U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during a press conference at the White House in Washington on March 1, 2021.
Kevin Lemarque | Reuters
Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday the surge in unaccompanied minors on the U.S.-Mexico border is an unprecedented challenge as action has been taken under former President Donald Trump as critics accuse the current White House of not up To be prepared for a humanitarian crisis is the nation’s doorstep.
“There was a system in both the Republican and Democratic governments that was torn down during the Trump administration, and so the challenge is more acute than ever,” Mayorkas told CNN’s State of the Union.
Mayorkas appeared on CNN, NBC and Fox on Sunday to defend President Joe Biden’s administration as it scrutinized the record number of children held in prison-like customs and border guards, including thousands over the legal limit of 72 Hours go out.
The Biden administration reversed a Trump-era policy of expelling unaccompanied minors arrested at the border and instead admitting them to the United States for processing. Republicans, Democrats and human rights activists have criticized the conditions in which children are being held.
Critics said the policy change has encouraged unaccompanied children to make the dangerous journey at a time when the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to properly care for them.
Mayorkas has previously said there is no crisis on the border, despite admitting the US is well on its way to meeting more people on the southwest border than it has ever done in the past two decades.
The Biden administration has set up the Federal Emergency Management Agency to quickly place children under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services until they are placed with a family member in the US or with a sponsor while their immigration cases progress.
NBC News and other media outlets have been denied access to the facilities where unaccompanied children are held. Requests for photos inside the facilities were also denied.
Mayorkas said on Sunday that his department will allow the media access to Border Patrol facilities if it can be done safely under Covid-19’s health protocols. The Trump administration gave media access to facilities at the height of the controversy over its child segregation policy in 2018.
After visiting a border agency, Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn. Wrote on Twitter Friday that he “fought back” the tears and spoke to a 13-year-old girl who, through an interpreter, explained “how scared she was after seeing them had been.” separated from her grandmother and without her parents. “
Mayorkas, who was urged to set a time frame for the control of the border situation by the federal government, refused. He said the goal is to be able to meet the 72-hour time limit as quickly as possible.
“I have repeatedly said from the start that a border guard station is not a place for a child, and that’s why we are working around the clock to get these children out of the border guards and into the care of the children. Ministry of Health and Human Services, that protects them, “said Mayorkas.
According to NBC News, 5,049 unaccompanied children were in CBP detention as of Saturday.
Mayorkas said the Biden administration’s approach was more humane than Trump’s. On Murphy’s tweet, Mayorkas said the 13-year-old girl would have been removed from the United States under the previous administration.
“We will not give up our values and principles. We will not give up the needs of vulnerable children. That is what this is about,” Mayorkas said.
In addition to the challenges caused by the Trump administration, the DHS secretary also cited the Covid-19 crisis as a complicating factor.
“We are in the middle of a pandemic and that makes operations a lot more difficult,” he said.
In each of the three networks in which he appeared on Sunday, Mayorkas repeated that the border was “closed”. He told the migrants not to attempt to cross the US-Mexico border at this time.
“We urge – and the message is clear – urgently not to do this now. I cannot exaggerate the dangers of the journey you are making,” Mayorkas said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The situation on the border makes it difficult for the Democrats to reform bipartisan immigration.
The House of Representatives passed two bills last week that would pave the way for citizenship or the legal status of millions of undocumented immigrants, but the legislature faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
A more ambitious comprehensive immigration reform package, backed by the White House and introduced in Congress in February, appears to be receiving less support.
Mayorkas was confirmed by the Senate on February 2nd with 56-43 votes.
Subscribe to CNBC Pro for the TV livestream, deep insights and analysis of how to invest during the next president’s term.
Passengers arrive for American Airlines flights at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois on February 05, 2021.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
The US could still see a renewed spike in coronavirus – even if vaccinations against Covid-19 surge across the country – as states relax restrictions and more Americans travel to spring break, the centers’ head warned disease control and prevention on Monday.
“With warmer weather coming, I know it is tempting to relax and lose our vigilance, especially after a harsh winter that unfortunately saw the most cases and deaths during the pandemic,” said CDC Director Dr . Rochelle Walensky said at a press conference.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) examined more than 1.34 million people on Sunday, 86,000 more than the same day a year ago, shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
TSA screenings have exceeded 1 million every day since Thursday, the highest volume in a year. While air traffic is well below 2019 levels, despite the CDC’s warning of non-essential travel, more and more Americans are returning to heaven, even those who are fully vaccinated.
Although many colleges in the US have scaled back their spring break to curb parties and infection, Biden’s top government officials are still concerned about travelers “enjoying a maskless spring break,” Walensky said.
“I beg you, for the sake of the health of our nation,” Walensky said at the briefing on Monday. “The cases rose last spring, they rose again in the summer, they will climb now if we no longer take precautions, if more and more people are being vaccinated.”
Even with infections declining and vaccine adoption rapidly growing, the US continues to report a dangerously high baseline of daily cases that could be higher if Americans lose their vigilance, Biden’s top health officials have warned. Around 37.5 million people in the US, about 11% of the population, have been fully vaccinated to date, according to the CDC.
