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U.S. and Europe Transfer Nearer to Truce in Trump-Period Commerce Spat: Dwell Updates

Working on a steel pipe at the Iron S.p.A. factory in Assisi, Italy. Former President Donald J. Trump’s administration imposed steel tariffs on several countries in 2018.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

The United States and the European Union said Monday they had begun discussions to resolve a conflict over steel and aluminum imports that was a major front in the Trump administration’s trade wars and a serious burden on trans-Atlantic relations.

As part of a truce announced Monday, the European Union will not, as planned, increase tariffs on products like United States whiskey, orange juice and motorcycles, which the bloc imposed in 2018 in retaliation for duties that the Trump administration imposed on European steel and aluminum. The higher tariffs were scheduled to take effect June 1.

The talks about steel and aluminum are part of an effort by the Biden administration to rebuild relations between the United States and Europe after the Trump administration treated the bloc like an adversary, sometimes threatening to leave NATO and citing national security as a justification for charging 25 percent tariffs on imports of European steel and 10 percent on aluminum.

In March, the United States and European Union temporarily suspended tariffs on billions of dollars of each others’ aircraft, wine, food and other products as they worked to settle a long-running dispute involving Boeing and Airbus, the two leading airplane manufacturers. The United States also temporarily suspended retaliatory tariffs against British products like Scotch whisky that had been imposed as part of the dispute over aircraft subsidies.

Some European officials had hoped President Biden would simply lift the Trump-era tariffs, which are unpopular with businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. But the administration is moving cautiously and is likely to seek something in return, mindful that the tariffs are welcomed in steelmaking regions like Pennsylvania.

In a joint statement, Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative; Gina M. Raimondo, the secretary of commerce; and Valdis Dombrovskis, the top European Union trade official, said they would discuss how to address a global glut in steel products that poses “a serious threat to the market-oriented E.U. and U.S. steel and aluminum industries and the workers in those industries.”

The United States and European Union are “allies and partners, sharing similar national security interests as democratic, market economies,” the officials said, adding that they would work together to “hold countries like China that support trade-distorting policies to account.”

Starbucks has announced that masks will be optional for vaccinated customers as of Monday, unless local regulations require them.Credit…Eze Amos for The New York Times

Target on Monday joined a growing list of retailers, restaurants and theme parks that will allow fully vaccinated customers to go mask free, following new coronavirus safety guidance from the federal government last week that said vaccinated people rarely transmit the virus.

[Answers to your questions about vaccines and masks at work.]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday took many businesses by surprise when it said that people who are vaccinated could go maskless in most places, including indoors. For businesses, the announcement was complicated by the fact that C.D.C. guidance does not override state and local rules. But several major companies have already moved to relax mask requirements. Businesses for the most part have not said they would require customers to show proof that they have been vaccinated.

Here’s the latest on companies that are changing their mask policies.

Costco, which has more than 500 U.S. stores, said it would allow fully vaccinated customers to go mask-free where state and local guidance allowed. The retailer said it would “not require proof of vaccination” but would ask for its customers’ “responsible and respectful cooperation with this revised policy.”

Publix, which has 1,270 grocery stores in the Southeast, said “face coverings are optional for fully vaccinated individuals inside Publix stores” subject to local regulations.

Starbucks, which has 32,000 cafes worldwide, said that facial coverings would be optional for vaccinated customers beginning on Monday, unless local regulations requireed them. Employees at Starbucks locations in the United States and Canada will still be required to wear masks.

Target, which has 1,909 stores in the United States, said it would no longer require fully vaccinated customers and employees to wear face coverings, except where required by local ordinances. The retailer said that it masks would still be “strongly recommended” for both shoppers and staff members who were not fully vaccinated.

Trader Joe’s, which operates 517 grocery stores across the country, said that customers who were fully vaccinated no longer needed to wear masks in its stores. It will not require proof of vaccination “as we trust our customers to follow C.D.C. guidelines,” a spokeswoman, Kenya Friend-Daniel, said in an email. Masks are still required for store employees.

Walmart said that vaccinated customers were allowed to go maskless starting May 18 in areas that did not have stricter mandates. A spokesman for the company, which operates more than 4,000 Walmart and nearly 600 Sam’s Club stores in the United States, said it expected its customers to abide by the honor system. Employees can also go mask-free by answering “yes” to a vaccination question that is part of a daily health assessment.

Walt Disney World Resort in Florida said that it was no longer requiring visitors to wear masks in most outdoor areas as of this weekend, though masks are still required in indoor locations. Disneyland in California continues to require masks indoors and out because of state mandates. Disney’s chief executive, Bob Chapek, said on an earnings call Thursday that the company had begun to increase capacity and that the C.D.C.’s new guidance “is very big news for us, particularly if anybody’s been in Florida in the middle of summer with a mask on.” About 150 million people visited Disney’s parks in 2019.

Hershey Park in Pennsylvania said it would no longer require masks nor social distancing for fully vaccinated guests. The theme park, which drew 3.4 million visitors in 2019, said it would rely on its guests to “accurately follow the guidelines based on their vaccination status.”

Universal Orlando Resort said masks were no longer required when outdoors but still must be used in “all indoor locations.” Its theme park in California will still require masks both outside and inside because of the state rules.

One of the 40,000 DVD rental kiosks operated by Redbox in the United States.Credit…Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Redbox, the company best known for its DVD-rental kiosks, is going public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal that values the company at $693 million, the DealBook newsletter was the first to report.

Redbox’s parent, Outerwall, was acquired by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management in 2016 at a $1.6 billion valuation; it later separated the group’s businesses, which included Redbox, Coinstar and ecoATM. Apollo is rolling over all of its equity in Redbox as part of the deal, which also includes a $50 million investment led by Ophir Asset Management.

Redbox has some 40,000 kiosks across the United States, more than there are McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. Are they needed in the age of Netflix? Redbox gets its DVDs long before many movies arrive on subscription services, said its chief executive, Galen Smith, and its customers are more value-conscious than the typical Netflix streamer. Many are also late adopters to streaming, perhaps because they can’t afford broadband access, Mr. Smith said.

The physical rental business was in decline at the time of Apollo’s acquisition, and revenue from DVDs fell more than a third last year, to around $500 million, as the pandemic held up new releases. As the backlog clears, the company is expecting a rebound. There is a “very long tail for the physical business,” Mr. Smith said.

Redbox is also hoping to convert loyal customers to its own streaming business, which accounted for about 8 percent of its revenue last year. It partners with brands like Showtime and is also creating its own content. Once seen as a threat to the studios, Redbox is now considered an important buyer. “We can create value in helping these studios reach consumers that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach through our platform,” Mr. Smith said.

The Internal Revenue Service delayed the tax filing deadline by a month, to May 17.Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated Press

It’s May 17 and it’s Tax Day, the deadline for filing your 2020 taxes. The Internal Revenue Service in March said that Americans who needed it could take extra time to file their taxes. That time has arrived.

The one-month delay from the usual April deadline did not offer as much extra time as the I.R.S. gave people last year, when the filing deadline was pushed to July 15. But the aim was the same: to make it easier for taxpayers to get a handle on their finances — as well as tax changes that took effect this year with the signing of the American Rescue Plan.

Still have questions? Here are some articles that might help.

How the Pandemic Has Changed Your Taxes

New rules for a new reality, from stimulus payments to retirement withdrawals to unemployment insurance, could cut your bill or even generate extra refunds.

The Tax Filing Deadline Was Delayed, but Read the Fine Print

The federal government and most states pushed back the date to May 17, but others have gone their own way. It’s a good idea to double-check deadlines.

The Tax Headaches of Working Remotely

“Each state has its own rules,” one tax expert says. So if you worked in a state other than your usual one in 2020, here are some tips on dealing with the tax season.

For Gig Workers and Business Owners, Taxes Are Even Trickier Now

Filing taxes has never been simple for freelancers and business owners, but the pandemic has made it far more complex.

A Break for Working Families

The government is allowing people who qualify for the earned-income tax credit to use income from either 2020 or 2019, whichever will result in a bigger credit.

Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline, said it has seen signs that a recovery in air travel and tourism “has already begun.”Credit…Albert Gea/Reuters

U.S. stocks slipped in early trading on Monday and most European equity indexes were lower, reversing some of Friday’s rally.

The S&P 500 fell about 0.2 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 600 dropped 0.1 percent.

The Wall Street benchmark rose on Friday, but the increase was not enough to reverse a decline of 1.4 percent for the week, when faster-than-expected inflation data rattled markets.

Traders are watching inflation data closely because if it shows signs of a substantial and sustained rise central bank policymakers might pull back on monetary stimulus. On Wednesday, the central bank will publish minutes of its April policy meeting.

  • Discovery shares rose 8 percent in early trading after confirming it would merge with AT&T’s media business, including the WarnerMedia assets, to create a new giant company. AT&T shares rose more than 3 percent.

  • The FTSE 100 in Britain fell 0.4 percent even as England entered the next stage of its exit from lockdown. Indoor dining and hotels reopened as well as entertainment venues such as museums and cinemas. But an increase in the number of cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in India has raised concerns about the easing of restrictions.

  • Ryanair shares rose slightly after the airline reported a loss of 815 million euros (or $991 million) in the year through March but said that it expected a “strong recovery” in air travel and tourism in the second half of this fiscal year. “The recent strong increases in weekly bookings since early April suggests that this recovery has already begun,” the earnings release said.

  • Taiwan’s stock index dropped 3 percent as the island battles its worst coronavirus outbreak. Its government imposed tougher restrictions, including closing cinemas and limiting the size of gatherings, and encouraged people not to panic buy essentials.

  • Oil prices rose slightly. The West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, rose 0.3 percent to $65.58 a barrel.

  • Bitcoin fell to about $45,000 on Monday morning, though it recovered some of its losses from the weekend after Elon Musk said Tesla hadn’t sold any Bitcoin. The electric carmaker bought $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency earlier this year but Mr. Musk recently suspended plans to accept Bitcoin for car payments.

The paper’s conclusions suggest that economic programs embraced by President Biden may be useful in raising wages.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Two economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute conclude in a new paper that the government is to blame for the fact that pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s.

“Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” write Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens.

Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively, trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.

Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue that a decades-long loss of leverage largely explains the gap between the pay increases that workers would have received had they benefited fully from rising productivity, and the smaller wage and benefit increases that workers actually received, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times.

Drawing on existing measures of the relationship between unemployment and wages, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens estimate that excess unemployment lowered wages by about 10 percent since the 1970s, explaining nearly one-quarter of the gap between wages and productivity growth.

They perform similar calculations for other factors that undermined workers’ bargaining power: the decline of unions; a succession of trade deals with low-wage countries; and increasingly common arrangements like “fissuring,” in which companies outsource work to lower-paying firms, and noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which make it hard for workers to leave for a competitor.

Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens conclude, these factors explain more than three-quarters of the gap between the typical worker’s actual increases in compensation and their expected increases, given the productivity gains.

The C.D.C.’s new guidance on masks comes with caveats.Credit…Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times

Are companies responsible for making sure that every employee without a mask is vaccinated against the coronavirus?

What if unvaccinated employees infect their co-workers — is the company potentially liable? Will companies ask their employees to take Covid-19 tests?

Millions of office workers who have been able to do their job from home during the pandemic are now thinking seriously about returning to work. The prospect raises myriad health safety and workplace protocol questions for employees and companies.

Lauren Hirsch of The New York Times’s DealBook team spoke to lawyers, employers and human resources professionals about some of the questions.

Generally, employers are allowed to require employees to be vaccinated. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance in December stating that vaccine mandates are legal. But this is complicated by proposed legislation in a number of states that would restrict companies’ abilities to set such requirements.

Whether executives are prepared to follow through on the implications of a vaccine mandate is also up for debate.

“If they want to permit employees to remove masks indoors, yes, I believe it does put the burden on the employer to verify,” said Kristin White, a lawyer at Fisher Phillips who specializes in workplace safety regulations.

The White House is also reviewing a new emergency standard on Covid workplace protections from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Labor groups have been pushing for new rules for about a year. OSHA suggests social distancing and masks in the workplace — but a temporary standard would establish requirements. Any new standard now needs to consider the new C.D.C. guidance.

As vaccination numbers rise and the number of Covid-19 cases drop, it’s natural for companies to rethink their workplace plans, said Joseph Allen, who is the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and advises companies on Covid-19 strategy.

“What was state-of-the-art last year is not state-of-the-art right now,” he said. “The science has changed, the plans should change.”

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World News

Israel-Palestinian Battle: Stay Updates – The New York Instances

Searching for survivors under the rubble of a building hit overnight by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Sunday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants mounted on Sunday, even as local health officials said an Israeli airstrike in Gaza overnight killed at least two dozen people, the single deadliest attack of the current hostilities.

The dead included women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement to The Associated Press.

On Sunday morning, rescue workers combed through the rubble of three buildings flattened in the Israeli airstrike as the hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians escalated to levels not seen since a 2014 war.

