He attended his next Games in Montreal in 1976 on a tour with Track & Field News, to which he subscribed. That was the first time, he said, that spectators got involved in pin trading on a large scale.

It’s an affordable hobby, at least in Mr. Marantz’s practiced hands. He estimates his whole collection has cost him about $10,000. That’s in large part because after the 1996 Games in Atlanta, he and three friends learned about a warehouse in Colorado — home to the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee — filled with 750,000 unsold pins. They chipped in $35,000 and bought the entire lot. Each kept about 40,000 pins, and they sold the rest to pin collectors around the world.

“We called it ‘the motherlode,’” he said of the acquisition. “It means I go to the Games with pins that effectively cost me nothing. That’s why I’ll trade with absolutely anyone.”

Beyond making new friends, pin trading is about the quest for obscure, hard-to-find treasures. These include pins from African delegations, because they tend to field small teams. (Burundi’s pins are especially prized; the country brought nine athletes to Rio in 2016.) Any country that has recently changed its name will find itself in the cross hairs of pin traders. That means you, North Macedonia, which will compete at its first Games since Greece compelled it to add “North” to its name.

The pins of Japanese media companies have been sought after ever since Nagano, because they are often adorned with cute cartoon mascots. This time around, though, not even this genre will be hot. Pins from Tokyo 2020 — yes, it’s keeping the name, never mind the actual date — are going to be worth next to nothing, Mr. Marantz predicts. Supply is going to swamp demand.

Both Mr. Marantz and Mr. Kling had purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets to events in Tokyo, money that has since been refunded. Only recently have they begun to accept that they really won’t be heading to Japan in a few weeks. On Friday, Japan’s government extended a state of emergency in Tokyo and other prefectures until at least June 20.

“It’s like a boulder falling,” Mr. Kling said of being forced to skip the Games, “and hitting you in the head.”

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Biden finances would give CDC greatest funding increase in practically 20 years

Biden budget would give CDC biggest funding boost in nearly 20 years

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris receive an update on the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as they visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., March 19, 2021.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

President Joe Biden’s first budget proposal would give the largest funding boost in nearly two decades to the agency most closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic, his administration said Friday.

The budget blueprint for fiscal 2022 would include $8.7 billion in discretionary funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to budget documents shared by the Office of Management and Budget.

The agency said that budget bump would build on the CDC investments doled out in the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan that Biden signed into law in March.

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The new funding would be used to “support core public health capacity improvements in States and Territories, modernize public health data collection nationwide, train new epidemiologists and other public health experts, and rebuild international capacity to detect, prepare for, and respond to emerging global threats,” the OMB said.

While the CDC funding request is a big increase from recent years, it comprises just a small slice of Biden’s $6 trillion budget proposal for 2022. The request wraps in funding for a double-barreled, multitrillion-dollar economic overhaul plan that the president unveiled earlier this year.

More than 33 million Covid infections, and at least 593,466 deaths, have been reported in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

From before Covid was even officially labeled a pandemic, the CDC has issued guidance on how to slow or prevent the spread of the virus in different environments, from summer camps to nursing homes. The agency has now issued and updated more than 200 guidance documents, its website shows.

But the budget proposal would go beyond funding the agency’s disease-focused work.

The budget materials say $153 million would be allocated for the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health program to work on “improving health equity and data collection for racial and ethnic populations.”

The government would also provide $100 million for the CDC’s Climate and Health program as part of a $1.2 billion investment in strengthening resilience to wildfires, floods, droughts and other climate-related disasters.

The budget request for the Health and Human Services Department would double firearm violence prevention research at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Overall, HHS is requesting $133.7 billion in discretionary funding — a $25.3 billion, or 23.4%, bump from the enacted budget of fiscal 2021.

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Fox Information Intensifies Its Professional-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump.

For seven years, Juan Williams was the lone liberal voice on “The Five,” the network’s popular afternoon chat show. On Wednesday, he announced that he was leaving the program, after months of harsh on-air blowback from his conservative co-hosts. Many Fox News viewers cheered his exit on social media.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic Party chairwoman, was hired by Fox News with great fanfare in 2019 as a dissenting voice for its political coverage. She criticized Mr. Trump and spoke passionately about the Black Lives Matter movement, which other hosts on the network often demonized. Ms. Brazile has now left Fox News; last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC.

Onscreen and off, in ways subtle and overt, Fox News has adapted to the post-Trump era by moving in a single direction: Trumpward.

The network has rewarded pro-Trump pundits like Greg Gutfeld and Dan Bongino with prize time slots. Some opinion hosts who ventured on-air criticism of the former president have been replaced. And within the Fox News reporting ranks, journalists have privately expressed concern that the network is less committed to straight-ahead news coverage than it was in the past.