The U.S. has come a long way since early January when it hit a weekly average of just over 250,000 new cases per day. According to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the nation reports an average of 53,670 new infections per day for the past week, a 10% decrease from the previous week.
– Leslie Josephs of CNBC and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
NEW DELHI – Indian outrage is growing over comments from the nation’s chief judge on two rape cases. Thousands of women signed a letter this week demanding his resignation.
Judge Sharad Arvind Bobde, the head of India’s Supreme Court, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a minor whether he would marry his victim, who is now an adult.
The victim, who cannot be identified under Indian law, accused the man, a distant relative and official of the Maharashtra state government, of repeatedly persecuting and raping her from the age of 16.
The judge’s comments sparked new demands that those in power, and especially men, do more to improve the treatment of women and girls in India.
A spate of shocking attacks in recent years has led women’s groups and other activists to change long-standing attitudes towards sexual violence.
Justice for victims is rare. Of the tens of thousands of rape cases reported annually in India, only a handful result in law enforcement, according to figures from the National Crime Records Bureau. Activists say the real scope of the problem is far worse, as many cases are never reported because of the stigma.
On Monday, Justice Bobde heard a petition from the defendant in the rape case for relief from a lower court prison order.
“Do you want to marry her?” Justice Bobde asked about Indian media reports.
“You should have thought before seducing and raping the young girl,” he added. “We’re not forcing you to marry. Let us know if you want. “
Activists said they were “appalled and outraged”.
“Your proposal to view marriage as a friendly solution to the case of the rape of an underage girl is worse than cruel and insensitive, as it profoundly undermines the victims’ right to seek justice,” the company said on Tuesday open letter.
Justice Bobde did not respond.
Sex with minors is a crime in India under the Child Protection from Sexual Offenses Act 2012. Mandatory sentences range from 10 years in prison to life imprisonment, and bail is rarely given.
According to court records, the families agreed that the man would marry the girl when she turned 18. The man later failed to keep his promise and married someone else. When the family filed a lawsuit against the man in 2019, a district court granted him early bail.
However, the Bombay Supreme Court overturned this ruling and wrote a scathing criticism of the lower court.
“Such an approach is a clear indication that the learned judge is completely lacking in competence,” the court wrote.
The defendant then turned to the Supreme Court. Justice Bobde and the other two members of the bank granted him four weeks of protection from arrest.
More than 4,000 women signed the letter calling for the Chief Justice to resign, including Anuradha Banerji, an activist with the Saheli women’s rights group.
“When the Chief Justice of India makes these archaic and patriarchal comments, it signals the deeper rot in both the judicial system and society,” Ms. Banerji said. “Millions of young girls will know that their values are marriageability, not personality.”
The victim’s lawyer declined to comment on Friday.
In another case, Justice Bobde appeared to condone consensual rape, according to the letter and media reports.
“If two people live as husbands and wives, however brutal the husband may be, can sexual intercourse between them be called rape?” Justice Bobde asked upon hearing a petition filed by a man accused of rape by a woman who had been his life partner.
The excitement over the judge’s comments comes a month after another Bombay Supreme Court judge, Judge Pushpa Ganedivala, blocked her promotion after criticizing several of her sexual assault rulings.
Her decision in a child abuse case that groping for a minor without skin contact could not be described as sexual assault under the Child Protection Act sparked outrage. She acquitted the man who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old by a lower court. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling after the Indian Attorney General said he had set a dangerous precedent.
In two separate cases, Justice Ganedivala acquitted two other men accused of raping minors and said the victims’ statements were unreliable.
Following her rulings, a Supreme Court panel led by Justice Bobde overturned her decision to make her permanent judge on the Bombay Supreme Court.
HOUSTON – Darren W. Woods seldom makes headlines despite being the executive director of Exxon Mobil, the oil company that some people consider top environmental villains and others consider it a major engine of the US economy.
Few have taken it seriously, or even noticed, that he is beginning to make promises to respond to climate change, which is at least a rhetorical break, if not a substantial one, with his predecessors.
“What society rightly demands is affordable, reliable energy that does not have the emissions associated with today’s energy systems,” he said Tuesday. “We are working on this development.”
While this may seem like a cautious statement, Mr. Woods, a quiet electrical engineer from Wichita, Kan., Is changing the tone of the company he acquired over four years ago. The bragging rights used by its predecessors in Texas, one of whom openly denied climate change concerns, has grown into something vaguely philosophical.
In an interview that was meant to raise the curtain on an annual presentation that executives will offer financial analysts and investors on Wednesday, Woods, 56, got poetic about the history of technology and the energy industry, and even suggested that there were similarities between him gives emission reduction plans and President Biden’s efforts to combat climate change. He went so far as to promise that Exxon would try to set a goal of not emitting more greenhouse gases than it removes from the atmosphere, though he said it was still difficult to say when that might happen.