With the conflict stretching into its seventh straight day, the United States stepped up its diplomatic engagement and the United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet to discuss the conflict for the first time on Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed late Saturday to continue striking Gaza “until we reach our targets,” suggesting a prolonged assault on the coastal territory even as casualties rose on both sides.

In separate calls on Saturday, President Biden conferred with Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, about efforts to broker a cease-fire. While supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Netanyahu to protect civilians and journalists.

Even before Sunday morning’s attack, Israeli airstrikes had intensified over the weekend, with an attack on a house in a refugee camp in Gaza that killed 10 members of an extended family, including women and children, and another that destroyed a high-rise that housed media outlets including The A.P. and Al Jazeera.

Israeli defense officials said the building housed military assets belonging to Hamas and they provided advance warning to civilians in the building to allow evacuation. No casualties were reported in that strike.

More than 170 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli airstrikes and shelling in Gaza, and 12 Israelis had died in Hamas rocket attacks.

Over the past week, the 15-member U.N. Security Council met privately at least twice to discuss ways of reducing tensions. But efforts to reach agreement on a statement or to hold an open meeting had faced resistance from the United States, Israel’s biggest defender on the council.

American officials said they wanted to give mediators sent to the region from the United States, Egypt and Qatar an opportunity to defuse the crisis.

But with violence worsening, a compromise was reached for a meeting on Sunday at 10 a.m. Eastern time, to be held via videoconference because of pandemic restrictions, and streamed live on a U.N. website.

The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said in a statement posted on Twitter after the meeting was announced that “the U.S. will continue to actively engage in diplomacy at the highest levels to try to de-escalate tensions.”

Security Council meetings on the Israeli-Palestinian issue have often ended inconclusively and served mainly as a platform for supporters of both sides to air their grievances. But they have also demonstrated the widespread view among United Nations members that Israel’s actions as an occupying power are illegal and that its use of deadly force is disproportionately harsh.

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Israel Strikes Gaza Tower Housing A.P. and Other News Media

An Israeli airstrike destroyed a prominent building in Gaza City on Saturday that housed media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The Israel Defense Forces said it gave an advanced warning for civilians to evacuate.

We are shocked and horrified that the Israelis would target the building that housed A.P.‘s bureau in Gaza. They long knew that A.P.’s bureau was there, and they targeted it. Now, fortunately, we had a warning, and we were able to get our journalists out. We narrowly escaped a huge loss of life. We had 12 journalists in that building. And those brave journalists not only got out, but they were able to salvage much of our equipment because it’s important that we continue to tell this story. You see, that building provided the best vantage point for the world to see the events in Gaza, and now that building is destroyed. And we will work hard to continue to tell the world the important events of Gaza, and we will keep our journalists safe.

Video player loadingAn Israeli airstrike destroyed a prominent building in Gaza City on Saturday that housed media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The Israel Defense Forces said it gave an advanced warning for civilians to evacuate.CreditCredit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

The prominent 12-story building in Gaza City that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday not only housed the offices of media organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera.

It also offered a vantage point for the world on Gaza, as A.P. cameras positioned on the roof terrace captured Israeli bombardments and Palestinian militants’ rocket attacks during periodic flare-ups in fighting — including over the past week.

“The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what transpired today,” the A.P.’s president, Gary Pruitt, said in a statement following the Israeli attack.

The leveling of the al-Jalaa tower, which occurred as fighting between Israelis and Palestinians spiraled on several fronts, drew condemnations from across the world. The Israel Defense Forces said that its fighter jets struck the tower because it also contained military assets belonging to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Pruitt called on the I.D.F. to present evidence to support its allegation, adding that the news agency had operated from the building for 15 years.

“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” he said. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

On Sunday, the I.D.F. tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence, where it “gathered intel for attacks against Israel, manufactured weapons & positioned equipment to hamper I.D.F. operations.”

The I.D.F. — which frequently accuses Hamas of using civilians as shields — provided advance warning to civilians in the building to allow evacuation. The A.P. reported that the owner of the building, Jawad Mahdi, was “told he had an hour to make sure everyone has left the building.”

In the minutes before the airstrike, Mr. Mahdi was filmed desperately pleading with the Israeli Army, asking them to allow four journalists who had been filming an interview — with the father of four children slain in an Israeli strike on a refugee camp on Saturday morning — an extra 10 minutes to retrieve their belongings.

An Israeli soldier told him: “There will be no 10 minutes.”

Minutes later, the building was destroyed, engulfed in a plume of black smoke.

The A.P. said that it “narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life,” and that a dozen journalists and freelancers inside the building evacuated before the strike. The building also housed apartments on the lower floors.

Press freedom groups said that the strike — coming a day after the Israeli Army erroneously told foreign media that ground troops had entered Gaza — raised concerns that Israel was interfering with independent reporting on the conflict. In a statement, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists questioned whether the I.D.F. was “deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza.”

A White House spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, tweeted that the United States had “communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was “deeply disturbed” by the strike and warned that “indiscriminate targeting of civilian and media structures” would violate international law.

After the strike, journalists from other news organizations gathered near the rubble. Heba Akila, an Al Jazeera journalist who had been broadcasting from the tower when the warning call was made, said: “This is clearly to silence the truth and the voices of journalists.”

  1. Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting rockets launched from GazaAnas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  2. Streaks through the sky left by the Iron Dome systemFatima Shbair/Getty Images
  3. Ashkelon, IsraelNir Elias/Reuters
  4. Ashdod, IsraelMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  5. Sderot, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  6. Ashkelon, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles streaking across the sky and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system attempting to shoot down missiles fired by militants in Gaza have been among the most widely shared online, even as the toll wrought by the violence only becomes clear in the light of the next day’s dawn.

“The number of Israelis killed and wounded would be far higher if it had not been for the Iron Dome system, which has been a lifesaver as it always is,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said this week.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Isreal.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The systems’s interceptors — just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long — rely on miniature sensors and computerized brains to zero in on short-range rockets. Israel’s larger interceptors — the Patriot and Arrow systems — can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

In the current conflict, militants in the Gaza Strip have fired nearly 3,000 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

The Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, examined the events that have led to the past week’s violence, the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in years. A little-noticed police action in Jerusalem was among them. He writes:

Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

A pro-Palestinian protest near the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Saturday.Credit…Gamal Diab/EPA, via Shutterstock

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas stretched into its seventh day, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were held in cities around the world, even as leaders across Europe expressed concern about a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators in Washington marched from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol in protest of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and what they said was an inadequate response from the United States.

“People think they can be neutral about this. That’s absolutely wrong,” said Alexandra-Ola Chaic, 17, who traveled to the rally from Burke, Va., with her family, which is of Palestinian descent. “We have to do what we can to make this an issue that receives political support.”

The crowd that gathered was diverse in age and background, and included many families with young children.

Ruth Soto, 25, from Northern Virginia, came with her sister to show solidarity with Palestinians. She said the displacement of Palestinians felt personal to her because her family fled war in Central America to come to the United States illegally.

“We’ve seen the struggle, being displaced from your home,” she said. “This is a way we can help them.”

In London, a pro-Palestinian march on Saturday attracted thousands of protesters, and similar demonstrations were held in cities around the world.

At the same time, there was growing concern about a rise in attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions.

France banned a pro-Palestinian protest in Paris, citing the “sensitive” international context and the risk of acts of violence against synagogues and Israeli interests in the French capital.

Paris protest organizers pressed ahead on Saturday despite the ban. The police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the rally, which had drawn about 3,000 people, Agence France-Presse reported.

This past week, German protesters attacked synagogues, burned Israeli flags and marched through the streets chanting slurs against Jews.

Felix Klein, a German official tasked with countering anti-Semitism, said: “It is appalling how obviously Jews in Germany are being held responsible here for actions of the Israeli government in which they are completely uninvolved.”

Britain experienced a sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the past week, a charity said on Saturday.

Credit…Adat Yeshua Messianic Synagogue

The Community Security Trust, a charity that records anti-Semitic threats, said it had received more than 50 reports of Jews across Britain being threatened and verbally abused in the past week — a 490 percent increase from the previous seven days. It said it believed that many more attacks had gone unreported.

Offensive phrases and slogans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been shouted at Jewish people of all ages, including children, said Dave Rich, the charity’s director of policy. “When the conflict in Israel reaches this level of intensity, we always see increases in anti-Semitic incidents,” he said.

Israeli ground forces at the Gaza border on Friday.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israel’s top military spokesman on Saturday apologized to foreign journalists for wrongly announcing early Friday that Israeli troops had entered the Gaza Strip in a ground attack, insisting that it was an “honest mistake,” even after Israeli news outlets called it a deliberate deception aimed at luring Hamas fighters into Israeli gun sights.

Early Friday, the I.D.F. announced on Twitter that “air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.” It later clarified that statement to say ground troops were firing into Gaza from Israel.

The spokesman, Brig. Gen. Hidai Zilberman, said he understood the “frustration” of journalists who reported as fact what turned out to be fiction. But he sought to assure Western reporters in Israel that no one was trying to turn them into tools of the Israeli military.

“Despite conspiratorial reports to the contrary in both international and Israeli press, this was not some elaborate attempt to manipulate the media in order to achieve a tactical victory,” General Zilberman wrote in a letter to the Foreign Press Association’s president, Andrew Carey of CNN.

“By definition and our guiding belief system, the I.D.F. Spokesperson’s Unit does not engage in psychological warfare and is tasked with conveying only the truth to the public, a mission we have devotedly undertaken for more than seven decades.”

Gen. Zilberman added no new details to explain how his office misled foreign journalists or why it had taken hours to correct itself. But he reiterated that the Israeli military’s relationship with foreign news organizations was “of paramount importance to us” and was “based on mutual trust and respect.”

The possibility that the military had used the international news media to kill fighters in Gaza prompted sharp objections from several news organizations.

“If they used us, it’s unacceptable,” said Daniel Estrin, N.P.R.’s correspondent in Jerusalem. “And if not, then what’s the story — and why is the Israeli media widely reporting that we were duped?”

For its part, the Foreign Press Association on Saturday protested an Israeli attack on a Gaza office tower that housed the offices of The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, saying in a statement that it “raises deeply worrying questions about Israel’s willingness to interfere with the freedom of the press to operate.”

  1. Gaza CityHosam Salem for The New York Times
  2. Tel AvivCorinna Kern for The New York Times
  3. East JerusalemEmmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  4. Sderot, IsraelAriel Schalit/Associated Press
  5. GazaHosam Salem for The New York Times
  6. Jaffa, IsraelCorinna Kern for The New York Times
  7. Ramat Gan, IsraelCorinna Kern for The New York Times
  8. Jaffa, IsraelAhmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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A new round of deadly violence erupted in the Middle East over the past week, as Israeli airstrikes hit targets in Gaza and the militant group Hamas launched rockets at cities inside Israel.

A damaged building in Petah Tikva, Israel, that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in a recent episode of The Daily, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting “Death to Arabs” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

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Business

What specialists say about attending dwell sports activities beneath new CDC tips

What experts say about attending live sports under new CDC guidelines

Houston Astros fans will reach home run outfield player Willie Calhoun, 5, hit by Texas Rangers in the first inning of the baseball game between the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros, Texas on May 13, 2021 at Minute Maid Park in Houston.

Leslie Plaza | Icon Sportswire | Getty Images

Mask mandates are slowly waning after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised their guidelines on Thursday. That could be good news for sports leagues, so CNBC spoke to some experts about what this means for fans who are nervous about getting back to face-to-face games.

The CDC said that in most cases, fully vaccinated people can wear protective clothing and no longer have to stay three feet apart. Unvaccinated people still have to follow stricter guidelines as they continue to be at risk.

“When you are fully vaccinated you can start doing the things you stopped doing because of the pandemic,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters. “We have all longed for that moment when we can return to a sense of normalcy.”

The CDC was cheered and criticized for its decision.

Professional sports leagues, including Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, have been operating under capacity constraints for cities and states due to the pandemic. The leagues have advised clubs to adopt their mask mandate advice from local officials. Game masks are still required and this rule could remain.

The new rules are good for business as professional sports leagues draw back more fans and help leagues recover from billions in losses. This should further support the already rich National Football League as clubs like the Dallas Cowboys want 100% capacity for the 2021 season.

“No free card to leave prison”

The CDC continues to advise people to follow business guidelines when it comes to masking mandates. Indoor arenas are riskier than outdoor arenas if you are not vaccinated. As such, the NBA and National Hockey League may need to maintain their guidelines as they prepare for their postseason.

Gil Fried, a professor of sports management at the University of New Haven, advised pro teams to stay cautious.

“When you’re in an arena, you don’t know what other people have and whether or not they have been vaccinated,” Fried said. “I still wouldn’t go to a venue without wearing a mask.”

When asked when leagues should drop mask mandates, Fried said, “When the numbers around the world go down.” He then pointed out the nationwide lockdown in Turkey as the number of cases rose to over 60,000 a day.

“Turkey has done very well and is considered a model for success. And now they have declined in a short time,” said Fried.