The shifts at Fox News, which is controlled by the father-and-son moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, have come in the wake of what amounted to an existential moment for a cable channel that is home to Trump cheerleaders like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham: the 2020 election.

Fox News’s ratings fell sharply after the network made an early call on election night that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, would carry Arizona and later declared him the winner, even as Mr. Trump advanced lies about fraud. With viewers in revolt, the network moved out dissenting voices and put a new emphasis on right-wing commentary.

In January, the network fired its veteran politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had been an onscreen face of the early call in Arizona for Mr. Biden. This month, it brought on a new editor in the Washington bureau: Kerri Kupec, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s attorney general William P. Barr. She had no journalistic experience.

Financially, the Murdochs’ formula has produced results: After a rare loss to archrivals CNN and MSNBC in January, Fox News’s ratings strength has recovered; the channel is again the Nielsen leader in cable news. In May, Fox News is on track to more than double CNN’s prime-time viewership.

Its new opinion shows at 7 and 11 — with segments that lament “cancel culture” and attack Mr. Biden — are attracting bigger audiences than the newscasts they replaced. And the niche right-wing network Newsmax has failed to sustain its postelection audience gains.

Partisanship plays well on cable news, an insight not lost on programmers at other networks who are chasing fatigued viewers. Liberal-leaning MSNBC has expanded the show hosted by the anti-Trump commentator Nicolle Wallace; it also replaced the moderate Chris Matthews at 7 p.m. with the partisan commentator Joy Reid. Last week, CNN dropped one of its chief conservative commentators, Rick Santorum, after he was criticized for remarks about Native Americans.

“Conservatives have a long-held suspicion of the mainstream media being in the tank for Democrats and for the left,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist and longtime aide to Mitt Romney who has occasionally appeared on the network as a guest. “Fox News for many years was viewed as the only outlet that wasn’t shilling for the other side. Liberals may doubt the power of Fox News, but it still draws a considerable audience for a reason.”

Fox News says its news coverage remains robust. And in some ways, the Murdochs are making a rational business decision by following the conservatives who have made up the heart of the Fox News audience; recent surveys show that more than three-quarters of Republicans want Mr. Trump to run in 2024.

But under Roger Ailes, the network’s founder, who shaped its look and feel, Fox News elevated liberal foils like Alan Colmes, a Democrat who shared equal billing in prime time with Mr. Hannity until the end of 2008, and moderates like Mr. Williams.

Credit…Andrew Toth/FilmMagic

“Roger’s view was you had to have some unpredictability and you had to challenge the audience; you couldn’t just be reading Republican talking points every night,” said Susan R. Estrich, a Democratic lawyer and former commentator on Fox News who negotiated Mr. Ailes’s exit from the network amid his sexual misconduct scandal.

Ms. Estrich recalled that Mr. Ailes had defended Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, attacked her in misogynist terms. Now, she said, “instead of trying to broaden their audience, Fox News is narrowing it and digging in.”

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May 28, 2021, 12:54 p.m. ET

Ms. Brazile said she had left Fox News of her own accord.

“Fox never censored my views in any way,” she wrote in an email. “Everyone treated me courteously as a colleague.” Ms. Brazile added: “I believe it’s important for all media to expose their audiences to both progressive and conservative viewpoints. With the election and President Biden’s first 100 days behind us, I’ve accomplished what I wanted at Fox News.”

Mr. Williams will remain at Fox News as a senior political analyst; the network said in a statement that he had requested to be closer to his family in Washington rather than commute to New York, where “The Five” is taped. Fox News said another liberal host would replace him. Among those in contention is a newly hired contributor to the Fox stable, the former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr.

Mr. Williams departed after a harder edge had crept into his exchanges with colleagues like Mr. Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. “The Five” had long been a venue for heated, if friendly debate, but Mr. Williams was repeatedly mocked and shouted down when he accused Mr. Trump of lying about the election and fueling the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Mr. Williams also noted, on-air, a Fox News report about Mr. Biden that falsely claimed he wanted to restrict Americans’ consumption of hamburgers. (Fox News later issued a correction.)

Credit…Fox News

His prime antagonist, Mr. Gutfeld, started an 11 p.m. show last month that is meant to compete with late-night fare like “The Daily Show.” “Gutfeld!” has attracted a bigger viewership than the previous 11 p.m. offering, a newscast anchored by Shannon Bream that was shifted to midnight.

Fox News is still determining a permanent host for its new 7 p.m. opinion hour, which is now a reliable venue for pro-Trump commentary. It was where Tucker Carlson, the network’s 8 p.m. host, made his remarks about white replacement theory that prompted an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.

A pro-Trump drift at Fox News is not new: George Will, a traditional conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy, lost his contributor contract in 2017. Shepard Smith, a news anchor who was tough on Mr. Trump, left in 2019.