“We support that ambition and our goal is to help society achieve it,” said Woods. “To be honest, the recognition of the challenge continues to grow. It’s an evolving conversation that I find very helpful in considering what needs to happen. “
Under pressure from activist investors, Exxon announced this week that it has added two new directors to its board with no prior commitment to fossil fuels. The company recently announced it would create a new company that will capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and bury it deep in the ground. It also recently invested in Global Thermostat, a company that aims to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
Of course, many people are deeply skeptical of the company’s plans and motives. Unlike executives at European oil companies, Mr. Woods does not cut investments in oil and gas to spend money on wind and solar power. He refrained from commenting on BP’s promise made last year to bring net emissions to zero by 2050.
“Unlike their major oil competitors, who have begun to take action against climate change, Woods and Exxon Mobil continue to live in a fairytale world of inactivity while California burns and Texas freezes,” said Peter Krull, chief executive officer of Earth Equity Advisors. a study and investment firm specializing in sustainability.
After spending nearly three decades with a company traditionally known for its island location, rigid culture, and public indifference to global warming, Mr Woods suggested that he be ready to steer it on a different course if also gradually.
Updated
March 3, 2021, 8:05 a.m. ET
With Exxon’s stock price still lower than it was a decade ago, many investors have asked for no less.
“My interactions with investors reflect broader trends in society,” said Woods.
The four years that Mr. Woods spent as chief executive have been a difficult time for the industry. Oil and gas prices have risen and fallen several times in recent years. And last year, demand for petroleum products collapsed when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Exxon lost $ 22.4 billion in 2020, much of it from amortization of assets the company acquired at high prices prior to being acquired by Mr. Woods.
But in the past few weeks, oil and gas prices have rebounded, and Exxon and its stocks are doing better. Mr Woods said the revenue was flowing again, which allowed the company to run down debt and pay for future projects. The company’s dividend, which it has been raising every year for nearly four decades, now seems safe from cuts.
What Exxon doesn’t do is spend much of its assets on companies or ideas that aim to greatly reduce emissions. Only $ 3 billion will be spent on carbon capture from industrial facilities by 2025 – a small fraction of the $ 16 billion to $ 19 billion expected to be spent on oil exploration and capital projects this year.
Mr Woods said he would seek more change by researching breakthrough technologies. However, many of them still have years or decades to have a major impact on emissions.
“Until we know the way to go and what will be required and what the solutions are, it’s hard to know,” he said. “What we can do is make a commitment to find out, and once we find the answers you will see that we are committed and we are actually on our way to net zero.”
While Exxon invests in energy efficiency projects, biofuels and hydrogen, Mr. Woods was particularly excited about his company’s 20 carbon capture and storage projects. Although the technology is not yet widely used because it is very expensive, Woods and Exxon scientists argue that it could play an important role in reducing emissions from cement and steel making and other industrial processes that renewable energy does not can be operated easily.
“The capture and storage of carbon will be required,” he said.
He even suggested that “Exxon’s carbon capture and storage potential certainly has the potential” to fit right in with Mr. Biden’s policies and goals.
“Political support and the right legal framework to support these investments are needed and will be important,” said Woods. “We would like to start this conversation with you. You need an investment permit. You need pipeline systems, laws, regulatory reforms and legal frameworks for storing CO2. “
Mr. Biden has expressed his support for carbon capture and sequestration. It is an environmental policy that Republicans in Congress could support, although many Liberal Democrats are not interested in it because they see it as an extension of fossil fuel use.
Many climate researchers are deeply skeptical that the technology can be used to the extent necessary to significantly reduce emissions. Some energy managers share this skepticism.
Charif Souki, the CEO of Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas company, said carbon capture was one of many potentially promising technologies for combating climate change. But he added, “There is no efficient way of doing this on the scale it takes to do what we need to do.”
But Mr. Woods said he was optimistic about the path Exxon had chosen. “It is very difficult to predict when a breakthrough will occur,” he said, “but when you look back in time, it is consistent.”
The hedge fund founder Thomas Sandell paid a whopping $ 105 million Tuesday to settle claims he fraudulently evaded New York and state taxes on more than $ 450 million for fees earned.
The settlement – which will reward a whistleblower with more than $ 22 million – is the largest recovery in New York State history under the False Claims Act.
This state law was amended more than a decade ago to allow claims related to intentionally evaded taxes.
Swedish-born billionaire Sandell, who did not admit wrongdoing, tried to evade his liability for tens of millions of dollars in taxes paid to the city and state for the 2017 by his firm Sandell Asset Management Corp. fees earned were said to have been owed.
The $ 105 million settlement covered both taxes and damages, according to Attorney General Letitia James and City Company attorney James Johnson. The whistleblower’s reward is 21 percent of that amount.
“The greed that has made it possible for a man not to pay his fair share of taxes is amazing,” said James.
“Thomas Sandell and his company got New York taxpayers out of the tens of millions of dollars in a single year – putting a huge strain on our system and forcing ordinary New Yorkers to bear the cost,” said James.