Also consider the recent Covid-19 outbreak within the New York Yankees, which occurred even though team members were vaccinated. On Thursday, a positive test put Yankees player Gleyber Torres out of action for at least 10 days under MLB rules. And the league reported 10 new positive cases on Friday.

Fried said the leagues shouldn’t move too fast if the mask requirements are dropped.

“I think it’s great news for things like personal training, but it’s not a free prison exit card that will make everything better,” Fried said on the CDC News.

“If you move too fast it can be scary to people,” he added. “They’ve been closed for months. Yes, they strive to get out and do things, but there are still a lot of fearful people. That’s part of the psychological side.”

Fans stand for the national anthem for the game between the San Antonio Spurs and Sacramento Kings on May 7, 2021 at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, California.

Rocky Widner | National Basketball Association | Getty Images

Arenas are safer than you think

At this point, leagues are at greater risk of changing protocols as liability concerns remain. And city and state officials are still holding the keys for fans who are returning in full.

On May 19, New York will allow Yankees and Mets games to have 33% capacity for unvaccinated sections and offer free vaccinations during games. The Knicks are used to 25%. In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia 76ers plan to allow 50% capacity when the team makes the playoffs.

At the league level, MLB plans to maintain Covid-19 advice for teams. The NBA didn’t respond to CNBC’s request to comment on their plans after the CDC update.

Stephen Kissler, who studies the spread of infectious diseases at Harvard University, said indoor arenas are now safer than they were before Covid. During the pandemic, the teams invested in disinfection equipment, germicidal technologies and improved ventilation systems.

“All of these things together don’t reduce the risk to zero, but they do reduce it to something that is much closer to the risks we take every day,” said Kissler.

NFL clubs have allowed more people to congregate at games after the league kicked off the 2020 season with limited capacity. More than 20,000 people attended the Super Bowl in February. But that was outside. When asked about the Covid 19 risk in fully vaccinated people at an indoor sports event – and with masks – Kissler said the chances were slim.

“One of the things I would have liked – and maybe arenas can think about – with the CDC guidelines is that these mask recommendations should be tied to the spread in the area,” said Kissler. “If you are vaccinated and are wearing a mask and someone next to you is not, and the prevalence in the community is low, then I think the likelihood that the person next to you is contagious and spreading it to you while you have a mask.” and vaccinated are extremely low. “

Kissler said allowing 75% capacity at indoor sporting events would be acceptable as cases decline.

“That side of caution makes a lot of sense – doing these things slowly,” said Kissler. “But we’re entering a time when Covid infection isn’t that scary anymore, which is great,” he added. “We have been pushing for that all along.”

“I don’t think Covid is likely to go away. But if enough people are vaccinated and there is a certain level of immunity to Covid – where previously a Covid infection would have brought things to a standstill, we can raise the threshold a little.” he said.

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World News

Israel-Palestinian Battle: Reside Updates – The New York Instances

Israeli artillery at the border with Gaza on Thursday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israeli ground forces bombarded Gaza with artillery on Friday, escalating a conflict that has already brought Israeli airstrikes, Palestinian rocket attacks and sectarian violence on the streets of Israeli cities.

As world leaders called for calm and American and Egyptian officials tried to broker an end to the violence, the fighting that began on Monday ratcheted up instead. By Friday morning, the Israeli authorities reported that eight Israelis, including one soldier, had been killed. Palestinian health officials reported the death toll in Gaza at 120 and the overall number of wounded in the latest violence at 900.

The Israeli military said on Friday that it had killed 75 operatives of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. It said that more than 2,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza (including about 400 that fell short of Israeli territory), while the Gaza authorities reported more than 150 strikes from Israeli jets and drones, along with the artillery fire, wounding more than 50 people overnight.

“This is the largest focused operation against a focused target that we have conducted so far,” said Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. Hidai Zilberman, another spokesman, told Kan Radio on Friday that the Israel Defense Forces had deployed as many as 160 aircraft at once in the attack.

Mr. Conricus said the target of the attack was a network of tunnels underneath the Palestinian-controlled territory, through which Hamas is known to deploy militants and smuggle weapons. The spokesman described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The Israel Defense Forces clarified that no Israeli troops were actually in Gaza despite earlier reports to the contrary. Instead, the army had massed troops along the Gazan border and was shelling the territory from Israel.

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

“This operation will continue as long as it takes to restore peace and security to the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released early Friday.

Mr. Zilberman warned that the operation might intensify, saying that “all options are on the table, and forces are preparing and will continue to accumulate during the holiday” — the feast of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Hamas launched dozens of rocket volleys overnight at Israeli targets, killing an 87-year-old woman who was running to a safe room.

The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian unrest began Monday after clashes between protesters and the Israeli police at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas then began firing into Israel with the increasingly potent rockets it has built with the aid of Iran, and Israel responded with air attacks on Hamas and other militant targets in Gaza.

The Biden administration has called for peaceful resolution, while insisting that the rocket attacks on Israel must stop and refraining from any public criticism of Israel.

But the two entrenched sides did not appear ready to cede ground.

“The Americans are talking to me, the Egyptians are talking to me,” Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, said during a video meeting with local council heads, “but I remain focused on the reason we went out on this campaign: to make Hamas and Islamic Jihad pay a price.”

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

The most surprising turn has been the violence between Jews and Arabs who have lived side by side in Israeli cities, with reports of gangs of people from one group pummeling members of another. Riots, stone throwing and protests continued overnight.

The crisis has come at a time when Israel’s political leaders are struggling to form a government after four inconclusive elections in two years. Mr. Netanyahu’s attempt to build a majority coalition in the Israeli Parliament failed, and his rival, Yair Lapid, had been invited to try to form a government.

Workers fixing a power line after an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Thursday.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Before the current crisis, Gazans already lived in what one United Nations human rights official called a “toxic slum”: a jagged strip of land blockaded indefinitely by Israel and Egypt whose roughly two million residents endured daily power outages of up to 16 hours and running water that worked only every other day.

Now, they are down to about five hours of electricity per day and half their usual water supply, according to an Israeli security official. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of briefing rules, said the shortages were partly because Israel has closed the border crossing through which most of Gaza’s fuel arrives, but also because Hamas, the militant group that governs the area, shot off rockets that damaged power lines. That claim could not be independently confirmed.

The official said that the power lines to two Gaza sewage treatment plants were damaged or down, and the U.N.’s humanitarian aid coordination agency said that a water desalination plant was not operational, cutting 250,000 residents off from water. About 150,000 people in Gaza City had limited access to water because the power cuts were affecting the piped supply, the agency added.

Gaza usually gets roughly a quarter of its electricity from Israel, with another portion coming from a power plant in the territory that relies on fuel from Israel, plus donated fuel from Qatar and aid groups. Before the current conflict, that left the area perpetually short of half to two-thirds of its power needs, meaning residents had no more than eight consecutive hours of electricity, according to Gisha, a Gaza-focused advocacy group. Those who could afford it turned to diesel generators to cover the gap.

Eager to push back on the idea that Israel alone is responsible for Gazans’ deteriorating living conditions, senior officials at the Israeli defense agency that deals with the West Bank and Gaza, , known as COGAT, said that Hamas was using Gaza residents as a “human shield.”

“Instead of focusing on welfare and economy,” the head of the agency’s civil department, Col. Elad Goren, said on Wednesday, “it’s focusing on violence and incitement.”

The lack of power was starting to affect hospitals, which were already at full capacity because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Gisha group said. The Gaza Health Ministry on Friday called on Israel to open a border crossing for patients to receive treatment and medical personnel and supplies to enter.

A tunnel in 2018 that Israel said was dug by the Islamic Jihad group at the Israel-Gaza border.Credit…Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

As the Israel Defense Forces strike Gaza with jets, drones and artillery, a key target has been a network of tunnels beneath the Palestinian-controlled territory that the militant Islamic group Hamas is known to use for deploying militants and smuggling weapons.

A spokesman for the Israeli military described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The tunnels were also the main rationale that Israel gave for its ground invasion of Gaza in 2014. Israel’s leaders said afterward that they had destroyed 32 tunnels during that operation, including 14 that penetrated into Israeli territory.

At the time of that fighting, the Israel Defense Forces took reporters into a 6-foot-by-2-foot underground passage running almost two miles under the border to show the threat posed by the tunnels, and the difficulty that Israel has in finding and destroying them.

Here is an excerpt from what The New York Times reported then:

Tunnels from Gaza to Israel have had a powerful hold on the Israeli psyche since 2006, when Hamas militants used one to capture an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The tunnels can be quite elaborate. The tunnel toured by journalists was reinforced with concrete and had a rack on the wall for electrical wiring. It also featured a metal track along the floor, used by carts that removed dirt during the tunnel’s construction, that could be used to ferry equipment and weapons, the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials acknowledge that it is a difficult technological and operational challenge to destroy all of the subterranean passageways and neutralize the threat they pose. The tunnels are well hidden, said the officer who conducted the tour, and some tunnels are booby-trapped.

  1. Taking shelter at a United Nations-run school in GazaHosam Salem for The New York Times
  2. Ashkelon, IsraelAriel Schalit/Associated Press
  3. Funeral of an Israeli soldier in ElyakimJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  4. Rockets being fired from the Gaza StripHosam Salem for The New York Times
  5. Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
  6. Mourning the death of a relative in Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
  7. Petah Tikva, IsraelDan Balilty for The New York Times
  8. Funeral of Hamas militants in Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

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The conflict is taking a growing toll as Israeli military strikes, Palestinian rocket attacks and street violence continue.

As violence between Israel and the Palestinians has grown this week, misinformation about the situation has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media outlets.

The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region. And the lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The effect is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions when suspicions and distrust are already running high.

“A lot of it is rumor and broken telephone, but it is being shared right now because people are desperate to share information about the unfolding situation,” said Arieh Kovler, a political analyst and independent researcher in Jerusalem who studies misinformation.

Israeli soldiers near the border between Israel and Gaza on Friday.Credit…Amir Cohen/Reuters

As United States and Egyptian mediators headed to Israel to begin de-escalation talks, the antagonists were weighing delicate internal considerations before agreeing to discussions on ending the violence.

But even before the mediators got to work, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared to have calculated that brute force was required first.

Early Friday, Israeli ground troops shelled Gaza — a potentially major move of escalation against the Hamas militants who have been launching hundreds of rockets at Israel.

For the Palestinians, the indefinite postponement of elections last month by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, created a vacuum that Hamas is more than willing to fill. Hamas argues that it is the only Palestinian faction that, with its large stockpile of improved missiles, is defending the holy places of Jerusalem, turning Mr. Abbas into a spectator.

President Biden has spoken to Mr. Netanyahu and repeated the usual formula about Israel’s right to self-defense. The American leader also dispatched an experienced diplomat, the deputy assistant secretary of state Hady Amr, to urge de-escalation on both sides.

The Biden administration has resisted calls at the United Nations Security Council for an immediate discussion of the crisis, arguing that Mr. Amr and other diplomats need at least a few days to work toward a possible solution.

A proposal to convene an urgent meeting on Friday by the 15-member council was effectively blocked by the United States, diplomats said. Criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is widespread among members of the United Nations, and the United States has often stood alone in defending Israel, its key Middle East ally.

In Washington, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, when asked about American objections to a Security Council meeting, told reporters on Thursday that “we are open to and supportive of a discussion, an open discussion, at the United Nations,” but wanted to wait until early next week.

“This, I hope, will give some time for the diplomacy to have some effect and to see if indeed we get a real de-escalation,” Mr. Blinken said.

Jordanian protesters gathered near the Israeli embassy in Amman, the capital, this week.Credit…Khalil Mazraawi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AMMAN, Jordan — Thousands of protesters in Jordan, Israel’s western neighbor, marched toward the border on Friday morning, chanting slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians and waving Palestinian flags as Jordanian riot police surrounded them.

“We are here. Either we go down, or they will have to carry us back,” they chanted, videos posted to social media showed. “To Palestine, to Palestine. We are going to Palestine. We are going in millions as martyrs to Palestine.”

Arriving in buses and cars, the protesters called on Jordan’s government to open the border, where it has stepped up security in recent days amid the growing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Before the protesters could reach the demarcation line, however, the riot police blocked their path, social media videos and photos at the scene showed.

Jordanians have been protesting near the Israeli Embassy in Amman for several days, some of the largest expressions of solidarity for the Palestinians in a region that has otherwise reacted mildly if at all to the outbreak of violence. Protesters have called on the government to expel the Israeli ambassador.

Jordan’s 1994 treaty normalizing relations with Israel produced a chilly-at-best peace between the two countries, and the latest conflict has strained it further. This week, Jordan summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires in Amman to condemn Israeli “attacks on worshipers” around the Aqsa Mosque compound in the walled Old City of Jerusalem, which played a major role in setting off the current conflict.

