Tag: News

Dominion Sues Fox Information, Claiming Defamation in Election Protection

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Post date March 27, 2021

Dominion Sues Fox News, Claiming Defamation in Election Coverage

Fox News and its powerful owner, Rupert Murdoch, face a second major libel suit over the network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election, a new front in the growing litigation over media disinformation and its aftermath.

In the recent aftershock of Donald J. Trump’s attempt to undermine President Biden’s victory, Dominion Voting Systems, an electoral technology company at the center of an unsubstantiated pro-Trump conspiracy theory about rigged voting machines, filed a lawsuit on Friday in Fox News has been accused of promoting lies that ruined its reputation and business.

Dominion, who has filed for a lawsuit, is seeking at least $ 1.6 billion in damages. Less than two months ago, another electoral technology company, Smartmatic, filed a $ 2.7 billion lawsuit against Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, naming Fox anchors Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as defendants.

In a 139-page complaint filed with the Delaware Supreme Court, Dominion depicted Fox as an active participant in spreading false claims that the company changed the number of votes and tampered with its machines to aid Mr. Biden in the election.

These falsehoods were relentlessly promoted in public forums, including appearances on Fox programs, by Mr. Trump’s attorneys, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In January, Dominion sued Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on charges of defamation. The company also sued Mike Lindell, the executive director of MyPillow and an ally of Trump’s who was a frequent guest at Fox and other conservative media outlets. Each of these lawsuits seek damages in excess of $ 1 billion.

“The truth matters,” wrote Dominion’s attorneys in Friday’s complaint against Fox. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of electoral fraud for its own commercial purposes, seriously injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not result in defamation by a broadcaster, it does nothing. “

In a statement on Friday, Fox said the coverage of the 2020 election “is in the highest tradition of American journalism” and pledged to “vigorously defend this unsubstantiated lawsuit in court.”

Dominion’s filing opened a new phase in the battle against the critics, and Thomas A. Clare, an attorney who represents the company, said Fox’s lawsuit was unlikely to be the final legal action. Susman Godfrey law firm, known for bringing cases to court, recently partnered with Mr. Clare’s law firm to support Dominion’s case.

Fox Corporation has filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic lawsuit, arguing that the false claims of election fraud on its channels were part of coverage of a short-lived story of significant public interest.

“A sitting president’s attempt to question the outcome of an election is objectively newsworthy,” Fox wrote in the motion.

The tale that Mr. Trump and his allies made about Dominion was one of the baroque creations of a month-long effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and convince Americans that Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate.

Founded in 2002, Dominion is one of the largest voting machine manufacturers in the United States. More than two dozen states, including several owned by Mr. Trump, used their equipment over the past year.

Mr. Trump’s allies falsely portrayed Dominion as biased against Mr. Biden, arguing without evidence that it was linked to Hugo Chavez, the long-dead Venezuelan president. Dominion founder John Poulos and other employees received harassing and threatening messages from people who believed the company had undermined the election results, according to the complaint.

Fox News and Fox Business programs were part of the mass media in which supporters of Mr. Trump denounced Dominion. The lawsuit also cites examples of Fox hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo and Mr. Dobbs, being uncritically repeated or vouching for false claims made by Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.

“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” wrote Dominion in the lawsuit, adding that the network “gave these fictions a meaning they would otherwise never have achieved.”

Dominion attorneys also cited an unusual argument by Ms. Powell on Friday in a motion filed Monday to dismiss Dominion’s separate lawsuit against her.

In that motion, her lawyers alleged that “no sane person” would accept Ms. Powell’s allegations as facts because the political language is often imprecise. The motion essentially argues that their claims about Dominion’s voting machines were hyperbolic and therefore not defamatory.

Mr. Clare described Ms. Powell’s allegation as “ridiculous,” but said her acknowledgment that her allegations were not factual may prove relevant to Dominion’s lawsuit. “Fox knew these were lies, but they made a conscious choice to pass them on to their huge audience,” Clare said on a call to journalists.

Dominion said it recently lost key contracts with election officials in Georgia and Louisiana, adding that the company now faces “the hatred, scorn and distrust of tens of millions of American voters”.

Defamation battles are a relatively novel tactic in the fight against disinformation, but they have produced some early results.

In February, two days after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit, Fox Business canceled its highest-rated program, Lou Dobbs Tonight. An anchor on Newsmax – a pro-Trump cable channel that received letters from Dominion and Smartmatic warning of imminent legal action – interrupted an interview with Mr Lindell after the MyPillow founder began attacking Dominion.

Combined, Dominion and Smartmatic are seeking at least $ 4.3 billion in damages from Fox. Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Mr. Murdoch, 90) and his older son Lachlan, said it had pretax profits of $ 3 billion on sales of $ 12.3 billion from September 2019 to September 2020 .

As a large media organization, Fox News enjoys solid protection under First Amendment case law, which often protects newspapers and broadcasters from being held liable for claims made by interviewees. If a court found Dominion to be a public figure, its attorneys would have to show that Fox acted with “real malice” and “reckless disregard” for the truth, which is usually a high standard.

“There is concern that putting Fox under liability could lead to the suppression of information about which people have a strong interest,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William and Mary Law School, who referred to the law first Specializes in change.

In its lawsuit on Friday, Dominion argued that Fox had an incentive to spread falsehoods about a rigged election, in part to reassure pro-Trump viewers who were upset about the network’s early projection that Mr. Biden would wear Arizona .

Dominion also claims that Fox and its hosts have benefited from uncritically reiterating these baseless claims. The lawsuit cites a surge in ratings for anchors like Ms. Bartiromo and Mr. Dobbs after the election, noting that Ms. Pirro’s ex-husband, who spoke on the air of a stolen election, later received a pardon from Mr. Trump.

Fox has argued that its coverage of the election should be viewed in its entirety, noting that at least one host, Tucker Carlson, was skeptical of Ms. Powell’s statements. The network has also said that allegations made by the president’s lawyers in an electoral battle were inherently timely.

Freedom of expression experts said Fox was forced to defend its journalism more fully than the particular claims it made about Dominion and Smartmatic.

“Fox had a problem because many of its experts said the very things that prompted Dominion to bring this lawsuit,” prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said in an interview.

Tags Claiming, Coverage, defamation, Dominion, election, Fox, News, sues

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Stay Updates on Enterprise Information, Shares, Bonds and Oil

Post author By
Post date March 26, 2021

The company recently launched Paramount+ to compete against the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and others.

Here’s what you need to know:

Tens of millions of lower-income Americans are still waiting for their stimulus checks, but there’s been some progress toward getting them paid.

People who receive benefits from Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, the Railroad Retirement Board and Veterans Affairs — while also not having to file tax returns because they don’t meet the income thresholds — have faced delays because the Internal Revenue Service didn’t have the proper payment files to process their stimulus checks.

Now the I.R.S. has all of the necessary files in hand, but it’s still not clear how long it will take for payments to be processed. The I.R.S. did not immediately comment on Friday.

Democratic leaders from the House Ways and Means Committee and other congressional subcommittees had sent a letter to the Social Security Administration and the I.R.S. on Monday, urging the quick transmission of the files. By Wednesday, the lawmakers’ request became an ultimatum: They demanded that the files for 30 million unpaid beneficiaries be sent by Thursday.

The Social Security Administration delivered its files to the I.R.S. on Thursday, according to a statement from the Ways and Means committee. (Veterans Affairs said it delivered its files on Tuesday; the Railroad Retirement Board delivered its files on Monday.)

The Social Security Administration notified congressional leaders that it had transmitted the necessary data to the I.R.S. at 8:48 a.m. Thursday.

Members of the committee blamed the delay on the Social Security Administration’s commissioner, Andrew Saul, who was appointed by President Trump. But the agency said it had been unable to act immediately because Congress hadn’t directly given it the money to do the work.

AARP also sent letters to both the Social Security Administration and I.R.S. on Thursday, urging them both to provide clear information on when beneficiaries could expect their payments.

Many federal beneficiaries who filed 2019 or 2020 returns — or who used the tool for non-filers on the I.R.S. website to update their information — have already received their payments.

So far, the I.R.S. has delivered roughly 127 million payments in two batches, totaling $325 billion.

Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Shares of ViacomCBS, the media goliath led by Shari Redstone, took a nosedive this week, with the company losing more than half of its market value in just four days.

Thes stock was as high as $100 on Monday. By the close of trading on Friday it had fallen to just over $48, a drop of more than 51 percent in less than a week.

There’s no better way to say it: The company’s stock tanked.

What happened? Several things all at once. First, it is worth noting that ViacomCBS had actually been on a bit of a tear up until this week’s meltdown, rising nearly tenfold in the past 12 months. About a year ago, it was trading at around $12 per share.

That rally came as the company, like the rest of the media industry, had made a move toward streaming. It recently launched Paramount+ to compete against the likes of Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and others. The service tapped ViacomCBS’s vast archive of content from the CBS broadcast network, Paramount Film Studios and several cable channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV.

That shift matters because ViacomCBS has been hit hard by an overall decline in cable viewership. The company’s pretax profits have fallen nearly 17 percent from two years ago, and its debt has topped more than $21 billion.

But the stock rose so much that Robert M. Bakish, ViacomCBS’s chief executive, decided to take advantage of the boon by offering new shares to raise as much as $3 billion. The underwriters who managed the sale priced the offering at around $85 per share earlier this week, a discount to where it had been trading on Monday.

You could say it backfired. When a company issues new stock, it normally dilutes the value of current shareholders, so some drop in price is expected. But a few days after the offering, one of Wall Street’s most influential research firms, MoffettNathanson, published a report that questioned the company’s value and downgraded the stock to a “sell.” The stock should really only be worth $55, MoffettNathanson said. That started the nosedive.

“We never, ever thought we would see Viacom trading close to $100 per share,” read the report, which was written by Michael Nathanson, a co-founder of the firm. “Obviously, neither did ViacomCBS’s management,” it continued, citing the new stock offering.

Streaming is still a money-losing enterprise, and that means the old line media companies must still endure more losses over more years before they can return to profitability.

In the case of ViacomCBS, it seemed to hasten the cord-cutting when it signed a new licensing agreement with the NFL that will cost the company more than $2 billion a year through 2033. As part of the agreement, ViacomCBS also plans to stream the games on Paramount+, which is much cheaper than a cable bundle.

As the games, considered premium programming, shifts to streaming, “the industry runs the risk of both higher cord-cutting and greater viewer erosion,” Mr. Nathanson wrote.

On Friday, an analyst with Wells Fargo also downgraded the stock, slashing the bank’s price target to $59.

But the market decided it wasn’t even worth that much. It closed on Friday barely a quarter above 48 bucks.

Credit…Ben Quinton for The New York Times

The Biden administration is keeping on the table the threat of tariffs on Austria, India, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom over their taxes on digital commerce as negotiations over a global tax agreement proceed.

The office of the United States Trade Representative said on Friday that those countries continue to be “subject to action” because they discriminated against American technology companies with their digital services taxes. Those taxes, which are levied against the digital services that tech companies like Amazon and Google provide — even if they have no physical presence in those nations — have become a huge global issue with which regulators are wrestling.

The United States has until June to decide whether to move forward or delay retaliatory tariffs under the terms of an investigation that began last year under the Trump administration.

“The United States is committed to working with its trading partners to resolve its concerns with digital services taxes and to addressing broader issues of international taxation,” said Katherine Tai, the newly confirmed United States Trade Representative. “The United States remains committed to reaching an international consensus through the O.E.C.D. process on international tax issues.”

U.S.T.R. will release a list of products from those countries that could face tariffs, and it will hold hearings in May about the investigations. Senior administration officials said on Friday that the step is procedural and not intended to provoke America’s trade partners. However, the administration wants to keep its options open to make sure that the negotiations continue to move forward productively.

In January, before President Biden took office, U.S.T.R. suspended tariffs that were about to be imposed on French imports while the other investigations proceeded.