Some Fox News journalists, though, say privately that they are increasingly concerned with the network’s direction. Kristin Fisher, one of the network’s rising stars in Washington and a White House correspondent, left Fox News earlier this month despite the network’s effort to keep her. She had faced criticism from viewers in November after a segment in which she aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The longtime Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, resigned in January after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage, around the time that Mr. Stirewalt was fired. (Mr. Stirewalt was let go along with roughly 20 digital journalists at Fox News, which the network attributed to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”)

Mr. Sammon has effectively been replaced by Doug Rohrbeck, a producer with extensive news experience on Bret Baier’s newscast and Chris Wallace’s Sunday show. Still, some Fox journalists were surprised when the network hired Ms. Kupec, the former Barr spokeswoman, to work under Mr. Rohrbeck.

A Fox News spokesperson said the network was proud of the journalism from its reporting ranks, listing examples including the foreign correspondent Trey Yingst’s coverage of Israel, Jennifer Griffin’s coverage of the Pentagon, and reporting on the crisis at the Mexican border by Bill Melugin and Aishah Hasnie.

Mr. Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, announced in May that he had extended his contract through 2025. Along with Mr. Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,” he regularly lands newsy interviews; a recent conversation with Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming grew testy when she faulted Fox News for perpetuating Mr. Trump’s lies about the election and Mr. Baier responded that he had made clear to viewers that Mr. Biden was the legitimate victor.

Fox News has a smaller international footprint than rivals like CNN, but it maintains several foreign bureaus and has had reporters in Israel covering the recent violence there. On Wednesday, the network announced an expansion of Fox News International, a streaming service available in 37 countries in Asia and Europe.

Despite continuing criticism from liberals, Fox News remains a financial juggernaut for the Murdoch empire; it is expected to earn record advertising revenues this year, the network said.

Even as its programming decisions seem aimed at attracting Trump supporters, Fox News does face one roadblock: Mr. Trump. The former president has maintained his stinging criticism of Fox News, which, he has claimed, betrayed him by calling the election for Mr. Biden.

On Friday, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism in a statement that he issued in response to a critical speech by the former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, a member of the Fox Corporation board since 2019.

“Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place” after Mr. Ryan joined the board, the former president wrote. Mr. Trump added: “Fox will never be the same!”

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Girls participation in Asia ecommerce is a $280 billion alternative

Women participation in Asia ecommerce is a $280 billion opportunity

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market could grow by more than $280 billion by 2030 if major online shopping marketplaces do more to encourage and enable women entrepreneurs, a new report from the International Finance Corporation found.

The “anonymity” of e-commerce has reduced many of the barriers to entry traditionally faced by women and afforded them the opportunity to thrive in new sectors, Amy Luinstra, the IFC’s gender program manager for East Asia and Pacific, told CNBC Thursday.

Still, many of the inequalities faced by women in the traditional retail space “bleed into the online world,” she said, such as securing access to funding.

Luinstra called on big e-commerce players to do more to support women vendors and capture the market opportunity.

For platforms that have financing options, that is an excellent way to bring more women in and help them thrive.

Amy Luinstra

gender program manager (East Asia and Pacific), IFC

That includes extending financing for women, providing training, and encouraging them to participate in higher value sectors like electronics, she said.

“For platforms that have financing options, that is an excellent way to bring more women in and help them thrive by making sure they’re aware of the financing offers and they’re able to take advantage of them,” Luinstra told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

A woman wears a protective face mask as she waits for customers inside her shop in Jakarta, Indonesia on Tuesday, March 31, 2020.

NurPhoto | Getty Images

Her comments come against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is said to have disproportionately put women at a disadvantage.

The IFC report, which drew on data collated from Southeast Asian e-commerce site Lazada, found that in 2019, women were on course to reach gender parity in e-commerce. But even with the surge in online retail in the past year, the additional caregiving duties and time constraints that women faced caused progress to take a step back.

“Prior to the pandemic, women were holding their own — in some cases outselling men and even … out participating men,” said Luinstra.

In the Philippines for instance, women previously accounted for 64% of sellers on Lazada’s site, but their sales dropped by 27% during the pandemic, the report found.

“That has changed under the pandemic and that’s how we’re starting to get the gap, and the opportunity for closing that gap, that adds up to the big number $280 billion,” she said, referring to the market opportunity referenced in the report.

Correction: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the report’s 2030 growth estimates.

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This is One Factor Lacking from President Biden’s Price range: Booming Progress

Here's One Thing Missing from President Biden's Budget: Booming Growth

“We are a really big economy where really big forces are shaping what happens to G.D.P. growth,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and a former C.B.O. chief economist.