A damaged building in Petah Tikva, Israel, that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in an episode of The Daily this week, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew on a light rail, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting, “Death to Arabs,” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?A building in Gaza City on Thursday that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike.Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

GAZA CITY — The taxi was loaded with everything the family would need for Eid al-Fitr, a holiday of feasts and cookies and new clothes that Israeli airstrikes on Gaza had, even before the assault by ground forces on Friday, transfigured into a time of explosions and fear.

In their four suitcases, the al-Hatu family — mother, father, son and daughter — had made sure to pack kaak filled with date paste, the biscuits traditionally shared among friends and family during Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

But they also brought enough clothing and food for several days — no one knew when it might be safe to go back home. Until then, to try to escape the airstrikes, they were going to stay with another daughter, on Al Mughrabi Street, a five-minute drive away.

They had all agreed: It would feel safer if they were all together, said the son, Mohammed al-Hatu, 28.

They were still unloading the taxi driver’s white Skoda sedan outside their temporary home shortly before noon on Wednesday when the first drone attacked.

Mr. al-Hatu’s sister had already lugged one suitcase inside. Mr. al-Hatu, who had been carrying another, staggered into the doorway of the building, bleeding, and collapsed.

Out on the street, their father, Said al-Hatu, 65, and the taxi driver lay dead. A few yards away, their mother, Maysoun al-Hatu, 58, was alive, but desperately wounded.

“Save me,” she begged Yousef al-Draimly, a neighbor who had rushed downstairs, he recounted. “I need an ambulance. Save me.”

An ambulance came, but Ms. al-Hatu did not make it.

Less than a minute after the first strike, a second drone strike ruptured the street, killing two more men: a worker at a laundry on the block and a passer-by. Another man, a barber whose shop was next to the laundry, was so badly wounded that his leg had to be amputated.

On Thursday, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, and the fourth day of the worst conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in years, Gaza City was silent with fear, except when it was loud with terror: the sudden smash of Israeli airstrikes, the whoosh of militants’ rockets arcing toward Israel, the shouts of people checking on one another, the last moans of the dying

Rockets launched toward Israel from the Gaza Strip on Friday.Credit…Anas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Palestinian militants have fired some 1,800 rockets from Gaza at Israel this week, far more than in previous clashes, according to Israeli officials, who on Thursday expressed surprise at the size of the barrage and the range of some of the rockets.

Israel’s “Iron Dome” antimissile system has shot down many of the rockets, and many others have struck places where they could do little damage. But some of the rockets, which are unguided, have hit populated areas, blowing up buildings and cars and killing seven people in Israel.

The increasingly sophisticated arsenal of rockets is the primary weapon of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Other groups there, like Islamic Jihad, also have them. Israeli intelligence estimates there are 30,000 rockets and mortar projectiles stockpiled in Gaza.

Hamas was believed before this week to have rockets with ranges approaching 100 miles, and many more with shorter ranges. Israel’s largest cities, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, as well as its primary airport, Ben Gurion airport, are within 40 miles of Gaza. The airport has been closed to incoming passenger flights because of the danger, with flights diverted to Ramon airport to the southeast.

But rockets have also been fired at Ramon, more than 110 miles from the nearest part of Gaza. A Hamas spokesman said the rockets aimed at that airport were a new type that could travel 155 miles, putting all of Israel within range of Gaza. The claim could not be verified, and it was not clear how many of the new rockets the group had.

In the past, many of the rockets fired from Gaza were smuggled in from Egypt, or assembled locally from smuggled parts. But in recent years, most have been made in Gaza, with technical assistance from Iran that Hamas has openly acknowledged.

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Business

McDonald’s to Enhance Wages as Job Market Tightens: Dwell Updates

McDonald’s said the entry-level wage for new employees would increase to $11 to $17 an hour, based on the location of the restaurant.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mike Blake/Reuters

Competing with fast-food chains, restaurants and other businesses for workers, McDonald’s said on Thursday that it, too, will raise wages at some restaurants in an effort to attract employees.

The company said it would increase hourly wages for current employees by an average of 10 percent and that the entry-level wage for new employees would rise to $11 to $17 an hour, based on the location of the restaurant.

The pay increases do not affect the 95 percent of the nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States that are independently owned, only the 650 company-owned restaurants.

Responding to a tight job market and echoing a move earlier this week by the burrito chain Chipotle, McDonald’s said it hoped the higher pay would attract as many as 10,000 new employees in the next three months, as the busy summer season approaches and dine-in restrictions are removed at many of its restaurants.

At its company-owned restaurants, McDonald’s said the average employee wage would increase to $13 an hour, with some restaurants achieving an average wage of $15 an hour later this year. All company-owned restaurants expected to be at an average salary of $15 by 2024, the company noted.

Still, that falls short of the minimum wage of $15 an hour being demanded by the Fight for $15 organization, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union. The Fight for $15 organization is spearheading a strike by McDonald’s employees in several cities across the country on Wednesday ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

In 2019, McDonald’s announced it would no longer use its powerful lobbying arm to fight attempts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour at the federal, state and local level. In a call with Wall Street analysts in January, the McDonald’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, said the company was doing “just fine” in the more than two dozen states that had increased minimum wages in a phased-in way.

In fact, despite having many of its dining rooms closed or with limited capacity in parts of the country for much of the pandemic, the strength of McDonald’s drive-throughs helped push its profit to more than $4.7 billion in 2020. It paid its shareholders more than $3.7 billion in dividends and spent another $874 million repurchasing shares before suspending the program in early March of last year.

Mr. Kempczinski agreed to cut his base salary in half last year, but his total compensation was still more than $10.8 million.

Servers at a restaurant in Columbia, Mo., last week. The labor market is struggling to return to normal after more than a year of being whipsawed by the pandemic.Credit…Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times

New claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, the government reported on Thursday, as the labor market slowly recovers from the staggering losses wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic.

About 487,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits during the week that ended May 8, the Labor Department said, a decrease from 514,000 the week before. In addition, about 104,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 473,000.

After more than a year of being whipsawed by the pandemic, the economy has been showing new life. Restrictions are lifting, businesses are reopening and job listings are on the upswing. But hiring in April was weaker than expected.

“Over all, jobless claims are about three times as high as they were pre-Covid, but they’re coming down” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Some employers, particularly in the restaurant and hospitality sectors, have complained of having trouble finding workers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several Republican governors have asserted that a temporary $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement has made workers reluctant to return to the job.

The U.S. Labor Department said that as of Wednesday, six states — Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and South Carolina — had notified the department that they were terminating federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits next month ahead of the Sept. 6 expiration date.

Several other states with Republican governors, including Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho, have said they also plan to withdraw from the federal program.

The unemployment rates in those states in March, the latest month for which data is available, ranged from 3.2 percent in Idaho to 6.3 percent in Mississippi.

Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama are among the states that offer the lowest maximum benefit to qualified individuals — $275 or less each week. Nationwide, the average weekly benefit without federal supplements is $387, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Economists are skeptical that supplemental jobless benefits are playing anything more than a bit part in the pace of the job market’s recovery.

“There is tremendous churn in this labor market,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “There are still major supply constraints and unemployment benefits are not the most important one. The virus is.”

Many workers have children at home who are not attending school in person. Others are wary of returning to jobs that require face-to-face encounters. Covid-19 infections have decreased since September but there are still 38,000 new cases being reported each day and 600 Covid-related deaths. Less than half the population is fully vaccinated.

There is halting progress from employers as well, as businesses continually update their assessment of costs and customer demand. “The hiring pattern isn’t going to be smooth,” Mr. Daco said. “Businesses hire and then reassess. They need to find the right balance, it’s a trial and error process more than anything.”

Prematurely halting federal jobless benefits is “detrimental to the economy,” Mr. Daco said. “You’re voluntarily hurting certain vulnerable tranches of the population.”

Roughly 5.3 million people had exhausted other benefits by late April and were collecting extended pandemic-related federal benefits.

Nationwide, the unemployment rate was 6.1 percent, and there are 8.2 million fewer jobs than in February 2020.

An empty gas pump, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Colonial Pipeline said Wednesday it had restarted operations along its Texas-to-New Jersey pipeline, but full restoration of service was expected to take days.Credit…Jonathan Drake/Reuters

U.S. stocks are expected to rebound on Thursday following a sell-off in European and Asian equities after faster-than-expected inflation data in the United States rattled markets the previous day.

The S&P 500 is expected to open 0.3 percent higher when markets open, after a 2.1 percent drop on Wednesday. Nasdaq futures climbed 0.7 percent.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell 0.7 percent, recovering from a 1.7 percent decline earlier. The Nikkei 225 slumped 2.5 percent in Japan and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 1.8 percent.

The U.S. Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, climbed 4.2 percent in April from a year earlier, the fastest pace of increase since 2008. From March to April, prices increased 0.8 percent; economists surveyed by Bloomberg only forecast a 0.2 percent increase.

The yield on 10-year Treasury notes held steady at about 1.69 percent after jumping seven basis points, or 0.07 percentage point, on Wednesday.

Federal Reserve policymakers have said that they expect the current increase in inflation to be transitory and would not set off a pullback in monetary stimulus. But the increase in April’s inflation reading, beyond what other analysts forecast, has some traders testing this view.

Oil prices fell on Thursday after Colonial Pipeline said it had begun to restart operations along its massive pipeline, which transports gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas to New Jersey. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropped 2.4 percent to $64.47 a barrel.

Other commodity prices have also fallen from recent highs. Iron ore futures were down 3.6 percent after climbing to a record this week. Aluminum prices fell 1.6 percent and silver prices were down 1.4 percent.

Bitcoin prices fell 12 percent to below $50,000, according to CoinDesk, after Elon Musk said Tesla would stop accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its electric cars. Mr. Musk citing concerns about the energy consumption used in mining for Bitcoin, a longstanding issue. Tesla’s share price fell 1.5 percent in premarket trading.

Most other cryptocurrencies fell on Thursday with CoinMarketCap valuing the global market at $2.2 trillion, down 11 percent from the day before.

Shares in Coinbase, an exchange for people and companies to buy and sell various digital currencies, dropped 5.5 percent in premarket trading.

The operator of Colonial Pipeline said on Wednesday that it had started to resume pipeline operations but noted that “it will take several days for the product delivery supply chain to return to normal.”

The pipeline, which stretches from Texas to New Jersey, had been shut down since Friday after a ransomware attack.

  • “There will be lag time between Colonial Pipeline reopening and increases in fuel availability for general public,” warned an internal assessment of potential impact drawn up by the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security. It noted that the fuel “travels through the pipeline at 5 miles per hour” and would take “approximately two weeks to travel from the Gulf Coast to New York.”

  • The company has refused to say whether it had paid a ransom or was considering doing so. On Wednesday, administration officials said they believed the company was avoiding paying the ransom, at least for now. Instead, they said, the company was trying to reconstruct its systems with a patchwork of backed-up data.

  • Gasoline prices in Georgia and a few other states rose 8 to 10 cents a gallon on Wednesday alone, a jump not usually seen without a major hurricane shutting down refineries. At some stations, people were filling up gasoline cans, forcing others to wait longer and causing shouting matches. Lines of 20 to 25 cars waited at the few stations operating in Chapel Hill, N.C., where almost all the gas stations lacked fuel.

Sales of Bitcoin helped Tesla’s bottom line in the first quarter.Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Three months after Tesla said it would begin accepting the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as payment, the electric carmaker has abruptly reversed course.

In a message posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said Tesla had suspended accepting Bitcoin because of concern about the energy consumed by computers crunching the calculations that underpin the currency.

“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment,” Mr. Musk wrote. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”

Earlier this year, Tesla announced that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and Mr. Musk trumpeted the company’s plan to accept the currency. Tesla later sold about $300 million of its Bitcoin holdings, proceeds that padded its bottom line in the first quarter.

“Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy,” Mr. Musk wrote on Wednesday, referring to the process through which new Bitcoin is created.

The price of Bitcoin dipped slightly after the announcement, according to Coindesk.

As cryptocurrencies explode in value, the amount of energy used by the digital currencies is increasingly under scrutiny. Some estimates put the energy use of Bitcoin at more than the entire country of Argentina.

“Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so it’s not a great climate thing,” Bill Gates said in February.

Mr. Musk also said on Wednesday that Tesla was “looking at other cryptocurrencies” that use a fraction of the energy consumed by Bitcoin. Mr. Musk has been a promoter of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke but that has exploded in value. In an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” last week, Mr. Musk referred to Dogecoin as a “hustle.” Dogecoin fell by nearly a third in price on the night of the show.

Alibaba recorded an operating loss of $1.2 billion for the first three months of the year.Credit…Thomas Peter/Reuters

China’s landmark $2.8 billion antitrust penalty against Alibaba caused the e-commerce giant to report a loss in the latest quarter, its first since going public seven years ago. But sales continued to grow despite the regulatory scrutiny, helped by China’s strong economic expansion.

Alibaba recorded an operating loss of $1.2 billion for the first three months of the year, the company said on Thursday. Without the antitrust fine, operating profits would have been $1.6 billion, a 48 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said.