U.S.T.R. said that the Biden administration is ending its investigations into Brazil, the Czech Republic, the European Union and Indonesia because the digital services taxes that they were considering have not been adopted. U.S.T.R. could still initiate new investigations if those countries decided to proceed.

The Biden administration has said it plans to take a much more deliberative approach to trade policy than the previous administration, and it is conducting a broad review of the tariffs that President Donald J. Trump levied on China and other countries. Administration officials have signaled a desire to adopt a more conciliatory approach to trade with American allies, like Europe.

Earlier this month, the United States and European Union agreed to temporarily suspend tariffs levied on billions of dollars of each others’ aircraft, wine, food and other products as both sides try to find a negotiated settlement to a long-running dispute over the two leading airplane manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus.

Last year, the Trump administration paused the international digital tax talks taking place through the O.E.C.D. so that countries could focus on the pandemic.

The Treasury Department will assume a leading role in the talks this year. In February, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen signaled that the United States could be more flexible in the negotiations when she told the Group of 20 finance ministers that it was no longer calling for a contentious “safe harbor” plan that would have essentially given American companies the ability to opt out of some of the taxes.

Negotiations are expected to continue at international economic forums this summer, and officials have said that the United States’ new position has given the talks renewed momentum.

Credit…Amy Lombard for The New York Times

Union workers at The New Yorker, Pitchfork and Ars Technica said Friday they had voted to authorize a strike as tensions over contract negotiations with Condé Nast, the owner of the publications, continued to escalate.

In a joint statement, the unions for the three publications said the vote, which received 98 percent support from members, meant workers would be ready to walk off the job if talks over collective bargaining agreements continued to devolve. At The New Yorker, the unionized staff includes fact checkers and web producers but not staff writers, while most editors and writers at Pitchfork and Ars Technica are members.

The unions, which are affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents employees at The New York Times, have been separately working toward first-time contracts with Condé Nast. In the case of The New Yorker Union, negotiations have dragged out for more than two years.

The core of their demands, the unions said, were fair contracts that included wage minimums in line with industry standards, clear paths for professional development, concrete commitments to diversity and inclusion, and work-life balance. They said in the statement that Condé Nast had “not negotiated in good faith.”

“Condé Nast has long profited off the exploitation of its workers, but that exploitation ends now,” the statement said.

A Condé Nast spokesman said management had already reached agreements on a range of issues with The New Yorker, Pitchfork and Ars Technica unions over the course of negotiations.

“On wages and economics, management has proposed giving raises to everyone in these bargaining units; increasing minimum salaries for entry-level employees by nearly 20 percent; and providing guaranteed annual raises for all members, among other enhancements,” the spokesman said in a statement.

He added: “All of this has been accomplished in just two rounds of bargaining, as we first received the unions’ economic proposals at the end of last year. We look forward to seeing this process through at the bargaining table.”

The labor disputes at Condé Nast have spilled into the public arena a number of times. In January, union members at The New Yorker, including fact checkers and web producers, stopped work for a day in protest over pay. Last year, two high-profile speakers at The New Yorker Festival — Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — vowed not to cross a picket line in solidarity with unionized workers.

The NewsGuild of New York said it would hold a rally for fair contracts on Saturday at Condé Nast’s offices in downtown Manhattan.

Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Facebook said on Friday that it would bring employees back into its California offices beginning in May, one of the first large tech companies to lay out a plan for workers to physically return to offices.

The social network said employees would begin working in its San Francisco Bay Area offices — including its headquarters in Menlo Park, as well as those in Fremont, Sunnyvale and downtown San Francisco — starting on May 10 and on a rolling basis thereafter. The offices would be at 10 percent capacity, the company said, as long as national health data continued to improve.

“The health and safety of our employees and neighbors in the community is our top priority and we’re taking a measured approach to reopening offices,” said Chloe Meyere, a Facebook spokeswoman. She said Facebook would require regular weekly testing for on-site workers, as well as physical distancing and mask wearing indoors.

The San Francisco Chronicle earlier reported on Facebook’s back-to-office plans.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has been a vocal proponent of remote work since the pandemic began. Last May, Mr. Zuckerberg said he would allow some employees to work from home permanently, though they would face salary reductions if they moved to different parts of the country.

For now, Facebook has given employees the option to work from home until July 2, after which any employee who was not hired as a full-time remote worker can continue to work from home until their office is operating at 50 percent capacity. The latest health data, Facebook said, suggested that it would be able to reopen its largest offices at 50 percent capacity after Sept. 7.

Those who were designated as full-time remote workers can continue to work remotely, the company said.

Other office reopenings will be on a case-by-case basis, as Facebook continues to study regional data provided by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies.

“We will continue to work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety,” Ms. Meyere said.

Credit…Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Volkswagen said on Friday that it would seek financial compensation from its former chief executive and the former head of the Audi division, accusing them of failing to act after learning that diesel vehicles sold in the United States were fitted with illegal emissions-cheating software.

The decision by the German carmaker’s supervisory board marks a turnabout. Volkswagen had been reluctant to publicly accuse former top managers of complicity in the emissions fraud, which has cost Volkswagen tens of billions of euros in fines, settlements and legal fees.

At the same time, the supervisory board said it found “no breaches of duty” by other executives who were members of Volkswagen’s management board in September 2015, when the scandal came to light.

That group includes Herbert Diess, now the chief executive of Volkswagen, who had joined the company two months earlier from BMW. Hans Dieter Pötsch, now chairman of the supervisory board, was chief financial officer and a member of the Volkswagen management board at the time, a position he had held for more than a decade.

Volkswagen’s supervisory board said that in a statement on Friday that a law firm hired to review evidence in the case found that Martin Winterkorn, the former chief executive, failed “to comprehensively and promptly clarify the circumstances behind the use of unlawful software functions” after learning about the misconduct in July 2015.

Mr. Winterkorn, who resigned shortly after the emissions fraud became public, also failed to ensure that questions by U.S. authorities “were answered truthfully, completely and without delay,” the supervisory board said. Shareholders suffered damages as a result, the board said, although it did not say how much money the company will try to recover.

Mr. Winterkorn’s lawyers said in a statement Friday that he denied the accusations and had done everything possible “to avoid or minimize damage” to Volkswagen.

The Volkswagen board said it also concluded that Rupert Stadler, former chief executive of the Audi luxury car division, was negligent because he failed to investigate the use of illegal software in diesel vehicles sold in the European Union.

Mr. Winterkorn and Mr. Stadler face criminal charges in Germany that revolve around the same circumstances. Mr. Winterkorn’s trial was scheduled to begin in April, but judges in the case postponed it this week until September, citing the pandemic.

Mr. Stadler has been on trial in Munich since last year on charges that, even after the wrongdoing came to light, he allowed Audi to continue selling cars that were programmed to recognize when an official emissions test was underway and dial up emissions controls to make the car appear compliant. The cars were not capable of consistently meeting pollution standards.

Mr. Stadler’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the past, Mr. Stadler has denied wrongdoing.

Credit…Laura Moss for The New York Times

Personal income and spending dipped last month as the effects of stimulus checks faded following a big jump in January, but both are expected to rebound as another round of federal payments arrived in March.

The government reported on Friday that personal income fell 7.1 percent in February from the previous month, while consumption dropped by 1 percent. Powered by $600 checks to most Americans from a December relief bill, income in January leapt by 10.1 percent, while consumption rose by 3.4 percent, a figure revised Friday from the originally reported 2.4 percent.

Despite the drop last month, a big pickup is expected in March with the arrival of $1,400 payments to most Americans from the $1.9 trillion relief package signed into law this month.

In the months ahead, most economists expect consumers to return in greater numbers to stores, restaurants and other gathering places as vaccination efforts gather speed and consumers put the stimulus money and lockdown-accumulated savings to work.

“In February, households were waiting for the bigger stimulus check coming in March and there will be a surge in consumer spending, particularly on services,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.

All of the drop in spending last month was for goods, Mr. Faucher noted, as consumers pulled back on buying big-ticket items like automobiles and appliances. Services should benefit in the coming months, he added, as people have more opportunities to go out and life increasingly returns to normal more than one year after the pandemic hit.

“Consumer spending will be very strong for the remainder of this year and into 2022,” Mr. Faucher added. “There’s a lot of money saved up.”

In another sign of optimism, the University of Michigan reported Friday that its index of consumer sentiment rose to the highest level since the pandemic began.

Economists have improved their forecasts for U.S. economic growth, with Bank of America foreseeing a 7 percent increase this year in gross domestic product.

By: Ella Koeze·Data delayed at least 15 minutes·Source: FactSet

Stocks rose on Friday, along with government bond yields, amid a bout of optimism about the economic recovery.

The gains came a day after President Biden said he wanted the United States to administer 200 million vaccines by his 100th day in office, on April 30, a target the country is already on track to meet. The Federal Reserve vice chair, Richard Clarida, pushed back on concerns that the government’s spending plans would fuel higher sustained inflation.

In a victory for financial institutions, the central bank said that pandemic-era rules that restricted share buybacks and dividend payouts by banks would end midway through 2021 for most firms. On the economic front, gross domestic product data for the fourth quarter was also revised slightly higher on Thursday.

Stocks & Bonds

The S&P 500 index rose 1.7 percent, ending the week with a 1.6 percent gain. Bank stocks fared better than the broad market, with the KBW Bank index up 2 percent.
The Stoxx 600 Europe rose 0.9 percent, logging a fourth consecutive week of gains.
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes rose to 1.67 percent.
Shares of ViacomCBS plunged 27 percent on Friday, bringing the stock’s losses for the week to 50 percent. The decline followed Viacom’s announcement that it plans to raise $3 billion by selling stock and put some of those funds toward building its streaming offering.

Economic data

Personal income and spending in the United States dipped last month as the effects of stimulus checks faded following a big jump in January, but both are expected to rebound as another round of federal payments arrived in March.
Retail sales in Britain rose 2.1 percent in February, rebounding from a slump of 8.2 percent the month before, when the country entered a third national lockdown.
A survey of German business expectations rose to the highest level in nearly three years.

Oil

Oil prices rose with futures of Brent crude, the global benchmark, climbing 3.9 percent to $64.34 a barrel.

Credit…Matt York/Associated Press

The thrift-store start-up ThredUp on Friday will become the latest clothing resale website to become publicly traded, a move that seeks to take advantage of a growing interest in secondhand retailers among young shoppers.

The company sold 12 million shares for $14 each in its initial public offering, raising $168 million and valuing the business at $1.3 billion.

Founded in Oakland in 2009, ThredUp built its inventory by sending prepaid packages, or “clean out kits,” to sellers, who fill the bags with used clothes and accessories and mail them back.

The website joins Poshmark, which went public in January, and The RealReal, which went public in 2019, on the Nasdaq stock market.

The three companies are all leaders in secondhand shopping, but they take different approaches to resale. The RealReal consigns high-end brands exclusively. Poshmark allows sellers to directly list their items. ThredUp has formed partnerships with brands including Gap, Walmart and Macy’s, helping these large retailers incorporate resale into their stores and e-commerce platforms.

All three emphasize the environmental benefits of resale — but ThredUp more so than its competitors. The company refers to itself as a “force for good” and has criticized the fashion industry’s carbon footprint, including by writing open letters to luxury brands like Burberry that have burned their unsold inventory.

James Reinhart, the chief executive and a co-founder of ThredUp, said Thursday that the company was “ushering in a more circular future for fashion by helping new waves of consumers, brands and retailers take steps toward sustainability.”

With the retail analytics firm GlobalData, ThredUp also publishes a widely cited annual “Resale Report,” which tracks growth of the secondhand market. By the end of 2021, the market value of online resale is estimated to grow to $12 billion, up from $7 billion in 2019, according to the last year’s report.

Much of that growth has been attributed to Generation Z’s preference for online shopping and passion for sustainability. ThredUp’s revenue was $186 million in 2020 (up from $163.8 million in 2019). It posted a net loss of $47.9 million last year.

Still, the company was not immune to retail’s upheaval during the pandemic, as detailed in a March filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Average monthly orders have now returned to prepandemic levels, ThredUp said, but the company has not “seen sustained growth” in the time since.