Even these moderate projections by the Biden administration imply that its policies will lift growth in economic activity by a few tenths of a percent each year over a decade. This is significant when comparing it with the growth that would be expected by simply looking at demographic factors and historical averages of productivity growth. The forecast is more inherently optimistic about Mr. Biden’s policies — and their potential to increase productivity and the size of the work force — than it might seem at first glance.

Biden’s 2022 Budget

    • A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what he’d like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress.
    • Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade.
    • Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the president’s desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years.
    • Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.
    • Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as America’s population ages.
    • Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
    • How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.

“Making the claim that your fiscal policies will boost growth by four-tenths of a point seems optimistic, but I can see how they could get there,” she said.

Jason Furman, the Obama administration’s former top economist, said: “I think there’s a problem that people have in their head — more extravagant ideas about what economic policy can do and how quickly it can do it. When you’re talking about productivity enhancement, you’re talking about compounding that becomes a big deal for a long time.”

In other words, the difference of a few tenths of a percent of G.D.P. growth might not mean much for a single year, but a gap of that size that persists for many years has a big impact on living standards.

Some of the administration’s policies, by design, would focus on the very long-term impact on the nation’s economic potential. For example, additional money for community colleges might actually depress the size of the labor force, and thus G.D.P., in the short run if more adults go back to school. But it would then increase those workers’ productive potential, and thus contribution to growth, for the decades that follow.

Conservatives, for their part, view the Biden agenda as likely to restrain growth, particularly once tax increases and new regulatory action go into effect. Mr. Mulligan, the Trump adviser, said he believed the Biden agenda would reduce the nation’s growth path by around 0.8 percentage points a year compared with its Trump-era trajectory. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, said he thought Mr. Biden’s policies could create faster growth in the short term but slower growth in the long run because of taxes and spending.

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Business

AMC brief sellers dealt huge $1.2 billion blow after inventory rally

AMC secures $100 million investment but bankruptcy concerns still loom

Street performers in Minnie Mouse costumes walk past an AMC movie theater in New York’s Times Square at night on October 15, 2020.

Amir Hamja | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Investors short of meme stock AMC Entertainment have lost an estimated $ 1.23 billion in the past week, as stocks are up more than 116% since Monday, according to S3 Partners.

The rally cooled off late Friday after AMC stock surged up to 38% during early morning trading. The stock closed at $ 26.12 per share on Friday, down from $ 13.68 on Monday. At its peak, the stock hit $ 36.72 per share.

AMC was by far the most active stock on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday as more than 650 million shares changed hands. According to FactSet, the average trading volume after 30 days is just over 100 million shares.

With 450 million shares outstanding, the entire company changed hands nearly 1.5 times during Friday’s trading.

So-called short coverage could add to AMC’s massive rally this week. The company has shorted about 20% of its outstanding shares, compared to an average of 5% short on a typical US stock, S3 Partners said.

When a sharply shortened stock bounces up quickly, short sellers are forced to buy back borrowed stocks to close their short position and reduce losses. The forced buy tends to drive the rally even further.

AMC’s new retail investors, who are 3.2 million strong, owned approximately 80% of the company’s 450 million shares outstanding as of March 11, AMC reported earlier this month. Their efforts, which soared in January, raised the stock from $ 5 to $ 20 per share and allowed AMC to reduce its debt burden by around $ 600 million.

The retail investor agenda was to keep AMC alive and hold onto the hedge funds, an analyst told CNBC.

AMC’s stock has risen more than 1,100% since January has defied the predictions of Wall Street analysts. AMC’s business was extremely strained. The company has roughly $ 5 billion in debt and has had to postpone repayments on lease agreements of $ 450 million as its revenues largely dried up during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The cinemas were closed for several months to stop the virus from spreading. When the company reopened its doors, few consumers were comfortable attending film screenings and film studios withheld new releases.

As the cinema business recovers, AMC is still facing tough headwinds. Although the company ended the first quarter with $ 1 billion in liquidity, the highest in its 100-year history, that money will only keep it afloat until 2022 unless audiences come back in droves for months without offsetting revenue.

While early box office revenues are promising, fundamental elements of the cinema business have changed over the past year, including theater capacity, joint release dates with streaming services, and the number of days that movies are shown in theaters.

“Anything that’s really important here in the long term will never make money to this company again,” said Rich Greenfield, co-founder of LightShed Partners, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday morning. “You will never generate cash with your current capital structure. It was trading at seven times EBITDA before the pandemic. It is currently trading at 25 times EBITDA and is now in a worse position with the changed industry. This is simply contrary to all logic . “

On the last day of 2019, AMC had a market value of $ 751.87 million. On Friday, that figure was around $ 11.9 billion, according to FactSet.

– CNBC’s Yun Li contributed to this report.