Revenue for the quarter grew by nearly two-thirds from a year before, to $28.6 billion. That figure got a boost because Alibaba began including the sales of Sun Art, a supermarket operator in which the company took a controlling stake last October.

China is on a regulatory blitz to curtail what officials describe as unfair and monopolistic business practices by the country’s internet heavyweights. The fine last month against Alibaba was followed swiftly by the opening of an antitrust investigation into Meituan, a food-delivery platform that is among China’s most valuable internet companies.

Two days after China’s market regulator announced the fine against Alibaba, which the agency said was for illegally restricting the vendors on its shopping sites, the company said it would lower the fees it charges those merchants and invest in new services for them.

Speaking to analysts on Thursday, Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, pledged to put “all of our incremental profits this year” toward helping merchants lower their operating costs, expanding in new business areas such as brick-and-mortar grocery and improving technology. But Mr. Zhang also stressed that these investments would be “highly targeted and disciplined.”

For the 12 months that ended in March, Alibaba recorded $109.5 billion in revenue, an increase of 41 percent over the year before. The company’s Chinese retail platforms attracted 811 million active consumers during that period.

Categories
Business

Gas Costs Rise After Oil Pipeline Is Hacked: Dwell Enterprise Updates

Colonial Pipeline fuel tanks in Woodbridge, N.J. The company’s pipeline carries nearly half the fuel supplies for the East Coast.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Colonial Pipeline/Via Reuters

Gasoline prices rose as much as 4.2 percent early on Monday after a major petroleum pipeline in the United States was shut down over the weekend because of a cyberattack. The pipeline’s operator, Colonial Pipeline, hasn’t said when it will reopen, raising concerns about the infrastructure that carries nearly half of the fuel supplies for the East Coast.

By 7:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, futures of gasoline for June delivery were up 1.7 percent but still at the highest level since late 2018. The instability is contained to prices that traders pay for gasoline, but may affect prices at the pump in the coming weeks.

“Should the pipeline be brought online at the start of the week, the impact on prices should be limited,” Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a note. “However, a prolonged shutdown (5 days or longer) is likely to send gasoline prices higher, which already trade close to a 7-year high.”

Oil prices also rose. Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, were up 0.6 percent to $65.29 a barrel, after climbing as much as 1.3 percent.

The increase in the price of gasoline and oil has added to what was already a boom in commodity prices. As economies from the United States to China have shown signs of strength, demand for raw materials to power industrial growth has risen. On Monday, iron ore futures rose as much as 10 percent and copper prices extended their record high.

A Bloomberg commodities index, which tracks the prices of 23 commodities from gold and oil to wheat and sugar, was at its highest level since mid-2015. Freeport-McMoRan, an American mining company, and United States Steel both rose more than 3 percent in premarket trading.

  • U.S. stocks were set to open slightly lower on Monday, futures indicated, pulling the S&P 500 back from a record high.

  • The benchmark stock index had risen on Friday after an unexpectedly weak jobs report tempered expectations about how soon the Federal Reserve would consider withdrawing some monetary stimulus.

  • The Stoxx Europe 600 was flat while the CAC 40 in France and DAX in Germany both fell 0.2 percent.

  • The British pound rose 0.8 percent against the U.S. dollar and 0.9 percent against the euro after the results of Thursday’s local elections were confirmed. The Scottish National Party, which is pushing for a second independence referendum, fell one seat short of gaining an outright majority in its Parliament. But it will still govern with the support of another pro-independence party.

  • The pound’s gains on Monday were as much about the weak dollar as the election results, Kit Juckes, a strategist at Société Générale, wrote in a note. “I don’t know anyone who thinks the risk of a second Scottish referendum has gone away.” The pound can rise against the dollar because the U.S. currency “remains under pressure from global economic optimism,” he added.

  • The pound was at $1.41, the highest since February.

Colonial Pipeline fuel tanks in Maryland. The company operates the largest petroleum pipeline between Texas and New York.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

The operator of the largest petroleum pipeline between Texas and New York, shut down after a ransomware attack, declined on Sunday to say when it would reopen.

While the shutdown has so far had little impact on supplies of gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, some energy analysts warned that a prolonged suspension could raise prices at the pump along the East Coast and leave some smaller airports scrambling for jet fuel, Clifford Krauss reports for The New York Times.

Colonial Pipeline, the pipeline operator, said on Sunday afternoon that it was developing “a system restart plan” and would restore service to some small lines between terminals and delivery points but “will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so.”

The company, which shut down the pipeline on Friday, has acknowledged that it was the victim of a ransomware attack by a criminal group, meaning that the hacker may hold the company’s data hostage until it pays a ransom. Colonial Pipeline, which is privately held, would not say whether it had paid a ransom. By failing to state a timeline for reopening on Sunday, the company renewed questions about whether the operations of the pipeline could still be in jeopardy.

The shutdown of the 5,500-mile pipeline was a troubling sign that the nation’s energy infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattacks from criminal groups or nations.

Energy experts predicted that traders would view the company’s announcement on Sunday as a sign that the pipeline would remain shut at least for a few days.

Experts said several airports that depend on the pipeline for jet fuel, including Nashville, Tenn.; Baltimore-Washington; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., could have a hard time later in the week. Airports generally store enough jet fuel for three to five days of operations.

White House officials held emergency meetings on the pipeline attack over the weekend. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a tweet that they are looking for ways to “mitigate potential disruptions to supply.”

A United Airlines vaccine clinic at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Employers are using on-site vaccinations to encourage workers to get shots.Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images

As companies make plans to fully reopen their offices across the United States, they face a delicate decision. Many would like all employees to be vaccinated when they return, but in the face of legal and P.R. risks, few employers have gone so far as to require it.

Instead, they are hoping that encouragement and incentives will suffice, Gillian Friedman and Lauren Hirsch report for The New York Times.

Legally, companies seem largely in the clear. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance in December stating that employers are permitted to require employees to be vaccinated. But employers are still worried about litigation, in part because several states have proposed laws that would limit their ability to require vaccines.

“It would seem to me that employers are going to find themselves in a fairly strong position legally,” said Eric Feldman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to get sued.”

So, companies are resorting to carrots over sticks. Darden offers hourly employees two hours of pay for each dose they receive. Target offers a $5 coupon to all customers and employees who receive their vaccination at a CVS at Target location. And many companies are hosting on-site clinics to make it easier to get vaccinated.

Others are experimenting with return-to-office policies that aren’t all or nothing. Salesforce will allow up to 100 fully vaccinated employees to volunteer to work together on designated floors of certain U.S. offices. Some companies are mandating the shots only for new hires.

A pop-up vaccination site in Miami Beach, Fla. Companies are debating vaccine mandates for their workers.Credit…Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Last week, the DealBook newsletter wrote about one of the most vexing issues facing boardrooms: Should companies mandate that employees get vaccinated before returning to the workplace? Many readers shared opinions, personal experiences and suggestions for handling this complex issue. Here is a small selection, edited for clarity:

  • “The way we’re doing it at our company is, if you submit a reason from your doctor or you have a religious belief or some other valid reason not to get the vaccination yet, you are required to be tested weekly and submit the results to H.R.” — Patricia Ripley, New York City

  • “We don’t know the long-term dangers of these vaccines. They may be bad or good. No one knows. Our employers should not be able to simply ignore any of our worries and concerns.” — Brandon Atchison, Verbena, Ala.

  • “I strongly support employer mandates. A few well-publicized firings will end the ‘hesitancy,’ but the firings must be backed up by classifying them as ‘for cause.’ That means no severance for executives and no unemployment for staff who refuse.” — Paul Levy, Carolina Beach, N.C.

  • “Individual rights are the cornerstone of American democracy — trampling them for the vaccine rollout is a dangerous precedent. People seem to forget that these ‘temporary changes’ end up as permanent, with the result that your employer can now compel greater access to your personal decision-making.” — Anonymous

  • “An unvaccinated person exposes everyone in the office, including visiting customers and clients, to the virus. Why should everyone else be jeopardized because of one person? Simply let unvaccinated people continue to work at home and suffer any consequences to their career paths that may result.” — Joseph Carlucci, White Plains, N.Y.

  • Norwegian Cruise Line is threatening to keep its ships out of Florida ports after the state enacted legislation that prohibits businesses from requiring proof of vaccination against the coronavirus in exchange for services. The company, which plans to have its first cruises available to the Caribbean and Europe this summer and fall, will offer trips with limited capacity and require all guests and crew members to be vaccinated on bookings through at least the end of October.

  • The operator of the largest petroleum pipeline between Texas and New York, which was shut down on Friday after a ransomware attack, would not give a timeline on Sunday on when it would reopen the pipeline. Colonial Pipeline, the pipeline operator, said on Sunday afternoon that it was developing “a system restart plan” and would restore service to some small lines between terminals and delivery points but “will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so.”

The Los Angeles area has the nation’s largest concentration of warehouses, contributing to some of the worst air pollution in the country.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

The South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California on Friday adopted a rule that would force about 3,000 of the largest warehouses in the area to slash emissions from the trucks that serve the site or take other measures to improve air quality, The New York Times’s Hiroko Tabuchi reports.

Southern California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of warehouses — a hub of thousands of mammoth structures, served by belching diesel trucks, that help feed America’s booming appetite for online shopping and also contribute to the worst air pollution in the country.

The rule sets a precedent for regulating the exploding e-commerce industry, which has grown even more during the pandemic and has led to a spectacular increase in warehouse construction.

The changes could also help spur a more rapid electrification of freight tucks, a significant step toward reducing emissions from transportation, the country’s biggest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The emissions are a major contributor to smog-causing nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter pollution, which are linked to health problems including respiratory conditions.

Empty platforms at the New Jersey Transit station in Secaucus in May.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Before the pandemic, the trains of New Jersey Transit could be cattle-car crowded, with strangers pressed so closely against you that you could deduce their last meal. That level of forced intimacy now seems unimaginable.

After the outbreak, ridership on New Jersey trains, which in normal times averaged 95,000 weekday passengers, plummeted to 3,500 before stabilizing at about 17,500. A similar pattern held for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road lines: in February 2020, nearly 600,000 riders; two months later, fewer than 30,000.

For many months, the commuter parking lots were empty, the train stations closed, the coffee vendor gone. At night, the trains cutting through Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester or Wyandanch on Long Island or in Maplewood, N.J., were like passing ghost ships, their interior lights illuminating absence.

But in recent weeks, as more people have become vaccinated, New Jersey Transit and the M.T.A. have seen a slight uptick, to about a quarter of their normal ridership.

Perhaps this signals a gradual return to how things had been; or, perhaps, it is a harbinger of how things will be, given that many people now feel that they can work just as efficiently from home.

Categories
Entertainment

Watch Miley Cyrus’s Saturday Night time Reside Mom’s Day Opener

Watch Miley Cyrus's Saturday Night Live Mother's Day Opener

Happy Mother’s Day from SNL! pic.twitter.com/QFaVVGA84r

– Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) May 9, 2021

The cast of Saturday night live started her Mother’s Day episode with a super cute tribute to all of the incredible mothers out there. During the May 8 episode, musical guest Miley Cyrus took the stage to play a beautiful rendition of the hit song “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” by her godmother Dolly Parton. In between we got an insight into the cast with their mothers. While Aidy Bryant’s mom adorable stuck her hit Hulu series, ShrillPete Davidson’s mom joked that she almost didn’t make it for the sketch because she got up late and played Madden with Timothée Chalamet. LOL! Of course, at the end of the act, Cyrus was accompanied by her own mother, Tish, when the entire cast gathered on stage. Check out the adorable opener above.

Categories
World News

Covid-19 Reside Updates: Vaccines, Variants and Circumstances

A vaccination site administering the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine in North Macedonia on Thursday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters

The World Health Organization on Friday approved China’s Sinopharm’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, easing the way for poorer nations to get access to another much-needed shot to help end the pandemic.

The approval allows the Sinopharm vaccine to be included in Covax, the World Health Organization’s global initiative that is designed to promote equitable vaccine distribution around the world.

The need is dire.

Rich countries are hoarding doses. India, a major vaccine maker, has stopped exports to address its worsening coronavirus crisis. Questions about safety after exceedingly rare side effects led some countries to briefly pause using AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson doses or change their guidance around the use.

Reliable vaccine access could improve further next week when the W.H.O. considers another Chinese shot, made by the company Sinovac.

Andrea Taylor, who analyzes global data on vaccines at the Duke Global Health Institute, called the potential addition of two Chinese vaccines into the Covax program a “game changer.”

“The situation right now is just so desperate for low- and lower-middle-income countries that any doses we can get out are worth mobilizing,” Ms. Taylor said. “Having potentially two options coming from China could really change the landscape of what’s possible over the next few months.”

But the fanfare may be short-lived. While China has claimed it can make up to 5 billion doses by the end of this year, Chinese officials say the country is struggling to manufacture enough doses for its own population and are cautioning a pandemic-weary world to keep expectations in check.