VideoCreditCredit…By Ben Denzer

In today’s On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide writes that people are buying digital items like a tweet and a meme for bonkers amounts of money. But we need to take a step back.

Tags Bonds, business, Live, News, Oil, Stocks, Updates

Business

As we speak’s Enterprise Information: Reside Updates on United Airways and Unemployment Claims

Post author By
Post date March 25, 2021

An outdoor seating area at a Bronx restaurant. The hospitality industry has been hit especially hard by job losses during the pandemic.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Michael Young for The New York Times

While vaccination efforts have gathered speed and restrictions on activities have receded in many states, the job market is showing signs of life.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell last week to 657,000, a decrease of 100,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It was the lowest weekly level of initial state claims since the pandemic upended the economy a year ago.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 684,000.

In addition, there were 242,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits, a decrease of 43,000.

Unemployment claims have been at historically high levels for the past year, partly because some workers have been laid off more than once. Much of the drop last week was accounted for by a decline in new claims in Ohio and Illinois, but economists said the overall trend was encouraging.

“This is definitely a positive signal and a move in the right direction,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. “We would expect to see further improvements as vaccines roll out and restrictions are lifted.”

Between the state and federal programs, the total number of new jobless claims was just under 900,000 after being stuck above one million a week.

Although the pace of vaccinations, as well as passage of a $1.9 trillion relief package this month, has lifted economists’ expectations for growth, the labor market has lagged behind other measures of recovery.

Still, the easing of restrictions on indoor dining areas, health clubs, movie theaters and other gathering places offers hope for the millions of workers who were let go in the last 12 months. And the $1,400 checks going to most Americans as part of the relief bill should help spending perk up in the weeks ahead.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, said she hoped for consistent employment gains but her optimism was tempered by concern about the longer-term displacement of workers by the pandemic.

“The numbers are encouraging, but no one is jumping the gun and hiring up for what looks to be a boom this spring and summer,” she said. “There is a reluctance to get ahead of activity.”

“We’ve passed the point where you can just flip a switch and the lights come back on,” she added. “We need to see a sustained increase in hiring, which I think we will see, but the concern is that it won’t be so robust. It takes longer to ramp up than it does to shut down.”

Credit…Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York Times

United Airlines plans to add more than two dozen new flights starting Memorial Day weekend, the latest sign that demand for leisure travel is picking up as the national vaccination rate moves higher.

Most of the new flights will connect cities in the Midwest to tourist destinations, such as Charleston, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina; Portland, Maine; Savannah, Ga.; and Pensacola, Fla. United also said it planned to offer more flights to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America in May than it did during the same month in 2019.

The airline has seen ticket sales rise in recent weeks, according to Ankit Gupta, United’s vice president of domestic network planning and scheduling. Customers are booking tickets further out, too, he said, suggesting growing confidence in travel.

“Over the past 12 months, this is the first time we are really feeling more bullish,” Mr. Gupta said.

Airports have been consistently busier in recent weeks than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic brought travel to a standstill a year ago. Well over one million people were screened at airport security checkpoints each day over the past two weeks, according to the Transportation Security Administration, although the number of screenings is down more than 40 percent compared with the same period in 2019.

Most of the new United flights will be offered between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend aboard the airline’s regional jets, which have 50 seats. The airline said it would also add new flights between Houston and Kalispell, Mont.; Washington and Bozeman, Mont.; Chicago and Nantucket, Mass.; and Orange County, Calif., and Honolulu.

All told, United said it planned to operate about 58 percent as many domestic flights this May as it did in May 2019 and 46 percent as many international flights. Most of the demand for international travel has been focused on warm beach destinations that have less-stringent travel restrictions.

“That is one of the strongest demand regions in the world right now,” Mr. Gupta said. “A lot of the leisure traffic has sort of shifted to those places and it’s actually seen a boom in bookings.”

Delta Air Lines issued a similar update last week, announcing more than 20 nonstop summer flights to mountain, beach and vacation destinations. Both airlines have said in recent weeks that they have made substantial progress toward reducing how much money they are losing every day.

Credit…Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said on Thursday that the central bank was trying to make its economic employee base more racially diverse and he was not satisfied with its progress toward that goal so far.

“It’s very frustrating, because we have had for many years a strong focus on recruiting a more diverse cadre of economists,” Mr. Powell said while speaking on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” after being asked about a New York Times story on the Fed’s lack of Black economists. “We’re not at all satisfied with the results.”

Only two of the 417 economists, or 0.5 percent, at the Fed’s board in Washington were Black, according to data the Fed provided to The Times earlier this year. By comparison, Black people make up 13 percent of the country’s population and 3 to 4 percent of the U.S. citizens and permanent residents who graduate as Ph.D. economists each year.

Across the entire Fed system — including the Board of Governors and the 12 regional banks — 1.3 percent of economists identified as Black. The Fed has been making efforts to hire more broadly, Mr. Powell said, including by working with historically Black colleges.

“It’s a very high priority,” Mr. Powell said of hiring more diversely. “Institutions that focus on diversity and do it well are the successful institutions in our society.”

The Fed chair was also asked about how he would rate the central bank’s sweeping efforts to rescue the economy as markets melted down at the start of the coronavirus outbreak last year. In addition to cutting its policy interest rate to near zero and rolling out an enormous bond-buying program, the Fed set up a series of emergency lending programs to funnel credit to the economy.

Rolled out over a frantic few weeks, the programs included ones that the Fed had never tried before to backstop corporate bond and private company loan markets.

“I liken it to Dunkirk,” Mr. Powell said, referring to the rapid evacuation of British and Allied forces from France in World War II. “Just get in the boats and go.”

Despite the speed of the decision-making, Mr. Powell said that he looked back on the results as positive.

“Overall, it was a very successful program,” he said. “It served its purpose in staving off what could have been far worse outcomes.”

Credit…Ann Saphir/Reuters

Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says that although the outlook for growth has improved as vaccinations increase and the government rolls out relief packages, the path of the pandemic remains a major question hanging over the U.S. and global economies.

“We’re not out of this yet,” Ms. George said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s hard to know what the dynamics will be on the other side.”

Ms. George said she was focused on labor force participation as a sign of the job market’s strength more than the headline unemployment rate, which has fallen to 6.2 percent from a 14.8 percent peak but misses many people who aren’t looking for new jobs after losing theirs during the pandemic. Participation, the share of people working or looking, remains a hefty two percentage points below its prepandemic levels.

“That might be the thing I really watch in the coming months,” she said.

Ms. George expects inflation to “firm,” but that the process is likely to take a while, she said, and it is “too soon to say” whether it will end with a more meaningful rise. Some prominent economists have begun to warn that prices, which have been low for decades, could rise rapidly as the government spends big and the Fed keeps rates at rock bottom to support the economic recovery.

“Wages are a very telling factor in a story about inflation,” Ms. George said.

Many economists look for faster growth in compensation as a signal that inflation is sustainable, not just driven by short-lived supply constraints or temporary quirks in the data.

Ms. George’s colleagues, including Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, have been clear that they expect prices to move higher this year but will not necessarily see that as an achievement of their inflation goal. The Fed redefined its target last year and now aims for 2 percent annual price gains, on average, over time.

Ms. George did not venture a guess of when the Fed will hit its three criteria for raising interest rates: full employment, 2 percent realized price gains and the expectation of higher inflation for some time. Some Fed officials expect to raise rates next year or in 2023, but most of them expect the initial increase to come even later.

Credit…Tony Dejak/Associated Press

Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans founder, has spent more than a decade putting billions into downtown Detroit. Now he’s broadening his scope.

The Gilbert Family Foundation and the Rocket Community Fund, the philanthropic arm of Quicken Loans’ Rocket Mortgage company, announced on Thursday a $500 million investment in Metro Detroit, to be spent over the next 10 years. The first $15 million will be put toward paying off property tax debt of low-income homeowners who qualified for Detroit’s Pay As You Stay initiative.

Quicken Loans has been based in Detroit since 2010, and Mr. Gilbert and his real estate firm, Bedrock, have spent billions buying and redeveloping properties there. Those efforts have been praised for revitalizing a downtown area of roughly seven square miles, but also criticized by some who contend they did not do enough to help those who live in the rest of the city.

“We feel like we’ve made Detroit into a tech boomtown,” said Mr. Gilbert. But he acknowledged that some may have felt left behind. “This can bridge that,” he said.

Mr. Gilbert added that his focus outside of Detroit’s city center stems from his work on President Barack Obama’s Blight Removal Task Force in 2014 as the city was emerging from bankruptcy. “Property taxes was the No. 1 issue that was causing the blight foreclosures,” he said.

Detroit’s housing crisis dates to “racial covenants” in the 1920s. In the mid-2000s, the city became a center of risky lending that defined the financial crisis, with subprime lending accounting for three-fourths of the mortgages in the city. (Quicken Loans settled a lawsuit with the Justice Department for its own lending practices during that time, but admitted no wrongdoing.)

The economic crisis that followed toppled a city already grappling with a dwindling population and shrinking revenue. Those who paid for the recovery were largely low-income housing owners — in many cases Black — whom the city was also accused of overtaxing. Poverty rates ascended and city services deteriorated as a result.

The investment announced on Thursday is an effort to address the lingering effects of the crisis. Twenty thousand families qualify for the tax-relief program, said Mr. Gilbert’s wife, Jennifer, who founded the Gilbert Family Foundation with her husband.

“By preserving that wealth, we also preserve opportunities for intergenerational wealth transfer,” she said. “The stability of the home allows for people to then focus on other economic opportunities that allow them to thrive.”

After the first $15 million of the initiative is spent paying back taxes of low-income homeowners, the remaining funds will be focused on, among other things, home repair and narrowing the digital divide.

The community will be vital for input, including those who qualify for the initial tax relief. “We can learn a lot about where we want to invest next and how best we can positively impact them and their lives,” Ms. Gilbert said.

Credit…Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Stocks on Wall Street dropped on Thursday even as the latest weekly data showed that state unemployment claims fell to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.

The S&P 500 index and Nasdaq composite both fell less than half a percent in early trading.

Stock trading has grown choppy lately as investors weigh news of rising Covid-19 cases and new lockdowns, or the rollback of efforts to reopen economies, against mounting signs of economic recovery as more people are vaccinated and the effects of the $1.9 trillion stimulus package emerge.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that initial claims for unemployment benefits fell last week to 657,000, a decrease of 100,000 from the previous week. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 684,000.

German lockdown U-turn

As Europe grapples with an emerging third wave of the pandemic, Germany has canceled a strict five-day lockdown that was set to start at the beginning of April. Chancellor Angela Merkel said she took “ultimate responsibility” for the reversal, which came after a large backlash to the plan, even from within her own party, and anger from retailers and restaurants.

“In the near term, this avoids the negative economic consequences of a lockdown,” Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a note. But over a longer a period of time, markets will question whether this will just delay Germany’s ability to restrain the virus and slow down the recovery, he added.

European stocks were lower Thursday. The Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 0.8 percent and the FTSE 100 in Britain fell 1 percent.

Suez Canal

Oil prices dropped. Futures of Brent crude, the European benchmark, fell 1.5 percent to $63.45 a barrel and futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, fell 1.8 percent to about $60 a barrel.

On Wednesday, oil prices jumped more than 5 percent after a container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking one of the world’s key shipping routes, which is also an important artery for the flow of oil. On Thursday, efforts to dislodge the ship were ongoing as some 150 other ships were waiting on either side.

The company trying to move the ship warned it could take weeks. Shipping has already been heavily disrupted by the pandemic, sending freight prices soaring.

Elsewhere in markets

Nike shares dropped more than 3 percent in early trading, and H&M shares fell close to 4 percent in Stockholm after Chinese social media users called for a boycott of the companies. The two fashion retailers published statements expressing concern over reports of forced labor in Xinjiang. Nike’s statement said the company didn’t source cotton from the region, but the online attacks have called it a boycott of the region’s cotton farmers.
Yields on 10-year Treasury notes fell to about 1.6 percent.