Chris Doyle, an attorney who represented Sandell in the false claims lawsuit, told CNBC, “Mr. Sandell and his companies have declined to comment.”
Sandell closed his hedge fund in 2019 and turned it into a family office.
In 2007, Sandell’s company agreed to pay more than $ 8 million to settle claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission Asset Management for improper short sales in connection with trading in a New Orleans-based holding company following the hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In the most recent case in New York, officials said that due to a change in the rules for 2008 regarding the recording of deferred fee income in 2017, Sandell was required to record approximately $ 450 million in such income and pay taxes on that money to the state and the city to pay.
“To avoid this liability, Sandell left New York to live in London from August 2016 to mid-2019,” said a press release.
“And while SAMC continued to operate in New York City, Sandell and SAMC have taken steps to create the impression that SAMC is no longer operating in New York City, often with the assistance of an international accounting firm.”
As part of the program, officials said Sandell, with three employees, opened a “Shell office” in Boca Raton, Fla., Which he and his company claimed was SAMC’s only American operation.
Despite the fact that they agreed to a determination by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s main place of business continued to be New York City.
Even after several consultants, including an accounting firm that had prepared its taxes for years, warned Sandell that “his tax position was problematic,” he still claimed he did not owe New York taxes on fee income, a 2017 press release said.
Randy Fox, an attorney for the whistleblower who sued Sandell for tax evasion under the False Claims Act, declined to identify the person or individuals who formed the limited liability company Tooley LLC named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit .
When asked what his client or clients would do with the $ 22,050,000 reward – a fraction of which Fox will receive under a contingent fee agreement – the attorney said, “I don’t know.”
“At least buy a nice bottle of champagne,” added Fox.
Fox was the founding director of the New York Attorney General’s Taxpayer Protection Office.
He said Sandell’s alleged circumvention was suspicious because he “already had access to an amazing tax break” that allowed him to invest the money earmarked as fees in an unqualified retirement plan that could generate returns for years before that Charges levied had to be declared for tax purposes.
Fox reported that 49 states allow whistleblowers to sue under false claims that provide rewards for reporting fraud to government agencies.
However, the law only limits about half of these states to compensation for fraud related to government Medicaid programs.
Fox said that until recently, New York was the only state that allowed false claims for damages for any type of fraud. Some states don’t prohibit tax claims for false claims, but they don’t encourage such actions, he said.
“The big question on my mind is why are all these states leaving money on the table … when you think about the difference between taxes paid and taxes owed,” said Fox.
He said the estimated shortfall in actual federal taxes owed versus taxes paid is $ 380 billion annually.
A less accurate estimate is that New York State loses $ 10 billion annually in taxes that should have been paid, he said.
“Tax revenue pays for vital city services. When a deadly pandemic has gutted the economy and weighed heavily on our city’s budget, every dollar counts,” Johnson said.
“Hedge funds, like everyone else, are required to pay taxes, and if they are not, we will use our legal tools and strategies to hold them accountable. Period.”
A GameStop store in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles. Jim Bell, the company’s chief financial officer, who joined the company in mid-2019, is leaving.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times
GameStop’s chief financial officer, Jim Bell, is leaving the company in late March, following a stock-trading frenzy that briefly sent shares in the video game retailer surging.
The company gave no reason for Mr. Bell’s departure in its announcement on Tuesday, but noted it would look for a successor “with the capabilities and qualifications to help accelerate GameStop’s transformation.” Mr. Bell joined GameStop less than two years ago.
GameStop jumped into the headlines in late January when amateur investors used trading apps to buy options and pump up its share price, defying hedge funds that had bet the price would fall. The chaotic trading led to congressional hearings last week, but executives from GameStop, which was essentially caught in the middle, were not called to testify.
GameStop’s share price closed at about $45 on Tuesday. It reached $483 on Jan. 28 after starting the year at $19.
The wild swings in share price were detached from what was happening at the company, where a major stockholder has been trying to force a turnaround. In early January, Ryan Cohen, the manager of RC Ventures and a large stockholder, joined the GameStop board. He has been pressuring the company’s executive team to overhaul GameStop’s strategy and focus on digital growth. The company has more than 5,000 stores, many in American malls and shopping strips, but has steadily lost sales to major online retailers like Amazon.
Mr. Bell joined the company in June 2019 at the age of 51 from Wok Holdings, which owns the restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s. In a short statement, GameStop thanked Mr. Bell “for his significant contributions and leadership, including his efforts over the past year during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said the central bank would keep buying bonds until it saw “substantial further progress” toward full employment and stable inflation.Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh
Stocks on Wall Street were set to open slightly higher on Wednesday, and most commodities prices were rising, after the Federal Reserve chief on Tuesday reiterated the need to provide plenty of support for the economic recovery from the pandemic.
“The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain,” Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He will speak to lawmakers in the House later on Wednesday.