“This should be the golden time for China to practice its vaccine diplomacy. The problem is, at the same time, China itself is facing a shortage,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “So in terms of global access to vaccines, I don’t expect the situation to significantly improve in the coming two to three months.”

Still, the approval represents a high point in its vaccine diplomacy efforts and a chance to fill the gap left by Western nations and pharmaceutical companies in low- and middle-income countries. Sinopharm is the first Chinese shot to be classified as safe and effective by the W.H.O., and its approval could ease concerns about the lack of transparency from Chinese vaccine companies.

Regulators from China and other countries have approved the Sinopharm vaccine in recent months, though the company has not released Phase 3 clinical trial data for scientists to independently assess.

The W.H.O. was given access to this data before the announcement, but there is limited data on how well the vaccine will work against the many coronavirus variants cropping up around the world.

United States › United StatesOn May 6 14-day change
New cases 47,325 –27%
New deaths 818 –4%
World › WorldOn May 6 14-day change
New cases 856,719 Flat
New deaths 13,873 +9%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Where states are reporting vaccines given

Ton Tran, 106, receiving his second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a clinic in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday.Credit…Noah Berger/Associated Press

Pfizer and the German company BioNTech have become the first companies to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for full approval of their Covid-19 vaccine for use in people 16 and older. The vaccine is currently being administered to adults in America under an emergency use authorization granted in December.

The approval process is likely to take months.

The companies said in a statement on Friday that they had submitted their clinical data, which includes six months of information on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, to the F.D.A. They plan to submit additional material, including information about the manufacturing of the vaccine, in the coming weeks.

“We are proud of the tremendous progress we’ve made since December in delivering vaccines to millions of Americans, in collaboration with the U.S. government,” Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said in the statement. “We look forward to working with the F.D.A. to complete this rolling submission and support their review, with the goal of securing full regulatory approval of the vaccine in the coming months.”

As of Thursday, more than 134 million doses of the vaccine had been administered in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Full approval would allow Pfizer and BioNTech to market the vaccine directly to customers.

It could also make it easier for companies, government agencies and schools to require vaccinations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in December that employers could mandate vaccination, and legal experts have generally agreed.

Many companies have been hesitant to require the vaccines, especially while they have only emergency authorization, which is designed to be temporary. Some institutions, like the University of California and California State University systems, have said that they would do so only after a vaccine has full approval.

Full approval could also prompt the U.S. military, which has had low uptake of Covid-19 vaccines, to mandate vaccinations for service members.

If the F.D.A. grants full approval, it could also help raise confidence in the vaccine. The pace of vaccination has slowed in the United States in recent weeks, and a recent national survey indicated that most people in the country who planned to get the shots had already done so.

The agency is also expected to issue an emergency authorization for use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds next week. The companies have said that they plan to file for emergency authorization for 2- to 11-year-olds in September.

Moderna plans to apply for full approval for its Covid-19 vaccine this month, the company said during its quarterly earnings call on Thursday.

Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Dr. Nancy Messonnier spoke in Washington in January 2020.Credit…Amanda Voisard/Reuters

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who famously warned the nation early last year that the coronavirus would upend their lives, resigned from her position at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection on Friday.

Dr. Messonnier’s resignation is effective May 14. She is taking on a new role as an executive director at the Skoll Foundation, a philanthropical organization based in Palo Alto, Calif., she told staff in an email on Friday.

Her exit may augur more changes at the agency. Reports have circulated for weeks that the C.D.C.’s new director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, planned to completely reorganize the division Dr. Messonnier led.

“My family and I have determined that now is the best time for me to transition to a new phase of my career,” Dr. Messonnier wrote in the email to staff.

Dr. Messonnier began her career in public health in 1995 with a stint in the prestigious Epidemic Intelligence Service. She has since held a number of leadership posts in the C.D.C. Since 2016, she has served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the C.D.C. division responsible for managing influenza and other respiratory threats.

In late 2019, she became the agency’s lead in responding to the coronavirus, and initially shared a stage with President Trump at briefings about the coronavirus.

She fell out of favor with President Trump and sent stocks tumbling after she sounded a dire alarm about the coronavirus, saying it would disrupt the lives of every American.

“It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” she said on Feb. 25, just as Mr. Trump was boarding Air Force One in New Delhi for his flight home.

Soon after that, she stopped appearing at briefings of the White House and of the C.D.C.

Patients with Covid-19 in the emergency ward at the Holy Family hospital in New Delhi on Thursday.Credit…Rebecca Conway/Getty Images

India’s worsening coronavirus outbreak has spread far outside its cities to rural areas with poor health care infrastructure and limited testing capacities, doctors and experts say.

One factor behind the surge of cases, they believe, is a series of recent campaign rallies held without social distancing.

The state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party lost an election last week after more than a month of campaigning to vast crowds, is recording the highest rate of positive coronavirus tests in the country. More than 31 percent of tests in the state are now coming back positive.

“There is a clear pattern here: States that went through elections and where large rallies were held are witnessing a huge rise in cases,” said Dr. Thekkekara Jacob John, a senior virologist in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, 1,028 new coronavirus cases and four deaths were recorded on March 26. On April 29, after campaigns for local village council elections were held, there were 35,104 cases and 288 deaths. A teachers’ union in the state said that 577 teachers and support staff members who were on duty as election workers had died of Covid-19.

The country’s cases as a whole have been skyrocketing since late March, from a seven-day average of more than 62,000 on March 31 to more than 385,000, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. On Friday, the country reported more than 410,000 new daily infections, a record, and more than 3,900 deaths.

As the outbreak reaches new heights, India’s vaccination campaign has slowed down, marred by supply shortages and competition among states.

The official daily death in the country has stayed over 3,000 over the past 10 days, and experts say the numbers are much higher,.

The true scope of the outbreak remains hard to measure. Nationwide, India conducted about 1.9 million coronavirus tests on Thursday, an increase from about 1.2 million daily tests last month, but hardly enough to keep up with a daily caseload that has almost quadrupled in that time.

West Bengal, a state of 90 million people that has poor health care infrastructure and is under a partial lockdown, has carried out fewer than 60,000 coronavirus tests a day. That is one of the lowest rates in the country, according to data compiled by researchers at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Abhijeet Barua, a physician in Kolkata, the state’s capital, said that cases had exploded in every corner of the city and that infections were spreading quickly in the state’s rural areas. At his 10-bed clinic, two people have died every day over the past 15 days, Dr. Barua said.

“What is making things worse in Kolkata is that over 70 percent of the population lives in close contact,” he said, adding that he was receiving dozens of calls a day from patients seeking help. “You can’t isolate yourself, because it is so congested here.”

Mr. Modi has repeatedly refrained from imposing a nationwide lockdown. Instead nearly a dozen of India’s 28 states have imposed restrictions, though they are less stringent than the nationwide lockdown put in place last year.

Protective masks are worn in March in Tokyo, the host of this summer’s Olympic Games.Credit…Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

TOKYO — Japan on Friday extended a state of emergency in Tokyo and other regions until the end of May to contain a surge of coronavirus cases, casting further doubt on the country’s ability to safely host the Summer Olympics, which are scheduled to begin in 11 weeks.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made the announcement at a meeting of the government’s coronavirus task force, saying that the measures were necessary because infections remain at a “high level, mainly in large cities.”

The announcement extends emergency measures imposed last month to two more prefectures, covering a total of six prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, that are together home to over a third of Japan’s 126 million people. Another eight prefectures will be under slightly looser restrictions.

The existing state of emergency, which were imposed to curb travel during the just-ended Golden Week holiday period and had been set to expire next week, have not slowed Japan’s fourth wave of coronavirus infections. In early March, the country recorded about 1,000 daily new. It is now recording nearly 6,000, according to a New York Times database.

Health officials say that they are seeing a growing number of cases of coronavirus variants spreading in the population, including at least 26 cases of the strain first detected in India. The authorities in Tokyo say that in four out of five cases found in the city, the infected person neither traveled abroad nor had close contact with someone who had.

The outbreak is stretching health care systems even in Japan’s biggest cities. On Thursday, there were 370 people being treated for serious cases of Covid-19 in Osaka, a prefecture of nine million people, more than the number of hospital beds available for seriously ill patients.

Japan, which has recorded more than 620,000 infections and 10,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, has controlled the virus better than many countries. But the government has faced criticism for the sluggish pace of vaccinations, and for pledging to go ahead with the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to begin on July 23, despite widespread public opposition.

Toru Hashimoto, a lawyer and a former governor of Osaka prefecture, said on a television show on Friday that Olympic organizers were ignoring the severity of Japan’s outbreak, and that it was inappropriate to continue holding pre-Olympic “test events” during the state of emergency, even though they are taking place without spectators.

“If the government wants to reduce the number of people in the city, it’s not a time when test events can be held,” Mr. Hashimoto said.

The government has imposed two previous states of emergency during the pandemic, although they are looser than the total lockdowns seen in many nations. The measures allow the prefectures to ask businesses to close or to restrict their hours, and to fine those that do not.

Under the extended state of emergency, people are asked not to go out for nonessential matters, especially after 8 p.m., and to refrain from traveling outside their prefectures. Karaoke parlors are asked to close, and restaurants requested not to serve alcohol, with fines of up to 300,000 yen, or $2,750, for noncompliance.

A vaccination center in Johannesburg in March.Credit…Joao Silva/The New York Times

A global debate is heating up over how to get Covid-19 vaccines to the nations most in need.

The United States supports an effort to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, and European countries say that richer nations should begin exporting more of their vaccine supply to poorer ones.

The European Union — whose approval is needed for any waiver of vaccine patents — said on Thursday that it would consider the Biden administration’s proposal. But Germany, the bloc’s largest economy, said that pushing pharmaceutical companies to share vaccine patents could have “significant implications” for the production of vaccines. The European Commission signaled it wouldn’t support the U.S. proposal.

“The limiting factor in vaccine manufacturing is production capacity and high-quality standards, not patents,” a spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in a statement.

Europe’s position emphasized the challenges of winning support for the waivers at the World Trade Organization, where the bloc wields significant influence, and where unanimous approval would be needed for any measure to suspend patents.

Many experts believe that the waivers are needed to expand the manufacturing of vaccines and get them to poorer parts of the world where inoculations have lagged behind those of richer countries.

Until the Biden administration’s announcement this week, the United States had been a major holdout at the W.T.O. over a proposal by India and South Africa to suspend some intellectual property protections. The move could give drugmakers access to the trade secrets of how the vaccines are made.

The pharmaceutical industry has argued that suspending patent protections would undermine risk-taking and innovation.

The debate arises amid a growing divide between wealthy nations that are slowly regaining normal life, and poorer countries that are confronting new and devastating outbreaks.

In India, which is suffering the world’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic, only 2.2 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database. South Africa has fully vaccinated less than 1 percent of its people. By contrast, vaccinations are slowing down in the United States — where one-third of people are fully inoculated — as they begin to pick up in Europe.

Even if a waiver receives support from the trade body, it alone would not increase the world’s vaccine supply. Large drug manufacturers in India and elsewhere would need extensive technological and other support to produce doses, experts say.

The American jobs engine slowed markedly last month, confounding rosy forecasts of the pace of the recovery and sharpening debates over how best to revive a labor market that was severely weakened by the coronavirus pandemic.

Employers added 266,000 jobs in April, the government reported Friday, far below the vigorous gains registered in March. The jobless rate rose slightly to 6.1 percent, as more people rejoined the labor force.

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“It turns out it’s easier to put an economy into a coma than wake it up,” Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton, said of the disappointing report. “It’s understandable, it’s going to take some time, you’re not just going to snap your fingers and get everyone back to work,

Economists had forecast an addition of about a million jobs. The increase for March was revised down to 770,000 from 916,000.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing blamed supply chain problems for the loss of 18,000 jobs in that sector, noting in particular the impact that a shortage of semiconductors has had on the automotive industry.

And many offices are not yet ready to reopen fully. “I just think it takes a while for businesses to figure out how many people they need,” Ms. Swonk said, noting there is still a lot of skittishness on the part of employers and workers. “I don’t view this as terribly troubling or distressing.”

Ben Herzon, executive director of U.S. economics at the financial services company IHS Markit, agreed. “A single report with unexpected weakness in job gains is not a cause for concern,” he said. “Demand is picking up, activity is picking up.”

He noted that labor force participation had been on the upswing for two months in a row, rising to 61.7 percent last month from 61.4 percent in February.

More opportunities are bubbling up as coronavirus infections ebb, vaccinations spread, restrictions lift and businesses reopen. Job postings on the online job site Indeed are 24 percent higher than they were in February last year.

“There’s been a broad-based pickup in demand,” said Nick Bunker, who leads North American economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. The supercharged housing market is driving demand for construction workers. There is also an abundance of loading, stocking and other warehousing jobs — a side-effect of the boom in e-commerce.

The economy still has a lot of ground to regain before returning to prepandemic levels. Millions of jobs have vanished since February 2020, and the labor force has shrunk.