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Companies harmed by the coronavirus pandemic can soon borrow up to $500,000 through the Small Business Administration’s emergency lending program, raising a cap that has frustrated many applicants.

“The pandemic has lasted longer than expected,” Isabella Casillas Guzman, the agency’s administrator, said on Wednesday. “We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access.”

The change to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program — known as EIDL and pronounced as idle — will take effect the week of April 6. Those who have already received loans but might now qualify for more money will be contacted and offered the opportunity to apply for an increase, the agency said.

The Small Business Administration has approved $200 billion in disaster loans to 3.8 million borrowers since the program began last year. Unlike the forgivable loans made through the larger and more prominent Paycheck Protection Program, the disaster loans must be paid back. But they carry a low interest rate and a long repayment term.

Normally, the decades-old disaster program makes loans of up to $2 million, and in the early days of the pandemic, the agency gave some applicants as much as $900,000. But it soon capped loans at $150,000 because it feared exhausting the available funding. That limit — which the agency did not tell borrowers about for months — angered applicants who needed more capital to keep their struggling ventures alive.

The agency has $270 billion left to lend through the pandemic relief program, James Rivera, the head of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance, told senators at a hearing on Wednesday.

Tribune Publishing’s board recommended that shareholders approve a purchase offer from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital over a higher bid from a Maryland hotel executive, according to a securities filing Tuesday. Alden, Tribune’s largest shareholder, agreed last month to buy the rest of the company at $17.25 per share and take it private in a deal that would value the company at $630 million. Last week, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate, made an $18.50 per share offer for the whole company.

Credit…Erin Scott/Reuters

Complaints of “Zoom fatigue” have emerged across industries and classrooms in the past year, as people confined to working from home faced schedules packed with virtual meetings and often followed up by long video catch-ups with friends, reports Anna Schaverien of The New York Times.

But Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks, is trying to start a new end-of-week tradition meant to combat that fatigue: Zoom-free Fridays.

The bank’s new chief executive, Jane Fraser, announced the plan in a memo sent to employees on Monday. Recognizing that workers have spent inordinate amounts of the past 12 months staring at video calls, Citi is encouraging its employees to take a step back from Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms for one day a week, she said.

“The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” Ms. Fraser wrote in the memo, which was seen by The New York Times.

No one at the company would have to turn their video on for any internal meetings on Fridays, she said. External meetings would not be affected.

The bank outlined other steps to restore some semblance of work-life balance. It recommended employees stop scheduling calls outside of traditional working hours and pledged that when employees can return to offices, a majority of its workers would be given the option to work from home up to two days a week.

Tags Airlines, business, Claims, Live, News, Todays, Unemployment, United, Updates

World News

Covid-19 and Vaccine Information: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date March 23, 2021

AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine being administered in Milan on Monday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

Federal health officials said Tuesday that the encouraging results that AstraZeneca announced about its Covid-19 vaccine may have been based on outdated and incomplete information about the vaccine’s effectiveness, an extraordinary blow to the credibility of an already embattled vaccine.

In a statement released after midnight, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that an independent panel of medical experts that has been helping to oversee AstraZeneca’s U.S. trial had “expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data.”

The exact nature of the institute’s concerns — and the effect they might have on how effective the vaccine appears to be — was unclear. But it is highly unusual for such a dust-up about the integrity of a clinical trial, especially one as high-profile as this, to occur in public.

“This is really what you call an unforced error,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, said on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday morning. “Because the fact is: This is very likely a very good vaccine, and this kind of thing does, as you say, do nothing but really cast some doubt about the vaccines and maybe contributes to the hesitancy.”

AstraZeneca defended the data that it released on Monday, which showed the vaccine was 79 percent effective at preventing Covid-19. The company said in a statement on Tuesday that the interim results, which were current as of Feb. 17, appeared to be “consistent” with more recent data collected during the trial. AstraZeneca said it would immediately share its latest efficacy data with the monitoring board. The company said it would reissue fuller results within 48 hours.

The results that AstraZeneca announced on Monday seemed encouraging — especially because they came at a moment when concerns about the vaccine’s safety had led more than a dozen countries, mostly in Europe, to temporarily suspend the shot’s use over concerns about possible rare side effects.

But the statement from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, raised the prospect that the company was presenting an overly optimistic interpretation of the data.

In recent days, the independent monitoring board’s analysis was delayed several times because the board had to ask for revised reports from those handling trial data on behalf of the company, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Companies sponsoring drug or vaccine trials typically wait for the monitoring board to review analyses and conclude that the study has yielded an answer before they announce trial results.

Company executives do not see the results of the study until the monitoring board reports their study data back to the company. The monitoring board ultimately conveyed the results of the study to AstraZeneca in a meeting over the weekend, leading to the company’s announcement Monday morning.

The monitoring board’s slow progress fueled concerns among federal officials that AstraZeneca may have been sitting on the data or that the monitoring board had concerns about the way the data it was reviewing had been presented.

An AstraZeneca spokeswoman, whom the company declined to name, said on Friday that it was “completely incorrect” that the trial data had formatting problems or had not been submitted to the monitoring board in a clean fashion.

“As is often the case,” the spokeswoman said, monitoring boards “can request new or clarifying analyses of data from the trial. This would enable them to ensure the robustness of their determinations.”

The national institute’s statement, issued shortly after midnight, stunned experts. Dr. Eric Topol, a clinical trials expert at Scripps Research in San Diego, said it was “highly irregular” to see such a public display of friction between a monitoring board and a study sponsor, which are typically in close concordance.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It’s so, so troubling.”

AstraZeneca’s relationship with the U.S. authorities has been fraught since last year, when senior health officials believed the company was not being forthright about the design of its clinical trials, its results and safety issues. That skepticism carried over to last week, when senior officials at a number of federal health agencies grew suspicious about why AstraZeneca had not announced data from its U.S. study.

United States ›	United StatesOn March 22	14-day change
New cases	55,621	–8%
New deaths	650	–35%

World ›	WorldOn March 22	14-day change
New cases	416,353	+25%
New deaths	7,301	+3%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, warning on Tuesday that her country is facing a significantly more deadly wave of the coronavirus, announced a five-day lockdown over Easter and the extension of existing restrictions until mid-April in an effort to break a spike in coronavirus cases.

Starting April 1, and until the following Monday, Germany will effectively shut down for an extended Easter break, with private meetings limited to no more than two groups of up to five adults and almost all stores ordered shuttered (supermarkets can open on the Saturday). Churches are asked to hold services online, and people are being asked to stay home and not travel.

“We are in a very, very serious situation,” Ms. Merkel told a news conference, after hours of deliberations with the leaders of the country’s 16 states over the Easter lockdown and extension of existing restrictions through April 18.

“After we were able to sharply bring down the number of new infections in January, we are now experiencing, through the spread of the more contagious British variant, a more dangerous variation — the numbers are going up and the intensive care beds are filling up,” she said.

Germany is the latest country in Europe to tighten restrictions as more contagious virus variants spread and the continent struggles to vaccinate its citizens. Poland, Italy and parts of France have ordered that residents stay home, and many businesses have shut before the holiday.

A resurgent virus and lagging vaccinations have forced governments to renege on promises that they would slowly reopen businesses and society as spring approached. That has spurred protests across Europe.

Europe’s vaccine campaign slowed after a small number of cases of blood clots and abnormal bleeding were reported in patients who received the AstraZeneca vaccine, dampening confidence in its safety. While the European drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, cleared the vaccine for use last week and said it was “safe and effective,” the scare further complicated vaccination efforts.

Just three weeks ago, Ms. Merkel and state officials hammered out a road map to reopening that relied on a decline in case rates. But the number of new daily cases in Germany has increased by 69 percent in the past two weeks, to levels last seen in January.

Credit…Regeneron, via Associated Press

A monoclonal antibody treatment developed by the drug maker Regeneron sharply cut the risk of hospitalization and death when given to high-risk Covid-19 patients in a large clinical trial, the company announced on Tuesday.

The results are the latest in a growing flurry of evidence that the infused drugs, meant to mimic the antibodies that the immune system generates naturally in fighting the coronavirus, can help infected patients avoid the worst outcomes if given early.

Regeneron’s treatment, a cocktail of two antibody drugs, was given last fall to President Donald J. Trump shortly after he got sick with Covid-19 and is now one of three such therapies available in the United States.

The new results come from a Phase 3 trial that enrolled more than 4,500 patients beginning in late September, around the time virus cases began to climb dangerously in the United States. The study found that patients who got the infused treatment within 10 days of developing symptoms or testing positive had a roughly 70 percent reduced risk of being hospitalized or dying compared with patients who were infused with a placebo.

“I think these are exciting data,” said Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study.

Even as vaccinations speed up, antibody treatments are expected to be helpful for high-risk people who still get sick for many months at least, and longer still if the virus can’t be wiped out. While there are signs that emerging virus variants may in some cases make antibodies less potent, Regeneron’s cocktail has not shown such vulnerability in laboratory tests.

In the new findings, Regeneron’s treatment worked equally well when given at half the dosing at which it was authorized. Regeneron said that it planned to request that the Food and Drug Administration allow the treatment to be given at that reduced strength.

Such a change would bring several advantages: While the cocktail is safe, getting it at a lower dose reduces the odds of side effects, such as an infusion reaction.

It would also allow Regeneron to increase the supply it can provide the United States. The company said that it had expected to supply the country with about 750,000 doses at the originally authorized higher strength by the end of June. If the lower strength is authorized, the company expects to provide about 1.25 million doses by then.

The antibody treatments from Regeneron and the drug maker Eli Lilly, which makes the other two such drugs authorized in the United States, were expected to be in high demand and to serve as a bridge in fighting the pandemic before vaccinations ramped up. Instead, they ended up sitting on refrigerator shelves in many places even during recent surges.

Many patients and their doctors did not know to ask for them or where to find them. Overwhelmed hospitals lacked the bandwidth to prioritize giving out the treatments. And some doctors were unconvinced by the relatively weak evidence available last fall supporting their use.

That picture is gradually shifting, thanks to improved logistics and more awareness. And more solid evidence, like the new data from Regeneron, also appears to be helping the drugs get used more widely. “As the data get stronger and stronger, I would expect that use will increase,” Dr. Gandhi said.

Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Positive trends in pandemic statistics in the United States are easy to distrust. After all, the country went through two false dawns last year, in the late spring and then again in the late summer, when declines in case reports prefaced even darker days. Each time, the apparent good news prompted relaxations and reopenings that helped bring on the next wave.

So it is no surprise that public health experts are wary about the latest flattening in the curve of the pandemic, from the steep decline in cases seen in late January and February to something like a plateau or slight decline more recently. With more contagious virus variants becoming prevalent, they fear the good news could be ending and a fourth wave might be building.

On Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, again warned Americans about the spread of the coronavirus, saying that with increased travel, looser pandemic restrictions and worrisome variants bearing down on the United States, another surge could erupt if Americans did not take protection efforts seriously “for just a little bit longer.”

“We are at a critical point in this pandemic, a fork in the road, where we as a country must decide which path we are going to take. We must act now,” said Dr. Walensky, who has been one of many federal officials in recent weeks to warn governors against lifting mask mandates too soon. “And I am worried that if we don’t take the right actions now, we will have another avoidable surge, just as we are seeing in Europe right now and just as we are so aggressively scaling up vaccination.”

That said, there are positive signs:

Daily death reports, which stayed stubbornly high long after the post-holidays surge, have finally come down sharply, to levels not seen since mid-November. As of Monday, the nation had averaged 1,051 newly reported virus deaths a day over the past week; the average had hovered around 3,000 for weeks over the winter.
Some recent hot spots have made major progress — notably Los Angeles, whose mayor, Eric Garcetti, said on CBS on Sunday that he had “not felt this optimism in 12 months.” The city and surrounding county, where cases in some areas leapt 450 percent over the holidays and hospitals became so swamped that some turned away ambulances, now has a test positivity rate of about 1.9 percent, and in an important shift, new case reports have fallen among people experiencing homelessness.
Vaccinations are becoming more accessible by the week, as states receive more doses and open up eligibility, in some cases to include all adult residents. The number of doses administered nationwide each day is rising, and the country surpassed President Biden’s initial goal to have administered 100 million shots on March 19, almost six weeks ahead of schedule.