The S&P 500 index reached record highs earlier in the month as traders bet on the recovery and a successful vaccine rollout. Easy-money policies has also helped push asset prices higher. But fears that stronger economic growth and higher inflation would prompt the Fed to withdraw some monetary support have caused bond prices to fall, pushing up yields. This temporarily unsettled stock markets.
On Wednesday, yields on U.S. bonds resumed their march higher, after falling the previous day. The yield on 10-year notes was at about 1.38 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr. Powell tried to reassure investors. He said that the central bank planned to keep buying bonds until it saw “substantial further progress” toward its twin goals of full employment and stable inflation. The United States can “expect us to move carefully, and patiently, and with a lot of advance warning” when it comes to slowing that support, Mr. Powell said.
Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude oil benchmark, rose more than 1 percent to $62 a barrel, the highest in 13 months. This week, for the first time since 2011, copper prices climbed above $9,000 a metric ton in London.
Elsewhere in markets
Bitcoin prices rose on Wednesday, helping lift the share price of Tesla, which recently invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency, and the shares of other blockchain-based companies, such as Riot Blockchain and Marathon Patent Group, in premarket trading.
Most European stocks indexes gained and the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.3 percent. The fourth quarter growth of Germany’s economy was revised higher to 0.3 percent, from 0.1 percent.
Most Asian indexes fell. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 3 percent with financial and consumer stocks falling the most after the government announced a plan to increase a tax on stock trading. Shares in Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing fell by nearly 9 percent, the most in the index.
A line at a San Antonio food distribution center on Sunday after a winter storm left millions without power.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times
A winter storm in Texas that pushed its power grid to the brink of collapse and left millions without electricity during a brutal cold snap has led to the resignations of five officials who oversaw the state’s electric grid.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which governs the flow of power for more than 26 million Texans, has been blamed for the widespread failures. The governor, lawmakers and federal officials quickly began inquiries into the system’s failures, particularly its preparation for cold weather, reports Rick Rojas for The New York Times.
The five board members, who announced on Tuesday that they intended to resign after a meeting set for Wednesday morning, were all from outside of Texas, a point of contention for critics who questioned the wisdom of outsiders playing such an influential role in the state’s infrastructure. In a statement filed with the Public Utility Commission, four board members said they were stepping down “to allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions.” In a footnote, the filing added that a fifth member was also resigning.
Those departing are the chairwoman, Sally Talberg, a former state utility regulator who lives in Michigan; Peter Cramton, the vice chairman and an economics professor at the University of Cologne in Germany and the University of Maryland; Terry Bulger, a retired banking executive who lives in Illinois; and Raymond Hepper, who is a former official with the agency overseeing the power grid in New England. Another person who was supposed to fill a vacant seat, Craig S. Ivey, has withdrawn from the 16-member board.
The board became the target of blame and scrutiny after the winter storm last week brought the state’s electric grid precariously close to a complete blackout that could have taken months to recover from. In a last-minute effort to avert that, the council, known as ERCOT, ordered rolling outages that plunged much of the state into darkness and caused electricity prices to skyrocket. Some customers had bills well over $10,000.
The second and final day of the DealBook DC Policy Project featured discussions on the prospects of bipartisan deal-making in Washington, overhauling of the financial markets and corporate America’s role in fighting the pandemic.
Here are the highlights from the sessions on Tuesday:
“We’ll lose 1.3 million jobs.”
Elements of Democrats’ stimulus proposals, including raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, attracted criticism from Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah. But he mentioned potential common ground with the Biden administration, including on climate change. Mr. Romney defended his traditional conservatism amid the G.O.P.’s embrace of right-wing populism, but noted that if former President Donald J. Trump ran for re-election in 2024, “I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.”
“I think it’s pathological that you could have greater than 100 percent short interest.”
Lessons from meme-stock mania were among the topics discussed by Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of the online brokerage firm Robinhood. He defended the practice of directing trades to market makers for a fee, which allows Robinhood to offer commission-free trading. Also on the panel, Jay Clayton, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the markets were functioning the way they should in many ways, including by promoting competition among brokers and market makers.
“There will continue to be vaccinations required for Covid.”
The chief executive of CVS Health, Karen S. Lynch, spoke about the fight against the pandemic, saying that people would probably need booster shots and might need to keep wearing masks next year. But whether businesses should require employees to be inoculated was a “company-by-company response,” she said.
Natasha Van Duser has war stories from bartending during the pandemic. She has since left service work.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
During two enormous crises — a public health emergency and an economic crash — restaurant service workers have found themselves double-exposed.
Many say their average tips have declined, while they’ve been saddled with the added work of policing patrons who aren’t social distancing, or as one service worker put it, “babysitting for the greater good,” Emma Goldberg reports for The New York Times.
On top of this, women, who make up more than two-thirds of servers, say they are facing “maskual harassment” — a term coined by the nonprofit organization One Fair Wage to describe demands that servers remove their masks to receive a tip.