–20

–15

–10

–5 million

–8.2 million since February 2020

152.5 million jobs in February 2020

As the economy fitfully recovers, there are divergent accounts of what’s going on in the labor market. Employers, particularly in the restaurant and hospitality industry, have reported scant response to help-wanted ads. Several have blamed what they call overly generous government jobless benefits, including a temporary $300-a-week federal stipend that was part of an emergency pandemic relief program.

But there are other forces constraining the return to work. Millions of Americans have said that health concerns and child care responsibilities — with many schools and day care centers not back to normal operations — have prevented them from returning to work. Millions of others who are not actively job hunting are considered on temporary layoff and expect to be hired back by their previous employers once more businesses reopen fully. At the same time, some baby boomers have retired or switched to working part time.

An 18-year-old student received a shot of a coronavirus vaccine in Los Angeles last month.Credit…Etienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock

A series of vaccine developments and the loosening of restrictions amid an improving virus trajectory may foreshadow a welcome return to normalcy for many young Americans, just as summer vacation nears.

By early next week, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue an emergency use authorization allowing the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to be used in children 12 to 15 years old, a major step ahead in the United States’ efforts to tackle Covid-19. Pfizer also expects to seek federal clearance in September to administer the vaccine to children age 2 to 11, the company said on Tuesday.

Vaccinating children is key to raising the level of immunity in the population, experts say, and to bringing down the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. It could also put school administrators, teachers and parents at ease if millions of adolescent students become eligible for vaccination before the next academic year begins.

The move would be a major leap forward, experts say, and comes as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said that vaccinated adolescents would be able to remove their masks outdoors at summer camps.

Yet the eagerness of parents to let their children be vaccinated is limited, according to a new national poll, which found that three in 10 parents surveyed said they would get their children vaccinated right away and 26 percent said they wanted to wait to see how the vaccine was working. About 23 percent said they would definitely not get their children vaccinated, and 18 percent said they would do so only if a child’s school required it. The survey also noted that only 9 percent of respondents said they had not yet gotten a shot but still intended to do so, one more indication that achieving widespread immunity in the United States is becoming increasingly challenging.

As health experts focus on the future of vaccinating children, a growing number of students have returned to in-person learning this school year. In March, 54 percent of K-8 schools were open for full-time in-person learning, and 88 percent were open for either full-time in-person and/or hybrid learning, according to data from a federal government survey released on Thursday. But Black, Hispanic and Asian students are enrolled in full-time in-person learning at much lower rates than white students.

The Biden administration has made an aggressive push for reopening schools in recent months, including an effort to prioritize vaccinations for teachers and employees.

An airplane landing at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.Credit…Michael Probst/Associated Press

One returning pilot lost control of an aircraft during landing and skidded off the runway into a ditch. Another just returning from furlough forgot to activate a critical anti-icing system designed to prevent hazards in cold weather. Several others flew at the wrong altitudes, which they attributed to distractions and lapses in communication.

In all of these incidents, which were recorded on NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, a database of commercial aviation mistakes that are anonymously reported by pilots and other airline crew, the pilots involved blamed the same thing for their mistakes: a lack of practice flying during the pandemic.

In 2020, global air passenger traffic experienced the largest year-on-year decline in aviation history, falling 65.9 percent compared with 2019, according to the International Air Transport Association. Flights were grounded, schedules reduced and thousands of pilots were laid off or put on furlough for up to 12 months.

As vaccination programs pick up speed across some parts of the world and travel starts to rebound, airlines are beginning to reactivate their fleets and summoning pilots back as they prepare to expand their schedules for the summer. But returning pilots can’t just pick up where they left off.

“It’s not quite like riding a bike,” said Joe Townshend, a former pilot for Titan Airways, a British charter airline, who was laid off when the pandemic hit in March last year.

“You can probably go 10 years without flying a plane and still get it off the ground,” he said, “but what fades is the operational side of things.”

Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, examining samples of wastewater to track the coronavirus.Credit…MichaelB Thomas for The New York Times

Although Covid-19 is primarily a respiratory disease, research conducted early in the pandemic revealed that people infected with the coronavirus often shed it in their stool. This finding, combined with the scale and urgency of the crisis, spurred immediate interest in tracking the virus by sampling wastewater.

In the past year, many scientists have been drawn into the once niche field of wastewater epidemiology. Researchers in 54 countries are tracking the coronavirus in sewage, according to the Covid19Poops Dashboard, a global directory of the projects.

These teams have found that the wastewater data seemed to accurately indicate what was happening in society. When the number of diagnosed Covid-19 cases in an area increased, more coronavirus appeared in the wastewater. Levels of the virus fell when areas instituted lockdowns and surged when they reopened.

Several teams have also confirmed that sewage can serve as an early warning system: Wastewater viral levels often peaked days before doctors saw a peak in official Covid-19 cases.

And wastewater analysis has allowed scientists to detect the arrival of certain variants in a region weeks before they are found in people — and to identify mutations that have not yet been detected in people anywhere.

The surveillance is not a replacement for clinical testing, experts said, but can be an efficient and cost-effective complement. The approach is likely to be especially valuable in low- and middle-income countries, where testing resources are more limited.

“Not every population gets tested, not everyone has access to health care,” said Dr. Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri. “If there’s groups of people that are asymptomatic, they probably aren’t getting tested either. So you aren’t really getting the full big picture. Whereas for our testing, everyone poops.”

global roundup

Administering the AstraZeneca vaccine in Nottingham, England, last month.Credit…Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Britain’s vaccines regulator advised on Friday that all adults under 40 in the country should be offered alternatives to AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine. It factored in concerns over very rare blood clots, the dwindling risk of severe coronavirus infection in younger adults and the availability of alternatives.

The guidance extends earlier advice that people under 30 would be offered alternative doses.

The use of the AstraZeneca vaccine has been marred by uncertainty after reports of a possible link between the doses and very rare blood clots, but public health experts around the world say that the vaccine’s benefits far outweigh the risks for most people.

Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization stressed that the chances of younger people becoming seriously ill with the coronavirus had grown smaller as infection rates decrease across the country. It said that this new reality paired with the availability of alternative vaccines had factored into the decision.

In other news from around the world:

  • Australia will resume repatriation flights for Australian nationals in India after May 15, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday. The resumption will end a travel ban that made it a criminal offense for citizens and residents of Australia to enter the country from India. No other democratic nation has issued a similar ban on all arrivals.

  • Tunisia will enter a weeklong nationwide lockdown starting on Sunday, Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi said on Friday. The country of nearly 12 million people has reported 11,122 deaths and 315,000 cases, according a New York Times database.

Categories
Business

Jobs Numbers and Inventory Market: Dwell Updates

Diners in Detroit diese Woche. Der Arbeitsmarkt hat sich verbessert, da die Coronavirus-Infektionen nachlassen, sich die Impfungen ausbreiten, die Beschränkungen aufgehoben werden und die Unternehmen wieder öffnen.

Folgendes müssen Sie wissen:

Anerkennung…Sarah Rice für die New York Times

Wirtschaftswissenschaftler erwarten einen weiteren großen monatlichen Einstellungssprung, wenn das Arbeitsministerium am Freitagmorgen seinen Jobbericht vom April veröffentlicht. Von Bloomberg befragte Prognostiker schätzen, dass die Zahl der Beschäftigten im letzten Monat um 978.000 gestiegen ist und die Arbeitslosenquote von 6 Prozent auf 5,8 Prozent gesunken ist.

Mit dem Abklingen der Coronavirus-Infektionen, der Ausbreitung von Impfungen, der Aufhebung von Beschränkungen und der Wiedereröffnung von Unternehmen hat sich der Arbeitsmarkt erholt. Der Gewinn im März, vorbehaltlich einer Überarbeitung am Freitag, betrug 916.000.

“Die Erholung der Beschäftigung wird in Anfällen und Anfängen eintreten”, sagte Diane Swonk, Chefökonomin bei der Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft Grant Thornton. “Aber wir werden in diesem Jahr viele starke Gewinne sehen.”

Der Verkehr in den Einkaufszentren hat zugenommen, sagte Frau Swonk, aber die Herstellung könnte durch Engpässe in der Lieferkette beeinträchtigt werden. Restaurants, Hotels und Reisen kommen wieder online, sagte sie, aber es ist unklar, ob der Beschäftigungszuwachs in diesen Branchen die zu dieser Jahreszeit typischen saisonalen Zuwächse übersteigen wird.

Die Wirtschaft hat noch viel zu tun, bevor sie wieder auf das Niveau der Präpandemie zurückkehrt. Im März gab es rund 8,4 Millionen weniger Arbeitsplätze als im Februar 2020, und die Erwerbsbevölkerung ist geschrumpft.

Arbeitgeber, insbesondere in der Restaurant- und Gastgewerbebranche, haben kaum Reaktionen auf Hilfesuchanzeigen gemeldet. Einige haben das beschuldigt, was sie als übermäßig großzügige staatliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung bezeichnen, einschließlich eines vorübergehenden Bundesstipendiums in Höhe von 300 USD pro Woche, das Teil eines Soforthandemie-Hilfsprogramms war.

Aber der beste Beweis für einen echten Arbeitskräftemangel, sagen viele Ökonomen, wären steigende Löhne. Und das geschieht nicht nachhaltig. Jerome H. Powell, Vorsitzender der Federal Reserve, sagte letzte Woche auf einer Pressekonferenz: „Wir sehen noch keine steigenden Löhne. Und vermutlich würden wir das in einem wirklich angespannten Arbeitsmarkt sehen. “

Millionen Amerikaner haben gesagt, dass Gesundheitsbedenken und Kinderbetreuungspflichten – da viele Schulen und Kindertagesstätten nicht wieder normal arbeiten – sie davon abgehalten haben, zur Arbeit zurückzukehren. Millionen von anderen, die nicht aktiv auf Jobsuche sind, werden vorübergehend entlassen und werden voraussichtlich von ihren früheren Arbeitgebern wieder eingestellt, sobald die Unternehmen wieder vollständig eröffnet sind.

Die gute Nachricht, sagte Robert Rosener, ein leitender US-Ökonom bei Morgan Stanley, ist, dass die Unruhe auf dem Arbeitsmarkt, die sich aus aufeinanderfolgenden Runden von Eröffnungen und Schließungen ergibt, nachzulassen scheint. “Die Leute gehen wieder zur Arbeit und bleiben eher bei der Arbeit”, sagte er.

Arbeitgeber sagen, dass zusätzliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung die Einstellung erschwert. Einige ehemalige Food-Service-Mitarbeiter wechseln jedoch zu Lagerarbeitsplätzen oder von zu Hause aus.Anerkennung…Sarah Rice für die New York Times

Diese Woche sagten die republikanischen Gouverneure von Montana und South Carolina, sie wollten die staatlich finanzierte Pandemie-Arbeitslosenunterstützung Ende Juni einstellen, unter Berufung auf Beschwerden von Arbeitgebern über schwerwiegenden Arbeitskräftemangel.

Das bedeutet, dass arbeitslose Arbeitnehmer dort keinen staatlichen Zuschlag von 300 US-Dollar pro Woche für staatliche Leistungen mehr erhalten und die Bundesstaaten ein Pandemieprogramm aufgeben, das Freiberuflern und anderen Personen hilft, die keinen Anspruch auf staatliche Arbeitslosenversicherung haben. (Montana bietet jedoch einen Bonus von 1.200 USD für diejenigen, die Jobs annehmen.)

“Was als kurzfristige finanzielle Unterstützung für schutzbedürftige und vertriebene Menschen während des Höhepunkts der Pandemie gedacht war, hat sich zu einem gefährlichen Bundesanspruch entwickelt, der die Arbeitnehmer dazu anregt und bezahlt, zu Hause zu bleiben”, erklärte Gouverneur Henry McMaster aus South Carolina.

Diese Ansicht ist jedoch nur ein Teil einer breiten Debatte über die Auswirkungen vorübergehend erhöhter Arbeitslosenunterstützung während der Pandemie.

Gail Myer, deren Familie sechs Hotels in Branson, Missouri, besitzt, sagt, dass der Zuschlag von 300 US-Dollar in der Tat ein Hindernis für die Einstellung darstellt. “Ich spreche regelmäßig mit Menschen im ganzen Land in der Hotellerie, und das Hauptdiskussionsthema ist Arbeitskräftemangel”, sagte er.

Vor der Pandemie, sagte Herr Myer, waren in seinen sechs Hotels etwa 150 Vollzeitbeschäftigte beschäftigt. Jetzt ist der Personalbestand um etwa 15 Prozent gesunken, sagte er. Jobs bei Myer Hospitality für Haushälterinnen, Frühstückspersonal und Rezeptionisten werden mit 12,75 bis 14 US-Dollar pro Stunde plus Sozialleistungen und einem Unterzeichnungsbonus von 500 US-Dollar ausgeschrieben.

Interessengruppen für Arbeitnehmer bieten eine andere Perspektive. „Der Mangel an Restaurantarbeitern im ganzen Land ist kein Problem des Arbeitskräftemangels. Es ist ein Lohnknappheitsproblem “, sagte Saru Jayaraman, Präsident von One Fair Wage, einer Interessenvertretung für Mindestlöhne.