The question now is which will prevail: the positive effects of trends like these or the negative effects of looser behavior and the evolution of the virus into more dangerous forms?

It’s still “a race between vaccinations and variants,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Twitter. Like other experts, he cautioned: “Opening up too fast helps the variants.”

Noah Weiland contributed reporting.

Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

In the fall, after Samar Khan came down with a mild case of Covid-19, she expected to recover and return to her previous energetic life in Chicago. She was 25 and healthy.

But weeks later, she said, “this weird constellation of symptoms began to set in.”

She had blurred vision encircled with halos. She had ringing in her ears, and everything began to smell like cigarettes or Lysol. One leg started to tingle, and her hands would tremble while she was putting on eyeliner.

She also developed “really intense brain fog,” she said. Trying to concentrate on a call for her job in financial services, she felt as if she had come out of anesthesia.

By the end of the year, Ms. Khan was referred to a special clinic for Covid-related neurological symptoms at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which has been evaluating and counseling hundreds of people with similar problems.

Now, the clinic has published the first study focused on long-term neurological symptoms in people who were never physically sick enough from Covid-19 to need hospitalization, including Ms. Khan.

The study of 100 patients from 21 states, published on Tuesday in The Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, found that 85 percent of them experienced four or more neurological issues like brain fog, headaches, tingling, muscle pain and dizziness.

“We are seeing people who are really highly, highly functional individuals, used to multitasking all the time and being on top of their game, but, all of a sudden, it’s really a struggle for them,” said Dr. Igor J. Koralnik, the chief of neuro-infectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine, who oversees the clinic and is the senior author of the study.

Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

With virus cases seeming to stabilize in New York City and vaccinations becoming more widespread, city officials intend to send a message that New York is close to returning to normal: On May 3, the city will compel its municipal office employees to begin to report to work in person, according to planning documents shared with The New York Times. Workers will return in phases over several weeks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to bring the nation’s largest municipal work force back to the office signals a remarkable turnabout in the fortunes of a city that was the national epicenter of the pandemic, coming to symbolize the perils of living in densely packed global capitals.

The move is meant to broadcast that New York City will soon be open for business, and to encourage private companies to follow suit.

The new policy is expected to affect about 80,000 employees who have been working remotely, including caseworkers, computer specialists and clerical associates. The rest of the city’s roughly 300,000-person work force, many of them uniformed personnel including police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers, have already been reporting to work sites.

“Above all else, this is a major momentum builder,” said Reggie Thomas, a senior vice president with the Real Estate Board of New York.

Yet the move has spurred concern among some workers and union leaders who fear it is premature. New York City still has among the highest coronavirus case rates in the nation. Many workers will have to commute an hour or more on mass transit.

Facial masks will be strongly encouraged but not required: A March 18 presentation from the city’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services said agency leaders should “encourage face coverings to be worn at all times even if six-feet distancing can be maintained.” The provision allows workers to remove face coverings if they are more than six feet apart.

Vaccination will not be mandatory for those returning to the office because of legal concerns, though city officials are strongly encouraging their workers to get vaccinated and are trying to facilitate that process.

Credit…Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Residents of England who travel abroad without a valid reason will be fined 5,000 pounds, or $6,900, under coronavirus regulations that are scheduled to come into force on Monday if lawmakers approve.

Daily coronavirus deaths in Britain have dropped to their lowest level since fall, thanks in part to a vaccination program that has already reached more than half the adult population, and the country is preparing to slowly reopen its economy after months of national lockdown. A stay-at-home order is to be lifted on Monday, though many shops and other businesses will be closed until mid-April or later.

Travel abroad for leisure is banned until May 17 at the earliest, and the new regulations signal a potentially longer wait for vacationers.

If the new regulations are approved, travelers would have to provide a valid excuse for leaving the country, which would include some essential work, elite sports competitions and education. But opposition lawmakers have criticized an exemption that would allow travel “in connection with the purchase, sale, letting or rental of a residential property,” arguing that it would privilege those wealthy enough to own a second residence. Travel without an essential reason is also banned in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The legislation, which is set to be reviewed on April 12 and expire at the end of June, would also renew a ban on indoor gatherings and limit outdoor gatherings to six people. Lawmakers on Thursday will also vote on extending a coronavirus act that gave the government emergency powers during the pandemic, which has caused friction among some members of the governing Conservative Party who have called the laws extreme.

It comes as the country marks the one year since Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown. Britain has reported at least 4.3 million cases and over 126,000 deaths according to a New York Times database.

Credit…Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

Cineworld, the parent company of the U.S. movie theater chain Regal Cinemas, announced on Tuesday that it would reopen its cinemas in the United States in April and in Britain in May as those countries ease lockdown restrictions.

“We have long-awaited this moment,” said Mooky Greidinger, the chief executive of Cineworld, which is based in London. “With capacity restrictions expanding to 50 percent or more across most U.S. states, we will be able to operate profitably in our biggest markets.”

Regal Cinemas is the second largest theater chain in the United States, after AMC Theaters. The announcement by Cineworld comes six months after the movie theater chains were forced to shut down across the United States and Britain last October in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The decision affected a total of 45,000 employees in both countries and forced studios to postpone film releases.

Cineworld also announced a multiyear agreement with Warner Bros. starting in 2022 that will allow the theater chain to show the studios’ films for 45 days in the United States and 31 days in Britain. The deal shortens the typical window that theaters have to show movies before they are released to on-demand streaming services.

The reopening plans in the United States will coincide with the release of two movies from Warner Bros. Pictures, “Godzilla vs. Kong” on April 2 and “Mortal Kombat” on April 16.

“We are very happy for the agreement with Warner Bros.,” Mr. Greidinger said. “This agreement shows the studio’s commitment to the theatrical business.”

Last week, AMC Theaters announced the reopening of nearly all of its U.S. theaters.

The moves come at a time of concern that looser restrictions will lead to rise in coronavirus cases. On Monday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that relaxed pandemic restrictions could lead to another spike. “If we don’t take the right actions now,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, “we will have another avoidable surge.”

In September, Cineworld reported a pretax loss of $1.6 billion for the first half of 2020. In 2019, 90 percent of the company’s revenue was generated in the United States and Britain.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Most school districts in New Jersey have partly reopened, but one in four children still live in a district where public schools are closed. No state in the Northeast had more districts relying on all-virtual teaching in early March than New Jersey, according to Return to Learn, a database created by a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and Davidson College. Nationwide, only seven states had a greater proportion of all-remote instruction.

As the distribution of vaccines has accelerated and President Biden has signaled a push for broader reopenings, frustration among parents has grown, particularly in New Jersey’s affluent suburbs, where schools with stellar reputations are a key reason families are willing to pay some of the nation’s highest taxes.

These parents have filed federal lawsuits, held protests, created online petitions and shown up at virtual board of education meetings to demand expanded in-person instruction.

The pressure to open schools more fully comes as the infection rate in New Jersey, which is small and densely populated, remains stubbornly high: With a weekly average of 45 cases for every 100,000 residents, the state leads the nation in new infections per capita, according to a New York Times database.

The drumbeat intensified after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a major policy shift on Friday, reducing its distancing recommendations to three feet from six feet for all elementary schools and for middle and high schools in areas where the virus infection rate is not high.

Anger at the pace of reopening has led some families who can afford it to enroll their children in private schools, start home-schooling them or move. If enough children leave a district in New Jersey, it could lead to cuts in state aid, scaled-back programming or potentially layoffs.

Several New Jersey cities and counties have held educator-only vaccine distribution events. But the virus’s hold on the state has left teachers and their powerful unions wary of expanded reopening.

Credit…Divyakant Solanki/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mumbai, India’s financial hub, has begun random testing for the coronavirus in malls, railway stations and other crowded places as officials attempt to tamp down on a worrying surge in cases.

Rapid antigen tests will be taken without individuals’ consent, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai said in a statement on Monday. Anyone who resists will be in violation of India’s colonial-era epidemic act, which gives the government the power to fine or imprison people who violate rules to contain an outbreak.

“We are trying to implement the existing protocol to the strictest possible level: use of face mask, regulating the number of people in one event, use of hand sanitizer, and now tests,” Suresh Kakani, a senior municipal official in Mumbai, told The New York Times.

Active Covid-19 cases in Mumbai have risen by more than 140 percent since March 1. With variants circulating and commercial activity almost back to prepandemic levels, the number of infections has also shot up in the surrounding state of Maharashtra. An entire district was forced back into lockdown last week.

Mr. Kakani said officials are determined to avert another lockdown in Mumbai, the city of 20 million that is home to Bollywood, India’s film industry, as well as the country’s largest stock exchange.

Another lockdown would be economically disastrous for India, which is just starting to recover from a lockdown last year that triggered a humanitarian crisis, as millions of migrant workers fled cities for their home villages, and a recession.

Tags Covid19, Live, News, Updates, Vaccine

Business

Nike shares fall after blended earnings report, layoffs information

Post author By
Post date March 19, 2021

Nike shares fall after mixed earnings report, layoffs news

A man wearing a face mask walks past a Nike store in the Central Business District, Beijing, China on Feb.17, 2020.

Andrea Verdelli | Getty Images

Nike shares fell Friday after the company reported mixed earnings for the third quarter late Thursday and confirmed it was laying off employees.

Shares fell nearly 4% at noon. The stock is up more than 95% over the past year and has a market value of $ 217 billion.

Nike didn’t announce the downsizing in its earnings report on Thursday or speak to investors. The layoffs were first reported by The Oregonian, which covers the Portland-based sneaker company.

Nike said the cuts follow layoffs that began last summer. As of May 31, 2020, Nike had approximately 75,400 employees worldwide, according to a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a prepared statement, Nike focused on “shifting resources and building capacity to invest in our growth areas with the highest potential”.

“We’re building a flatter, nippier company and transforming Nike faster to define the marketplace of the future,” it said.

On Thursday, the sportswear retailer announced that its sales in North America were down 10% year over year for the third fiscal quarter ending February 28, as lagging ports delayed shipments. This resulted in goods arriving late for weeks in their own stores and at wholesale partners such as department stores and sports stores, and increased the risk of them ending up on the clearance shelf.

Sales at its stores in Europe, the Middle East and Africa also fell during the quarter due to closings and restrictions related to pandemics, Nike said.

“The good news here is that supply chain problems will subside over the next few quarters, while Europe will open up in time if the vaccine continues to roll out,” Jefferies analyst Randal Konik said in a research report. Konik rates Nike shares with a price target of $ 140.

Nike pointed to bright spots like the growth of its direct customer business, momentum in China and strong online sales. The company announced that it had reached its first quarter of $ 1 billion in online sales in North America as consumers bought new gym shoes and workout clothing while they were at home. In Greater China, sales rose 51%. And the company expects a similar revival in sales as other countries rebound from the pandemic.

Tags earnings, fall, Layoffs, Mixed, News, Nike, report, Shares

World News

Covid-19 and Vaccine Information: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date March 19, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

VideoPrime Minister Jean Castex of France said on Thursday that several regions, including the Paris area, would again impose strict measures to contain the coronavirus.CreditCredit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Several regions in France, including the area that includes Paris, began a new lockdown on Friday that will last for at least a month, as officials sought to curb a sharp rise in coronavirus cases.

“The situation is worsening,” Primer Minister Jean Castex said on Thursday at a news conference about the restrictions, which will affect about a third of the French population. “Our responsibility now is that it not get out of control.”

The restrictions affect the Paris region, the country’s northern tip and the area surrounding the southern city of Nice.

Businesses considered nonessential are forced to close, outdoor activities are limited to within a six-mile radius of a person’s home, and travel to other regions is banned. Schools will remain open, Mr. Castex said.