The economic challenges have raised existential questions: Could this crisis herald the end of tipping, or a raise in the minimum wage for tipped workers? Depending on subjective gratuities has long been a fraught issue, but rarely has it had the safety consequences that it does now, when workers are struggling to enforce public health compliance from the customers whose tips they depend on.
Natasha Van Duser, 27, who tended bar in Manhattan, had never thought to show up to work with pepper spray. That was before last spring, when, she said, a customer dining outside spat on her and threatened to kill her when she asked him to put on a mask before walking to the bathroom; there were others who shouted expletives at her or suggested she take the temperature of their behinds instead of their foreheads.
In a recent national study of more than 1,600 workers, conducted by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, over three-quarters of workers reported “witnessing hostile behavior” from customers who were asked to comply with coronavirus protocols, more than 40 percent reported a change in the frequency of unwanted sexual comments during the pandemic and more than 80 percent reported that their tips had declined.
Credit…Matt Chase
Boredom’s impact on the economy is under-researched, experts say, possibly because there has been no modern situation like this one, but many agree that it’s an important one, Sydney Ember reports for The New York Times.
Feeling bored may result in different kinds of behaviors, like increasing novelty seeking and increasing reward sensitivity, said Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, who studies boredom.
This swirl of reactions to boredom can help explain the GameStop phenomenon, Ms. Westgate said. Investing in the stock was not just an act that felt engaging, powered by a propensity for taking risks and the excitement of reward, but also something that felt meaningful: For many traders, it was a form of protest.
Early in the pandemic, bread-making fervor prompted stores across the country to sell out of yeast. Puzzle sales have skyrocketed. Gardening has taken off as a hobby. Home improvement, too, has boomed. Sherwin-Williams said it had record sales in the fourth quarter and for the year, in part because of strong performances in its do-it-yourself and residential repaint businesses. Pandemic boredom evidently has nothing on watching paint dry.
There has also been an increase in sales of things like video games to keep us occupied, as well as things to help relieve the stress of the pandemic (and, perhaps, boredom from being at home), including self-help books, candles and messaging appliances.
It is possible that not being bored during certain periods of the day is also making people less productive, said Bec Weeks, who worked as a senior adviser for the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian government and is a co-founder of a behavioral science app called Pique.
Research has shown that mind-wandering, an activity that can happen during periods of boredom, can result in greater productivity. But during the pandemic, some of the best opportunities for mind-wandering, like the daily commute to work, have been lost for the millions of people now working from home.
“Even in those moments when we used to be bored, there were often a lot of things going on that we didn’t realize,” Ms. Weeks said.
Credit…Andrea Chronopoulos
Last month, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, wrote that the company wanted businesses it invests in to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as they emit by 2050 at the latest.
But crucial details were missing from the pledge, including what proportion of the companies BlackRock invests in will be zero-emission businesses in 2050. On Saturday, in response to questions from The New York Times, a BlackRock spokesman said that the company’s “ambition” was to have “net zero emissions across our entire assets under management by 2050,” The New York Times’s Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss report.
As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important.
Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but are finding that the technology often doesn’t exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives.
Determining how hard companies are really trying can be very difficult when there are no regulatory standards that require uniform disclosures of important information like emissions.
Institutional Shareholder Services, a firm that advises investors on how to vote on corporate matters, analyzed what corporations are doing to reduce emissions. Just over a third of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 stock index have set ambitious targets, it found, while 215 had no target at all. The rest had weak targets.
“To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set,” said Viola Lutz, deputy head of ISS ESG Climate Solutions, an arm of Institutional Shareholder Services. “Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050.”
The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday chose Oshkosh Defense, a manufacturer of military vehicles, to build the next generation of postal delivery trucks, shunning an all-electric vehicle maker that had been in the running for the multibillion-dollar, 10-year contract.
Under an initial $482 million deal, Oshkosh will complete the design and then assemble 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years, the Postal Service said.
Oshkosh was awarded the contract over two other bidders. One, the Workhorse Group, a small producer of electric delivery trucks based in Loveland, Ohio, was counting on the postal contract to provide a surge in revenue. At its height this month, the company’s stock was up more than tenfold in a year, in part on hopes it would win all or part of the postal contract. On Tuesday, after the Postal Service announced its decision, Workhorse shares lost nearly half their value. The other final bidder was Karsan, a Turkish maker of trucks and buses that was considered a long shot for the contract.
The choice of Oshkosh, which has no track record in producing electric vehicles, over Workhorse raised questions among some environmentalists over President Biden’s promised push to electrify the federal fleet. But some critics had also raised concerns that too swift a transition to plug-in trucks made by a fledgling company — and the buildup of charging infrastructure that would require — could burden a Postal Service already struggling with delivery delays.
Oshkosh has promised to shift to battery-powered vehicles if necessary, reflecting a wider push by automakers to bolster their offerings of electric vehicles to cut down on the industry’s carbon footprint. The new vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient gasoline engines or electric batteries, and they will be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technology, the Postal Service said.
The Post Office operates almost 230,000 vehicles and has one of the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleets, but its aging fleet — which federal data shows gets only about 10 miles a gallon — had also long been due for an upgrade.