In Umfragen unter Food Service-Mitarbeitern von One Fair Wage und dem Food Labour Research Center der University of California in Berkeley nannten drei Viertel niedrige Löhne und Trinkgelder als Grund für die Aufgabe ihres Arbeitsplatzes seit dem Ausbruch des Coronavirus. Fünfundfünfzig Prozent nannten Bedenken hinsichtlich Covid-19 als Faktor. Und fast 40 Prozent gaben an, dass Kunden, die häufig mit dem Tragen von Masken in Verbindung gebracht werden, zusätzlich zu langjährigen Beschwerden über sexuelle Belästigung zunehmend feindselig und belästigt werden.

Amy Glaser, Senior Vice President bei der Personalfirma Adecco, sagte, dass ehemalige Restaurantangestellte und andere zu Lagerarbeitsplätzen migrierten, die die Löhne auf bis zu 23 USD pro Stunde angehoben hatten, und zu Kundendienstarbeiten, die von zu Hause aus erledigt werden konnten.

Der Kupferpreis für Bau und Elektronik ist seit März 2020 um 118 Prozent gestiegen.Anerkennung…Nguyen Huy Kham / Reuters

Die globalen Aktien scheinen die Woche positiv zu beenden, da der jüngste US-Stellenbericht voraussichtlich zeigen wird, dass die Zahl der Beschäftigten im letzten Monat um etwa 1 Million gestiegen ist und die Arbeitslosenquote gesunken ist.

Der S & P 500 soll etwas höher eröffnen, Futures angegeben. Der US-Referenzindex hat diese Woche bereits um 0,5 Prozent zugelegt. Der Stoxx Europe 600 stieg am Freitag um 0,5 Prozent.

Die Kupferpreise stiegen am Donnerstag auf ein Rekordhoch. Das Metall wird oft als Barometer für die allgemeine Gesundheit der globalen Industriewirtschaft angesehen, und der Preis ist seit dem Sturz zu Beginn der Pandemie um fast 120 Prozent gestiegen. Die Preise für mehrere andere Rohstoffe, darunter Stahl, Aluminium und Schnittholz, sind gestiegen, als die Wirtschaft zu wachsen begann.

Der Beschäftigungszuwachs im April wird zu den mehr als 900.000 im März gemeldeten Einstellungen beitragen, da durch die Einführung von Impfstoffen mehr Unternehmen wiedereröffnet und andere Pandemiebeschränkungen gelockert werden konnten. Andere große Volkswirtschaften befinden sich ebenfalls auf dem Weg der Sperrung und haben ihre Aussichten verbessert, unter anderem in Großbritannien, wo die Zentralbank am Donnerstag eine schnellere Erholung prognostizierte. Dennoch haben steigende Coronavirus-Fälle in anderen Ländern, insbesondere in Indien, den Optimismus etwas gemildert.

  • Der Euro stieg gegenüber dem Dollar um 0,3 Prozent, nachdem ein Mitglied des EZB-Rates der Europäischen Zentralbank erklärt hatte, die Bank könne ihr Anleihekaufprogramm im Juni verlangsamen, berichtete Bloomberg. Die Zentralbanken entscheiden, wie sie einige ihrer geldpolitischen Konjunkturmaßnahmen abwickeln können, wenn sich die Weltwirtschaft von den Auswirkungen der Pandemie erholt.

  • BMW war der jüngste deutsche Autobauer, der eine starke Erholung von der von China angeheizten Pandemie verzeichnete. BMW sagte am Freitag, dass der Gewinn um das Fünffache auf 2,8 Milliarden Euro oder 3,4 Milliarden US-Dollar gestiegen ist, während der Umsatz um 15 Prozent auf 26,8 Milliarden Euro gestiegen ist. Der Absatz in China verdoppelte sich auf 230.000 Fahrzeuge oder fast so viele wie in ganz Europa zusammen. In Deutschland stieg die BMW Aktie um 1,9 Prozent.

  • Über Nacht zeigten die Daten einen über den Erwartungen liegenden Anstieg der chinesischen Exporte im April und dass der Dienstleistungssektor laut dem Einkaufsmanagerindex in diesem Jahr am schnellsten expandierte.

Ob die USA von Tagebau-Minen oder einer umweltfreundlicheren Option namens Lithium-Sole-Extraktion abhängig sind, hängt davon ab, wie erfolgreich Gruppen Projekte blockieren.Anerkennung…Gabriella Angotti-Jones für die New York Times

Die Vereinigten Staaten müssen schnell neue Lithiumvorräte finden, da die Autohersteller die Herstellung von Elektrofahrzeugen vorantreiben.

Lithium wird in Elektroautobatterien verwendet, weil es leicht ist, viel Energie speichern kann und wiederholt aufgeladen werden kann. Andere Zutaten wie Kobalt werden benötigt, um die Batterie stabil zu halten.

Die Produktion von Rohstoffen wie Lithium, Kobalt und Nickel, die für diese Technologien unerlässlich sind, ist jedoch für Land, Wasser, Wildtiere und Menschen oft ruinös, berichten Ivan Penn und Eric Lipton für die New York Times. Bergbau ist eines der schmutzigsten Unternehmen da draußen.

Diese Umweltbelastung wurde oft übersehen, weil zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten, China, Europa und anderen Großmächten ein Rennen im Gange ist. In Anlehnung an vergangene Wettbewerbe und Kriege um Gold und Öl kämpfen die Regierungen um die Vorherrschaft über Mineralien, die den Ländern helfen könnten, über Jahrzehnte hinweg wirtschaftliche und technologische Dominanz zu erlangen.

Bergbauunternehmen und verwandte Unternehmen wollen die heimische Lithiumproduktion beschleunigen und fordern die Verwaltung und die wichtigsten Gesetzgeber auf, ein 10-Milliarden-Dollar-Zuschussprogramm in das Infrastrukturgesetz von Präsident Biden aufzunehmen, mit der Begründung, dass dies eine Frage der nationalen Sicherheit sei.

“Im Moment, wenn China aus verschiedenen Gründen beschließt, die USA abzuschneiden, sind wir in Schwierigkeiten”, sagte Ben Steinberg, ein Beamter der Obama-Regierung, der zum Lobbyisten wurde. Er wurde im Januar von Piedmont Lithium eingestellt, das an der Errichtung einer Tagebaumine in North Carolina arbeitet und eines von mehreren Unternehmen ist, die einen Handelsverband für die Industrie gegründet haben.

Bisher hat die Regierung von Biden nicht versucht, umweltfreundlichere Optionen zu fördern – wie die Gewinnung von Lithium-Sole anstelle von Tagebauminen. Letztendlich werden Bundes- und Landesbeamte entscheiden, welche der beiden Methoden genehmigt wird. Beide konnten greifen. Viel wird davon abhängen, wie erfolgreich Umweltschützer, Stämme und lokale Gruppen Projekte blockieren.

Investoren haben mehr als 475 Millionen US-Dollar in Cerebras investiert, ein Start-up, das Prozessoren für künstliche Intelligenz herstellt.Anerkennung…Jessica Chou für die New York Times

Auch wenn ein Chipmangel Probleme für alle Arten von Branchen verursacht, tritt das Halbleiterfeld in eine überraschende neue Ära der Kreativität ein, von Branchenriesen bis hin zu innovativen Start-ups, die einen Anstieg der Finanzierung durch Risikokapitalgeber sehen, die traditionell die Chiphersteller Don Clark meiden Berichte für die New York Times.

“Es ist ein blutiges Wunder”, sagte Jim Keller, ein erfahrener Chipdesigner, dessen Lebenslauf Stationen bei Apple, Tesla und Intel umfasst und der jetzt beim Start-up Tenstorrent für Chips mit künstlicher Intelligenz arbeitet. “Vor zehn Jahren konnte man kein Hardware-Startup durchführen.”

Chip-Designteams arbeiten nicht mehr nur für traditionelle Chip-Unternehmen, sagte Pierre Lamond, ein 90-jähriger Risikokapitalgeber, der 1957 in die Chip-Industrie eintrat. „Sie gehen in vielerlei Hinsicht neue Wege“, sagte er.

  • Aktieninvestoren sahen Halbleiterunternehmen jahrelang als zu kostspielig für die Gründung an, aber im Jahr 2020 haben sie laut CB Insights mehr als 12 Milliarden US-Dollar in 407 Chip-Unternehmen investiert. Cerebras, ein Start-up, das massive Prozessoren mit künstlicher Intelligenz verkauft, die beispielsweise einen ganzen Siliziumwafer überspannen, hat mehr als 475 Millionen US-Dollar angezogen. Groq, ein Start-up, dessen Geschäftsführer zuvor an der Entwicklung eines Chips für künstliche Intelligenz für Google mitgewirkt hat, hat 367 Millionen US-Dollar gesammelt.

  • Die Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company und Samsung Electronics haben es immer schwieriger gemacht, mehr Transistoren auf jede Siliziumscheibe zu packen. IBM kündigte am Donnerstag einen weiteren Miniaturisierungssprung an, ein Zeichen für die anhaltenden US-Fähigkeiten im Technologierennen.

  • Immer mehr Unternehmen kommen zu dem Schluss, dass Software, die auf Standard-Mikroprozessoren im Intel-Stil ausgeführt wird, nicht die beste Lösung für alle Probleme ist. Riesen wie Apple, Amazon und Google sind in jüngerer Zeit aktiv geworden. Die YouTube-Einheit von Google hat kürzlich ihren ersten intern entwickelten Chip zur Beschleunigung der Videokodierung vorgestellt. Und Volkswagen hat letzte Woche angekündigt, einen eigenen Prozessor für das autonome Fahren zu entwickeln.

Categories
Business

Jobless Claims Knowledge Anticipated to Present Progress: Dwell Updates

A vaccination event in Miami last week. The unemployment rate has been falling in recent weeks as businesses reopen and vaccination rates rise.

Recognition…Saul Martinez for the New York Times

Government data from Thursday is expected to show that new government claims to unemployment insurance have continued to decline over the past week as the improving public health situation and easing of pandemic-related restrictions allowed the labor market to continue its gradual normalization .

Claims for unemployment benefits remain high by historical standards, but have fallen significantly in recent weeks after progress stalled in the fall and winter. The weekly requests for government benefits, which peaked last spring of more than six million, fell below 700,000 for the first time at the end of March; Economists expect the Department of Labor to report Thursday that filings have fallen below 600,000 for the third year in a row.

“In the past few weeks, claims data has improved dramatically, and I think this suggests that the labor market recovery accelerated in April,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

Economists should get a clearer picture of progress in the labor market on Friday when the Labor Department releases data on recruitment and unemployment in April. The report is expected to show employers created about a million jobs in the last month, up from 916,000 in March. The leisure and hospitality industry, which was hardest hit during the early stages of the pandemic last spring, has led the recovery in recent months, a trend that forecasters believe continued into April.

Many employers have said in the last few weeks that they want to hire even faster but are having difficulties finding enough workers. Some have blamed increased unemployment benefits for preventing people from returning to work. On Tuesday, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte said his state would be pulling out of a federal program that provides improved benefits to unemployed workers and instead pay recipients a $ 1,200 bonus when they find new jobs.

Economic research has shown that unemployment benefits can reduce the intensity of job search for workers. However, most studies find that the overall labor market impact is small, especially when unemployment is high. And Mr. Zhao and other economists say there are other reasons why labor supply is recovering more slowly than labor demand. Many potential employees are juggling childcare or other chores at home. others remain cautious about the health risks of returning to personal work.

“I think we will see that the labor supply will improve quite dramatically in the coming months as the pandemic subsides,” Zhao said.

Tim Lorentz with the LaBoata in Spokane, Wash.Recognition…Allie Lorentz

Tim Lorentz, a special education teacher in Spokane, Washington, loves both cars and boats. He has driven cars and owned a variety of muscle and exotic vehicles.

“Car guys always want to own or drive a unique car that no one else owns,” said Lorentz. “I created a convertible with eight passengers. Why not a boat over a convertible? I’ve never seen one like this before. “

And so the LaBoata was born. Mr. Lorentz, now 65, built it in 2009 using a white 1993 LeBaron, a used 17-foot boat that he got for $ 100, reports Mercedes Lilienthal for the New York Times.

The LaBoata was “instantly funny,” he said until it received a letter from the Washington Department of Motor Vehicles canceling its registration and title. The authorities had noticed his converted convertible and were not amused. He removed the boat shell, drove the car to the DMV and had it rechecked, restored, and re-licensed. He went home and turned the boat back on, and since then he has had no problems.

Mr. Lorentz is part of a community that builds cars from scrap. 19-year-old Kelvin Odartei Cruickshank, who lives in Accra, Ghana’s capital, built a two-person car from the ground up that looks like a dilapidated DeLorean. It took three years to complete. Mr. Cruickshank used about $ 200 scrap metal and parts that are not normally used in automobiles for financial reasons.