On Thursday, France reported 35,000 new coronavirus cases, according to a New York Times database — one of the highest numbers since November, when a second wave of infection forced the entire country into lockdown. The country’s slow inoculation campaign, further set back by a temporary suspension of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, has not helped.

France, along with Germany, Italy and Spain, said on Thursday that it would resume using the AstraZeneca vaccine, within hours of the European Medicines Agency declaring it safe. Norway said it would await further study. But officials worry that a fearful public may not be easily reassured.

Coronavirus infections in France rose 24 percent from the previous week. The variant first identified in Britain now represents three-quarters of new cases.

The Paris region has borne the brunt of it. Last week, health officials in Paris ordered hospitals to cancel many of their procedures to make room for Covid-19 patients. And this week some patients were transferred to other regions to ease the pressure on hospitals.

France has been under a nighttime curfew since mid-January, with restaurants, cafes and museums remaining closed. Making a calculated gamble, the government tried to tighten restrictions just enough to stave off a third wave of infections without taking more severe steps that might hurt the economy.

But as infections started to increase in late February, the government imposed new lockdowns on weekends in the French Riviera, the famed strip along the Mediterranean coast, and in the area surrounding the northern port of Dunkirk. Officials made clear that more lockdowns might follow in other regions.

The new restrictions will affect about a third of the population, though they don’t go as far as those imposed a year ago, at the start of the epidemic.

Primary schools and secondary schools will remain open, and the rules for high schools and universities will remain much the same, with attendance limited to prevent infections. People will also be allowed to take walks and exercise with no time limit.

Though nonessential shops will close, the definition of essential has been expanded to include bookshops and music shops.

Bruno Riou, the head of the crisis center for Paris public hospitals, said a lockdown was the only remaining option to prevent more deaths, given that less than 9 percent of the population has received at least a first vaccination dose.

“I hear a lot of people saying that a week without a lockdown is a week that’s gained,” Mr. Riou said. “For me, it’s a week that’s lost.”

United States ›	United StatesOn March 18	14-day change
New cases	60,782	–13%
New deaths	1,549	–29%

World ›	WorldOn March 18	14-day change
New cases	507,132	+21%
New deaths	9,561	Flat

U.S. vaccinations ›

Video

transcript

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transcript

Biden: U.S. on Track for 100 Million Vaccinations Since Jan. 20

President Biden said Thursday the U.S. would on Friday reach his Covid-19 vaccine goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, though he had earlier conceded they should aim higher.

In the last week, we’ve seen increases in the number of cases in several states — scientists have made clear that things may get worse as new variants of this virus spread. Getting vaccinated is the best thing we can do to fight back against these variants. While millions of people are vaccinated, we need millions more to be vaccinated. And I’m proud to announce that tomorrow, 58 days into our administration, we will have met my goal of administering 100 million shots to our fellow Americans. That’s weeks ahead of schedule. Eight weeks ago, only 8 percent of seniors, those most vulnerable to Covid-19, had received a vaccination. Today, 65 percent of people age 65 or older have received at least one shot. And 36 percent are fully vaccinated. This is a time for optimism, but it’s not a time for relaxation. I need all Americans, I need all of you to do your part. Keep the faith, keep wearing the mask, keep washing your hands and keep socially distanced. We’re going to beat this. We’re way ahead of schedule, but we’ve got a long way to go.

President Biden said Thursday the U.S. would on Friday reach his Covid-19 vaccine goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, though he had earlier conceded they should aim higher.CreditCredit…Jon Cherry for The New York Times

As more states expand eligibility for coronavirus vaccinations, the pace of daily shots administered in the United States has steadily increased to a rate that is now 12 percent higher than it was a week ago.

On Thursday, Illinois joined a growing list of at least 16 other states announcing that they were opening appointments to all residents 16 years and older this month or next.

“The light that we can see at end of the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter as more people get vaccinated,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at a news conference.

President Biden said on Thursday that the United States was a day away from reaching his goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days — with six weeks to spare before his self-imposed deadline.

“We’re way ahead of schedule,” he said in brief remarks from the White House, “but we have a long way to go.”

Mr. Biden maintained that the 100 million-shot goal was ambitious, even though he conceded in January that the government should be aiming higher. And though the new administration has bulked up the vaccine production and distribution campaign, its key elements were in place before Mr. Biden took office.

As of Thursday, the seven-day average was about 2.5 million doses a day, according to a New York Times analysis of data reported from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last week, Mr. Biden set a deadline of May 1 for states to make vaccines available to all adult residents. At least Maine, Virginia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, in addition to Washington, D.C., plan to meet that goal. Others, including Colorado, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan and Montana, hope to make vaccines available to all of their adult residents even earlier.

Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah said opening up eligibility to all adults in his state would help address vaccine equity and reach rural communities. He also said it would “allow us to take our mobile vaccination clinics into these hard-to-reach areas or populations who may have a little more vaccine hesitancy.”

Other states have also pushed up their eligibility dates: Nevada will make vaccines available to all adults on April 5; Missouri on April 9; Maryland as of April 27; and Rhode Island starting April 19.

New York has yet to make all adults eligible, but the state recently expanded to include public-facing government employees, nonprofit workers and essential building service workers. On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, newly eligible because of the change, received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a news conference.

Eligible only in some counties

Credit…Nishant S. Gurung/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KATHMANDU, Nepal — A peculiar vaccine drama is unfolding at the international airport in Nepal’s capital. It involves a member of Bahrain’s royal family who arrived with thousands of doses of coronavirus vaccines from China for an expedition to Mount Everest.

Before setting out, a team of Bahraini climbers led by Sheikh Mohamed Hamad Mohamed al-Khalifa had announced that they would be coming with 2,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines, which Nepal’s government said would be of the AstraZeneca kind.

This move would fulfill a pledge that the climbers had made to local villagers during another expedition last September — a promise of generosity that led the villagers to name a local hill “Bahrain Peak.”

But when the climbers arrived in the capital, Kathmandu, on Monday, an inquiry by Nepal’s drug regulators found that the vaccines they were carrying were actually the one developed by Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned vaccine maker.

The Nepali authorities now find themselves in a fix: whether to accept the vaccine doses or refuse.

The doses are being held in cold storage at the airport, and the climbers have been quarantined at a hotel as the authorities ponder how to handle the situation.

Nepal has largely relied on the AstraZeneca vaccine for its rollout, which is off to a slow start. Relying on a donation of one million doses from India, Nepal has vaccinated about 1.7 million people in a country of about 30 million.

Its efforts have been slowed because of a delay in the delivery of two million vaccine doses that it bought from the Serum Institute of India.

Although Nepal approved the emergency use of the Sinopharm vaccine after China pledged to give 500,000 doses to the country, it has not received the Chinese donation.

In September, the Bahraini climbers arrived in Nepal in a chartered plane to climb two mountains, Mount Manaslu and Lobuche Peak. The vaccine doses they were carrying this week were a gift for villagers in Samagaun, a gateway to Mount Manaslu.

The team of Bahraini climbers could not be reached for comment. But Mingma Sherpa, the owner of Seven Summit Treks, the agency that has been organizing the Bahrain team’s Everest expedition, said the complications might have resulted from miscommunication between Nepal’s foreign ministry and the health ministry.

He said the Sinopharm vaccine had also been used during Bahrain’s vaccination drive.

“It’s up to the government,” Mr. Sherpa said. “If they think it’s OK, the vaccines will be administered to villagers. If they think it’s risky to vaccinate the people, the team will take the vaccine back to Bahrain.”

Credit…Moscow City Court Press Service, via Shutterstock

A Russian court has confined some of the country’s most prominent opposition figures to house arrest on accusations that they violated coronavirus safety rules, in what appears to be a government effort to use the restrictions to muzzle its opponents.

The legal action, known as a “sanitary case,” targets 10 opposition politicians and dissidents, including the senior leadership of Aleksei A. Navalny’s organization and members of the protest group Pussy Riot. All are accused of inciting others to violate rules introduced last spring to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Their lawyers have denied that they did.

Prosecutors say their social media posts promoting a protest in Moscow in January resulted in attendance by 19 people who were legally required to isolate because of positive Covid-19 tests, thus putting at risk others who attended.

Defense lawyers say the authorities are cynically twisting coronavirus rules to isolate people who pose no infection risk but are seen by the government as posing a political one.

“The ideological intent is to label opposition figures as infectious, as toxic, as poisoners of the public,” said Danil Berman, a lawyer for Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot who was one of those targeted. Isolating key leaders before parliamentary elections scheduled for this year also hobbles the opposition, he said.

Many people around the world have complained that coronavirus restrictions have infringed on their freedoms as a byproduct of safety measures. But the Russian opposition members argue that the government is using the restrictions against them with the specific aim of curbing their liberty.

Online posts from the opposition figures promoting the protest did not specifically encourage people who were sick to attend, as the government charged, defense lawyers say. Lockdowns in Moscow had in any case been mostly lifted months earlier.

Also, the defense lawyers say, the rules are selectively enforced to restrict opposition activity while allowing pro-government events to go ahead with few restrictions, though the virus would spread as readily at either type of gathering.

Credit…Nikki Boliaux for The New York Times

Last June, as Americans began to emerge from lockdowns and into a new yet still uncertain stage of the pandemic, Amy Ryan and her family set sail in a 44-foot catamaran and headed up the Atlantic coast. They haven’t stopped sailing since.

Ms. Ryan’s husband, Casey Ryan, 56, was on partly paid leave from his job as an airline pilot. School was remote for their daughters, now 7 and 11. Ms. Ryan, a real estate agent, could manage her team from anywhere.

For nine months, the Ryans have been hopscotching, first up the coast and later in the Caribbean. “We’re so secluded most of the time, we won’t see any people on land for weeks at a time,” Ms. Ryan said. The biggest challenge is finding a Covid-19 test before setting sail for a new location.

For many people, the past 12 months have been lived in a state of suspended animation, with dreams and plans deferred until further notice amid worry over venturing out for even basic excursions. But some people, like the Ryans, took the restrictions — virtual school and remote work — as an opportunity to pick up and go somewhere else. With a good internet connection, a Zoom conference call can happen just as easily on a boat or in the back of a camper as it can in a living room.

Many people bristle at the idea of anyone taking a trip at all, let alone traveling indefinitely at a time of immense suffering. School and office closings weren’t meant to make it easier to see the world; they were intended to persuade people to stay home and slow the spread of a deadly virus. And with many out of work and struggling to pay bills, or trying to balance parenting with the demands of remote work, it would have been impossible.

But these families insist that their “slow travel” methods — allowing for only rare encounters with other people indoors — are no more dangerous than staying home. Spend your time crisscrossing the country in a camper and staying in state parks, and you rarely encounter anyone outside your family, except to get food and gas.

“This pandemic has been so incredibly hard for everybody, and people are finding their ways of managing and getting through it,” said Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, adding that isolated activities like sailing and camping are not inherently risky.

Until the pandemic, the Ryans weren’t sailors, nor had they ever planned to be. But they spent the lockdown watching YouTube videos about families that sail. By May, they had bought a boat with no idea how long they would be on it.

“If it hadn’t been for Covid,” Ms. Ryan said, “there is no way this would have happened.”

Credit…Bryon Houlgrave/The Des Moines Register, via Associated Press

For the first time in nearly a year, Iowa is reporting that there are no active coronavirus outbreaks in any of the state’s long-term care facilities.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 2,200 residents of those facilities have died from the virus, according to Iowa’s Covid-19 dashboard. But the rate of outbreaks began a steep decline in January, when the state ramped up vaccinations for residents and staff.

In the first two weeks of January alone, cases declined 70 percent, from 410 to 119 by mid-January, according to the Iowa Health Care Association. Of the state’s 445 skilled nursing homes and 258 assisted-living facilities, 146 were experiencing outbreaks in December.

“This is a big milestone,” said Nola Aigner Davis, the public health communications officer for the Polk County Health Department in Des Moines. “It really speaks volumes of how effective this vaccine is.”