New York Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker on Friday defended the state’s decision in March to force nursing homes to admit hospital residents with the coronavirus, blaming staff for spreading the virus.
The guideline, enacted on March 25, banned nursing homes from refusing admission or readmission to residents infected with Covid-19. The policy also banned nursing homes from testing patients prior to entry, NBC News reported. The policy was reversed later in May.
Zucker said Friday that at the time, the coronavirus hospitalization rate in New York was increasing “at an astounding rate” and capacity in the state’s intensive care units was running low. By allowing residents to return to the nursing homes, it helped protect the health system from collapse, he said.
“You can only verify a decision based on the facts you had at the time,” Zucker said during a press conference next to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “And with the facts we had at the time, it was the right decision from a public health perspective.”
Zucker said the decision was based on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued at the time, that nursing homes should accept all residents who would normally accept them, including those diagnosed with Covid-19, for as long Precautions have been taken.
A CDC spokesman was not immediately available to comment on Zucker’s remarks.
“What if we hadn’t done it on March 25? Hospital beds, which ultimately saved lives, would not have been available because they would have been occupied by someone who could have been discharged,” Zucker said. “We made the right public health decision then and, given the same facts, we would make the same decisions again.”
The Covid-19 patients who returned to the nursing homes were likely not contagious according to the CDC’s guidelines at the time and were separated from other residents. Zucker added that state law requires nursing homes to refuse residents if they are unable to properly care for them.
“We simply said that you cannot refuse admission because of the Covid status,” he said. “We never said you had to accept, we said you couldn’t deny.”
The state’s top health official comes as the Cuomo government faces bipartisan criticism of the treatment of Covid-19 deaths in the nursing home. An investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James published in late January found that the New York Department of Health signed up to 50% of deaths from Covid-19 in nursing homes.
On Friday, Cuomo and Zucker said most of the spread of the virus was not due to the Covid-positive resident, but from the staff who look after them.
“Covid came from the staff in the nursing homes. They got it at home, they got it at the supermarket, they went to work and they brought Covid with them,” Cuomo said.
However, Cuomo has aggressively defended the state’s census, stating that these deaths were counted as part of hospital deaths rather than nursing homes. The Democratic governor has apologized for “creating a void” by not providing enough information quickly enough and by not fighting against misinformation.
“Twitter, false reports, will eventually become a reality,” said Cuomo. “Social media, 24-hour news network, if you don’t correct it, it’ll repeat … and then people will think it’s true.”
In August, prosecutors under the Trump administration requested information about the deaths in New York nursing homes that Cuomo has criticized as politically motivated. The state legislature also asked for similar information, but the Cuomo government postponed that request to focus on that of the Justice Department, the governor said.
One of Cuomo’s top advisors, Melissa DeRosa, reportedly told Democratic lawmakers that the governor’s administration was “frozen” at their request because they feared the data would be used against them by the Justice Department, Associated Press reported.
DeRosa has since tried to clarify her comments, stating in a statement last week that she was trying to tell lawmakers that they need to focus on the Justice Department’s request first.
“We were comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the DOJ and had to immediately focus our resources on the introduction of the second wave and the vaccine,” DeRosa said in the statement. “As I said when I called the legislature, we weren’t able to respond to your request as quickly as anyone would have liked.”
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will be brought to trial on June 27, 2019 on charges in the New York Supreme Court.
Lucas Jackson | Reuters
Manafort was convicted in court and found separately guilty in 2018 of several federal crimes related to consulting revenue he provided to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
Immediately after being sentenced to 7½ years in prison on these cases, Vance announced that he had tried Manafort in the Manhattan Supreme Court of mortgage fraud, conspiracy and forgery of business records.
Vance’s law enforcement was, at least in part, to ensure that Manafort was punished for his crimes, even if Trump pardoned him, as Trump had implied. Presidents can only excuse individuals for federal convictions, not state charges.
However, Manafort attorney Todd Blanche argued that the New York case is outlawed by double exposure, which precludes a person from being prosecuted twice for the same crime. Blanche noted that the case related to mortgage applications that were the subject of federal proceedings against Manafort.
A Manhattan Supreme Court judge agreed to Blanche and dismissed the case in December 2019. Vance then appealed the decision.
But last October, months after Manafort was released in prison over Covid-19 concerns, that release was upheld by the Appeals Division of the First Department of Justice.
Vance then asked the appeals court to hear his appeal against the dismissal. That court denied the prosecutor’s request last Thursday.
Blanche received the decision on Monday.
“As we said earlier when the District Attorney announced charges against Mr. Manafort, this is a case that should never have been brought as the dismissed charge is a clear violation of New York law,” Blanche said in an email .
“As the court found and the Appeals Division confirmed, the people’s arguments are far from triggering a dual threat exception that would warrant this prosecution,” said Blanche.
“We are pleased that the New York Court of Appeals has seen no reason to give the district attorney permission to appeal the prior reasoned decision dismissing the charges and the appeals department’s opinion on it.”