For much of the pandemic, residents and employees in nursing homes have been among the most vulnerable people in the country.

The coronavirus, as of late February, had scythed through more than 31,000 long-term care facilities and killed at least 172,000 people living and working in them. More than 1.3 million long-term care residents and workers have been infected over the past year.

Of Iowa’s 5,673 deaths, nearly 60 percent were people over age 80.

That has changed, however, with the advent of vaccinations.

Facilities for older people were given early priority for shots, and from late December to early February, a New York Times analysis found, new cases among nursing home residents — a subset of long-term care residents — fell more than 80 percent. That was about double the rate of improvement in the general population.

Even as fatalities were peaking in the general population, deaths inside the facilities decreased more than 65 percent.

About 4.8 million residents and employees in long-term care facilities have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2.8 million have been fully vaccinated.

Tags Covid19, Live, News, Updates, Vaccine

Business

Jobless Claims and Different Enterprise Information: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date March 18, 2021

A restaurant in Seattle this month. The economy, still suffering from the pandemic, is showing signs of growth as more and more people are being vaccinated.

Here’s what you need to know:

Recognition…Ruth Fremson / The New York Times

The surge in jobless claims last March was one of the first clear warnings of the havoc the pandemic has wreaked in the American economy.

A year later this Klaxon is still booming.

Labor ministry data on Thursday morning is expected to show that more than 700,000 people first filed for state unemployment benefits last week. Hundreds of thousands more have likely applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal emergency program that covers freelancers, the self-employed, and others who are not entitled to benefits during normal times.

Last week was the 52nd straight with increased submissions. In a week last March, the number of applications increased tenfold, from less than 300,000 to around three million. They topped six million a week later when businesses across the country shut down.

The numbers have fallen significantly since then, but thanks to at least some measures they remain higher than in any previous recession. And progress has stalled: the first weekly claims under regular programs and emergency programs combined have been just over a million since last fall.

“It’s going a little bit up, it’s going down, but we really haven’t seen much progress,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for Indeed careers site. “After a year I ask myself: What does it take to fix the size problem? How is this going to end? “

Most forecasters expect the labor market recovery to accelerate in the coming months as warmer weather and rising vaccination rates allow more businesses to reopen and new state aid encourages Americans to go out and spend. Federal Reserve policymakers said Wednesday they expected the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5 percent by the end of the year, a marked improvement from the 5 percent they forecast three months ago.

Recognition…Rebecca Cook / Reuters

Many Ford Motor employees will have to continue working remotely for at least some time after the pandemic ends.

The company announced on Wednesday that it would move to a “flexible hybrid work model” that would allow workers to stay at home to work focused and come to the office for collaboration-based activities like team building exercises.

In the United States, Ford currently has more than 30,000 employees working remotely due to the pandemic. The new system will go into effect in July when the company, which has its main campus in Dearborn, Michigan, is expected to gradually bring more employees back to the office, it said.

“Any non-location-based employee, starting with our executive team, will participate in the hybrid approach,” wrote Kiersten Robinson, the company’s chief people officer, in a handbook distributed to employees. “While we recognize that this requires different skills and resources, we see it as a great accelerator and competitive advantage for the company. This enables us to be agile and nimble and to realize the full potential of our team. “

Ford is the latest to announce that remote working will continue even after the pandemic ends.

In February, San Francisco-based Salesforce announced that the majority of the global workforce would no longer need to return to the office after the pandemic ended, and adopted a Work From Anywhere plan that would give employees flexibility in how, when, and how How offers where they work. Target has also announced it will switch to a partially removed model and lose some of its office space.

The Commerce Department said Wednesday it had issued subpoenas to several Chinese companies asking them to provide the government with more information about their use and transfer of American data to ensure confidential information is not leaked to China.

The department has not clarified which Chinese companies are affected.

“With the issuance of subpoenas today, we are taking an important step in collecting information that will enable us to take possible measures that will best protect the security of American companies, American workers, and the national security of the United States,” said Gina Raimondo, Trade Secretary. said in a statement.

“The government is determined to take a state-wide approach to ensuring that untrustworthy companies cannot misuse and abuse data and to ensure that US technology does not support the malicious activities of China or other actors,” she said.

The subpoenas are part of a review of company activities related to an information and communications technology and services industry executive order issued by the Trump administration.

The order would give the Department of Commerce extensive powers to conduct police transactions by companies in the industry that are owned by foreign nations and pose a risk to US national security. The measure, which was first adopted in May 2019, has been criticized for its vague wording and the fact that it leaves the Secretary of Commerce with so much discretion.

Recognition…Bob Miller for the New York Times

The latest figure for the median wage in the greater Birmingham, Alabama area was nearly $ 3 higher than Amazon’s wages in its Bessemer warehouse, although Amazon advertises that most ordinary workers there make about $ 15.50 an hour .

It is common for employers facing a union vote to stress the generosity of their wages and suggest that workers could be worse off if they unionized, reports Noam Scheiber for the New York Times.

The catch is that wages in establishments that have successfully avoided unionisation tend to be significantly higher than typical wages in their areas, which makes workers feel that they have something valuable to lose.

Seasoned production workers earned $ 23.50 an hour at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019 when they were considering union formation.
The comparable figure was $ 23 at Boeing’s South Carolina facility when workers were voting on a union.
At the Nissan plant in Mississippi, the number at the vote there was also $ 26 in 2017.

The union lost in all three cases.

In contrast, unions have been successful when companies have kept wages low. In the first half of the 2010s, workers at several auto parts suppliers in Alabama and elsewhere in the south were unionized, often citing low wages and benefits as a nuisance.

In 2015, employees of the Commercial Vehicle Group in Piedmont, Ala., Which makes seats for trucks, voted, roughly two-to-one, to join the United Automobile Workers union. Workers at the plant complained about wages that started at $ 9.70 an hour for contract workers and started at $ 15.80 for full-time workers.

“Workers always say this: it’s about respect, appreciation,” said Gary Casteel, the former UAW second-rate officer who oversaw much of the organization in the south. “That’s not the case. It’s about the money. Everyone wants to get paid more.”

The Internal Revenue Service will give Americans until May 17 to file their taxes, the agency said on Wednesday. The IRS stressed that the additional time only applies to federal returns and not to state returns. Therefore, taxpayers should check with their state tax authorities about changes to the deadlines. This also does not apply to estimated tax payments that are due on April 15th and are still due on that day.
The latest Federal Reserve projections showed that central bank policymakers do not expect interest rates to rise until at least 2023. The Fed is also buying $ 120 billion a month in bonds – $ 80 billion worth of government bonds plus $ 40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities in debt. Fed chairman Jerome Powell announced on Wednesday that the Fed was unwilling to even talk about when to cut back on that support. “We will look ahead carefully,” he said. “When we see that we are on the right track” then “we will say it, and we will say it so long before any decision to actually rejuvenate” is made. “

Tags business, Claims, jobless, Live, News, Updates

World News

Covid-19 Dwell Information Updates: Vaccine Eligibility, Variants and Tourism

Post author By
Post date March 17, 2021

An empty Montmartre district in Paris last April. The European Union hopes to restore the summer tourism market this year.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

The European Union proposed a Covid-19 certificate on Wednesday that would allow people to travel more freely, a move aimed at saving the summer tourist season for member states that depend on it economically.

The proposed document, known as a Digital Green Certificate, would allow residents of member nations to travel at will within the bloc if they have proof of Covid-19 vaccination, a negative test result or a documented recovery from the coronavirus.

The certificates would be free and would be available in digital or paper format.

“The Digital Green Certificate will not be a precondition to free movement, and it will not discriminate in any way,” said Didier Reynders, the bloc’s top official for justice, adding that the aim was to “gradually restore free movement within the E.U. and avoid fragmentation.”

Freedom of movement is a cornerstone of the bloc, but travel restrictions are traditionally under the purview of national governments. The commission’s plan is a bid to coordinate what has become a patchwork of national measures that are hindering travel within the bloc.

Under the proposed rules, national governments could decide which travel restrictions, such as obligatory quarantine, would be lifted for certificate holders.

The proposals, which require approval by the European Parliament and the majority of member states, come as many European countries are experiencing a third wave of infections and an inoculation effort that has been slowed by doubts over AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine. Several countries have suspended use of the vaccine at least temporarily, confusing citizens and possibly increasing resistance to vaccinations.

The hope is to make the certificates operational by mid-June in order to salvage the summer season.

Just under 10 percent of European Union residents have been vaccinated, leaving the bloc far behind Britain and the United States.

As the European Union was offering its proposal to allow greater freedom of movement, Kwasi Kwarteng, the British business secretary, said the government was continuing to look at ways that would allow people to travel.

“We are having conversations all the time about what the next steps should be,” he told the BBC, adding that the government was stressing on the importance of allowing people to travel safely.

An earlier version of this item misstated where the Digital Green Certificate would be valid. The document would be used for travel in all European Union member countries, not in all countries of the border-free Schengen area, which excludes some E.U. members and includes some nonmembers.

United States ›	United StatesOn March 16	14-day change
New cases	54,440	–16%
New deaths	1,245	–35%

World ›	WorldOn March 16	14-day change
New cases	456,093	+15%
New deaths	9,988	–5%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Not long ago, Covid-19 vaccines were available only to the most vulnerable Americans and some essential workers. That is quickly changing as vaccine production and distribution ramp up and more states begin to heed a call from President Biden to expand access to all adults by May.

States are also racing to stay ahead of the growing number of virus variants, some of which are more contagious and possibly even more deadly. At least three states — Maine, Virginia and Wisconsin — and Washington, D.C., have said that they will expand eligibility to their general population by May 1, the deadline that Mr. Biden set last week. Other states — including Colorado, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana and Utah — hope to do so this month or next.

In Mississippi and Alaska, everyone age 16 or older is eligible, and Arizona and Michigan have made the vaccines available to all adults in some counties.

Mr. Biden said last week that he was directing the federal government to secure an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. With three vaccines now in use, Mr. Biden has said that the United States will have secured enough doses by the end of May for shots to be available for all adults.

Eligible only in some counties

Several states have already been expanding eligibility for vaccinations. In Ohio, vaccines will open to anyone 40 and up as of Friday, and to more residents with certain medical conditions. Indiana extended access to people 45 and older, effective immediately.

In Massachusetts, residents 60 years and older, as well as people who work in small spaces and those whose work requires regular public interaction, will be eligible for a vaccine on March 22, the state announced Wednesday. Residents 55 and older with certain medical conditions will be eligible on April 5, and everyone else 16 years and older will be eligible on April 19.

Coloradans age 50 and up will be eligible for a shot on Friday, along with anyone 16 years and older with certain medical conditions. Wisconsin said on Tuesday that residents 16 years and up with certain medical conditions would be eligible a week earlier than initially planned.

On Monday, Texans age 50 and older and Georgians over 55 became eligible for vaccines.

In New York State, residents 60 and older are eligible to receive a vaccine, and more frontline workers became eligible on Wednesday, including government employees, building services workers and employees of nonprofit groups.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has yet to announce how or when the state will expand eligibility to all adults. On Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo, 63, received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a church in Harlem, which he framed as an effort to boost vaccination rates among the state’s Black communities.

Since vaccinations began in December, the federal government has delivered nearly 143 million vaccine doses to states and territories, and more than 77 percent have been administered, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country is averaging about 2.4 million shots a day, compared with well under one million a day in January.

As of Tuesday, 65 percent of the country’s older population had received at least one vaccine dose, according to C.D.C. data, with 37 percent fully vaccinated.

Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

The World Health Organization and the head of the European Commission urged European countries to use the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine and expressed confidence that it was safe, as investigations continue into unusual cases of side effects that led several countries to pause administering the shots.

The head of the W.H.O.’s vaccines department, Dr. Kate O’Brien, said cases of blood clots reported among millions of Europeans who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine were rare. And, she said, it was not unusual that some of those vaccinated should suffer blood clots resulting from other health conditions. No causative link has yet emerged between the vaccine and blood clots or severe bleeding.