Manafort was one of dozens of people to receive pardons and executive mercy from Trump after Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden.
Among the other pardons was Roger Stone, Manafort’s former business partner and himself a longtime GOP agent.
Stone was convicted last year for lied to Congress for trying to get information about emails received from the WikiLeaks document disclosure group after the 2016 emails from Russian agents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and the Democratic National Committee had been stolen.
A US Capitol police car drives past the US Capitol in Washington, USA on January 26, 2021.
Al Drago | Reuters
The acting head of the U.S. Capitol Police called for permanent fencing of the complex on Thursday and cited the January 6 uprising by a crowd of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters.
Calls for “huge improvements” to the security of the Capitol came the day after a West Virginia man was arrested after police found a gun and a list of members of Congress in his car, which was stopped near the complex’s temporary barrier .
Acting Capitol chief Yogananda Pittman noted that a 2006 Capitol security assessment “specifically recommended the installation of a permanent perimeter fence.”
“In light of recent events, I can clearly state that the physical security infrastructure needs to be significantly improved to allow permanent fences and the availability of emergency services in close proximity to the Capitol,” said Pittman.
She noted that after becoming acting boss on Jan. 8, she directed staff to conduct a physical security assessment of the entire Capitol complex. In addition to this review, the Capitol Police’s internal watchdog is investigating the January 6th events and a third party review of the complex’s security systems.
“In the end, we all have the same goal – to prevent what happened on January 6th from ever happening again,” said Pittman.
Five people died in the riot, including a Capitol policeman.
Two other police officers defending the Capitol that day killed themselves and up to 140 other police officers were injured while fighting Trump supporters who were invading the halls of convention, according to the Capitol Union.
A temporary fencing was set up after the violence, motivated by anger over Congress’ proposed confirmation of President Joe Biden’s election that day.
Shortly before the Trump uprising, his sons, personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and other key supporters reiterated false claims that Biden won the election through electoral fraud and urged followers to help undo Biden’s victory.
A permanent fence would drastically change the traditional atmosphere around the Capitol, whose grounds and buildings were usually open to the public.
West Virginia man arrested
On Wednesday afternoon, Washington police arrested a 71-year-old West Virginia man, Dennis Warren Westover, who parked his car on the street near the fence on the southwest side of the Capitol and began to “yell at” [National] Guardsmen who were inside the fence line, “the authorities said.
Westover, who lives in South Charleston, later told police, “I wanted to see the fence that was around ‘my capitol’,” according to court records.
Westover’s car, according to court documents, contained a Sig Sauer P365 semi-automatic pistol with 10 rounds of ammunition and a separate 9mm 10-round magazine in the center console of the car.
Westover was charged with carrying an unregistered firearm and ammunition.
He told police he was “concerned about the honesty and integrity of the elections,” according to a criminal complaint.
The complaint also contained “Stop the Steal Paperwork” in his car, which contained a list of Senators and representatives from the US Congress and the West Virginia House of Representatives with contact information.
“He said that is the process that I am busy with [in] is justice, justice and truth, “says the complaint.
Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, who became Commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic began, resigned on Wednesday when President Biden’s administration began.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, longtime director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Review, will serve as acting commissioner, according to an agency official.
From May, Dr. Woodcock has been tasked with Operation Warp Speed, the previous government’s program to accelerate vaccine and treatment development for the coronavirus.
She has been with the FDA since 1986 and has served in a number of key roles including Chief Medical Officer and Assistant Commissioner.
The Biden administration has not yet appointed a permanent commissioner, but Dr. Woodcock is one of the contemplated candidates, according to several advisors to the new president’s transition team. Dr. Amy Abernethy, Deputy Chief Commissioner, is also being considered, as is Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former agency officer who is the vice dean of public health practice and community involvement at Johns Hopkins University.
The resignation of Dr. Hahn was expected to be part of the routine departure of senior political figures that comes with the assumption of office of a new administration. In a farewell message to FDA staff on Wednesday, he wrote: “As a nation and as a health agency, we have faced major challenges and turbulent times over the past year, particularly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout all of this, FDA staff have been instrumental in responding to the disease with very real scientific advances like the approval of the first non-prescription OTC [over the counter] Covid test, the approval and approval of an antiviral agent, and the first two FDA-approved Covid-19 vaccines. “
Dr. Hahn received considerable criticism in the course of the pandemic. He has been accused of bowing to political pressure from President Trump and the White House to issue emergency clearances for unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine that did not provide evidence of their effectiveness. For the past few months, he has led reviews of the first vaccine against the virus, Pfizer and Moderna products.
In the past, 72-year-old Dr. Woodcock among other presidential administrations in the race for the top position of the FDA. It was first introduced by Dr. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner who was named chief science officer for the Biden Administration’s vaccination efforts, no longer referred to as Operation Warp Speed, to the FDA’s Drugs Division.
The Biden administration did not specify when an FDA commissioner would be appointed.