“At this point the benefit-risk assessment is to continue with vaccination,” Dr. O’Brien said, repeating the responses both organizations have offered as some member countries have paused administering doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine following some reports of fatal brain hemorrhaging, blood clots and unusual bleeding in a handful of people who received it.

The European Union’s top drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, is expected to give its assessment of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Thursday. It has so far also pushed back against concerns about the shot, saying there was no sign that it caused dangerous problems. On Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, said, “I trust AstraZeneca, I trust the vaccines.” She added that she was “convinced that the statement will clarify the situation.”

Germany, France, Italy and Spain are the prominent European countries to recently halt their rollouts of the AstraZeneca shots this week. More than a dozen countries have either partly or fully suspended the vaccine’s use while the cases are investigated. Most of the countries said they were doing so as a precaution until leading health agencies could review the cases.

Even if experts ultimately conclude there may be an association between the blood clots and the vaccine “these are very rare events,” Dr. O’Brien said.

Blood clots, thick blobs of blood that can block circulation, form in response to injuries and can also be caused by many illnesses, including cancer and genetic disorders, certain drugs and prolonged sitting or bed rest. If a blood clot travels to the brain, it can be deadly.

The suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in some countries comes at a time when the region is facing a third wave of the virus and further slows Europe’s vaccination campaign, already lagging because of shortages. No E.U. country is currently on pace to vaccinate 70 percent of its population by September.

Ms. von der Leyen said Europe’s vaccination campaign would pick up speed, with 55 million doses of the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine, 200 million of the Pfizer vaccine, 35 million of the Moderna vaccine, and 70 million of AstraZeneca expected in the coming months.

Credit…Laura Boushnak for The New York Times

Stained for years by its brutal role in the horrific Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, Serbia is now basking in the glow of success in a good campaign: the quest to get its people vaccinated.

Serbia has raced ahead of the far richer and usually better-organized countries in Europe to offer all adult citizens not only free inoculations, but also a smorgasbord of five vaccines to choose from.

The country’s unusual surfeit of vaccines has been a public relations triumph for the increasingly authoritarian government of President Aleksandar Vucic. It has burnished his own and his country’s image, weakened his already beleaguered opponents and added a new twist to the complex geopolitics of vaccines.

Serbia, with a population under seven million, placed bets across the board, sealing initial deals for more than 11 million doses with Russia and China, whose products have not been approved by European regulators, as well as with Western drug companies.

It reached its first vaccine deal, covering 2.2 million doses, with Pfizer in August and quickly followed up with contracts for millions more from Russia and China.

As a result, Serbia has become the best vaccinator in Europe after Britain, data collected by OurWorldInData shows. It had administered 29.5 doses for every 100 people as of last week compared with just 10.5 in Germany, a country long viewed as a model of efficiency and good governance, and 10.7 in France.

Serbia’s prime minister, Ana Brnabic, attributed her country’s success to its decision to “treat this as a health issue, not a political issue. We negotiated with all, regardless of whether East or West.”

Serbia’s readiness to embrace non-Western vaccines so far shunned by the European Union could backfire if they turn out to be duds. Sinopharm, unlike Western vaccine makers, has not published detailed data from Phase 3 trials. Data it has released suggest that its product is less effective than Western coronavirus vaccines.

Many Serbians, apparently reassured by the vaccination drive, have also lowered their guard against the risk of infection. The daily number of new cases has more than doubled since early February, prompting the government to order all businesses other than food stores and pharmacies to close last weekend.

Credit…Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via Shutterstock

After a tough year of toggling between remote and in-person schooling, many students, teachers and their families feel burned out from pandemic learning. But companies that market digital learning tools to schools are enjoying a windfall.

Venture and equity financing for education technology start-ups has more than doubled, surging to $12.6 billion worldwide last year from $4.8 billion in 2019, according to a report from CB Insights, a firm that tracks start-ups and venture capital.

Yet as more districts reopen for in-person instruction, the billions of dollars that schools and venture capitalists have sunk into education technology are about to get tested.

“There’s definitely going to be a shakeout over the next year,” said Matthew Gross, the chief executive of Newsela, a popular reading lesson app for schools.

A number of ed-tech start-ups reporting record growth had sizable school audiences before the pandemic. Then last spring, as school districts switched to remote learning, many education apps hit on a common pandemic growth strategy: They temporarily made their premium services free to teachers for the rest of the school year.

“What unfolded from there was massive adoption,” said Tory Patterson, a managing director at Owl Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in education start-ups like Newsela. Once the school year ended, he said, ed-tech start-ups began trying to convert school districts into paying customers, and “we saw pretty broad-based uptake of those offers.”

Some consumer tech giants that provided free services to schools also reaped benefits, gaining audience share and getting millions of students accustomed to using their product.

The worldwide audience for Google Classroom, Google’s free class assignment and grading app, has skyrocketed to more than 150 million students and educators, up from 40 million early last year. And Zoom Video Communications says it has provided free services during the pandemic to more than 125,000 schools in 25 countries.

Whether tools that teachers have come to rely on for remote learning can maintain their popularity will now hinge on how useful the apps are in the classroom.

Credit…Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — The occupied West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip received their first shipment of Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday from the global vaccine sharing initiative Covax, paving the way for Palestinian authorities to start inoculating residents on a wider scale.

The Health Ministry of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority said the vaccines would be administered starting Sunday to medical teams, dialysis and cancer patients, and people who are 75 or older.

The ministry said the shipment included 37,440 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which will be used right away; and 24,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which it initially said would be stored until the World Health Organization issued a scientific opinion on the vaccine’s safety.

Later Wednesday, after the W.H.O. recommended the continued use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the Palestinian health minister, Mai al-Kaila, said the Palestinians would follow that recommendation.

Tor Wennesland, the top United Nations envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called the shipment “a key step in our fight against #Covid19 in the #WestBank & #Gaza.”

The West Bank now faces what Palestinian officials have called the most challenging public health situation since the pandemic first emerged in the territory last year. Occupancy in coronavirus wards has surged, and the authorities have announced a “comprehensive lockdown” between Monday and Saturday. An average of 1,767 new coronavirus cases have been recorded daily over the past week, according to official figures.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank said that before Wednesday, it had received only 12,000 vaccine doses. Officials in Gaza said they had received a total of 62,000 doses, including 2,000 from the Palestinian Authority and 60,000 from the United Arab Emirates.

Israeli security officials said that about 20,000 of the doses that arrived from Covax on Wednesday went to Gaza.

Israel has faced criticism for providing Israeli citizens with significantly greater access to vaccines than it has allowed for Palestinians living under its occupation.

Last week, Israel started inoculating tens of thousands of Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel or in Jewish settlements — the first substantial amount of vaccine it has made available to Palestinians living in the West Bank.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Credit…Sem Van Der Wal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As Dutch voters go to the polls for parliamentary elections this week, the pandemic has changed the usual dynamic.

To help maintain social distancing, the voting process was spread over three days, ending on Wednesday. Voters over 70 were encouraged to vote by mail. And campaigning mainly took place on television, making it hard for voters to spontaneously confront politicians as is typical practice.

Coronavirus cases are again surging in the Netherlands, prompting the authorities to warn of a third wave. Last year, it took the government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte until November to get the country’s testing capabilities in order, and the vaccination process is also going slowly.

Yet during the campaigning, more localized issues managed to overshadow the government’s handling of the coronavirus.

The prime minister and his cabinet resigned in January over a scandal involving the tax authorities’ hunting down people, mostly poor, who had made administrative mistakes in their child benefits requests. Many were brought to financial ruin as a result.

Broader policies put forward by Mr. Rutte, who has been in power since 2010, were also a focus on the campaign trail. While his party is ahead in the polls, it has lost some support in recent weeks.

Neighboring Germany is also entering a packed election season, with national and state votes coming in a year that will bring to an end the 16-year chancellorship of Angela Merkel.

In other developments around the world:

Australia will send 8,000 coronavirus vaccine doses to Papua New Guinea in an attempt to curb a rapidly growing outbreak in the country, which is Australia’s closest neighbor, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday. Australia will also ask AstraZeneca to divert to the small island nation a million vaccine doses that were bound for Australia. And it is suspending all charter flights from Papua New Guinea, where about half of the nation’s total reported 2,351 coronavirus cases have been recorded in the past two weeks.

Credit…Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

When the pandemic narrowed the world, Jonathan Hirshon stopped traveling, eating out, going to cocktail parties and commuting to the office.

What a relief.

Mr. Hirshon experiences severe social anxiety. Even as he grieved the pandemic’s toll, he found lockdown life to be a respite.

Now, with public life about to resume, he finds himself with decidedly mixed feelings — “anticipation, dread and hope.”

Mr. Hirshon, a 54-year-old public relations consultant, is one of numerous people who find the everyday grind not only wearing, but also emotionally unsettling. That includes people with clinical diagnoses of anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, and also some run-of-the-mill introverts.

A new survey from the American Psychological Association found that while 47 percent of people have seen their stress rise over the pandemic, about 43 percent reported no change in stress and 7 percent said they felt less stress.

Mental health experts said that this portion of the population found lockdown measures protective, a sort of permission to glide into more predictable spaces, schedules, routines and relationships. And experts say that while the lockdown periods have blessed the “avoidance” of social situations, the circumstances are poised to change.

“I am very worried about many of my socially anxious patients,” said Andrea Maikovich-Fong, a psychologist in Denver. That anxiety, she said, “is going to come back with a vengeance when the world opens up.”

Credit…Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Former President Donald J. Trump recommended in a nationally televised interview on Tuesday evening that Americans who are reluctant to be vaccinated against the coronavirus should go ahead with inoculations.

Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania, were vaccinated in January. And vaccine proponents have called on him to speak out in favor of the shots to his supporters — many of whom remain reluctant, polls show.

Speaking to Maria Bartiromo on “Fox News Primetime,” Mr. Trump said, “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it — and a lot of those people voted for me frankly.”

He added: “It is a safe vaccine, and it is something that works.”

While there are degrees of opposition to coronavirus vaccination among a number of groups, polling suggests that the opinions break substantially along partisan lines.

A third of Republicans said in a CBS News poll that they would not be vaccinated — compared with 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Other polls have found similar trends.

Mr. Trump encouraged attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., late last month to get vaccinated.

Still, Mr. Trump — whose tenure during the pandemic was often marked by railing against recommendations from medical experts — said on Tuesday that “we have our freedoms and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also.”

With President Biden’s administration readying television and internet advertising and other efforts to promote vaccination, the challenge for the White House is complicated by perceptions of Mr. Trump’s stance on the vaccine.

Asked about the issue on Monday at the White House, Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump’s help promoting vaccination was less important than getting trusted community figures on board.

“I discussed it with my team, and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the MAGA folks is what the local doctor, what the local preachers, what the local people in the community say,” Mr. Biden said, referring to Mr. Trump’s supporters and campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”

Credit…via Grace Sundstrom

This year perhaps more than ever, the college essay has served as a canvas for high school seniors to reflect on a turbulent and, for many, sorrowful year. It has been a psychiatrist’s couch, a road map to a more hopeful future, a chance to pour out intimate feelings about loneliness and injustice.

In response to a request from The New York Times, more than 900 seniors submitted the personal essays they wrote for their college applications. Reading them is like a taking a trip through two of the biggest news events of recent decades: the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, and the rise of a new civil rights movement.

In the wake of the high-profile deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers, students shared how they had wrestled with racism in their own lives. Many dipped their feet into the politics of protest.

And in the midst of the most far-reaching pandemic in a century, they described the isolation and loss that have pervaded every aspect of their lives since schools suddenly shut down a year ago. They sought to articulate how they have managed while cut off from friends and activities.

The coronavirus was the most common theme in the essays submitted to The Times, appearing in 393 essays, more than 40 percent. Next was the value of family, coming up in 351 essays, but often in the context of other issues, like the pandemic and race. Racial justice and protest figured in 342 essays.

Family was not the only eternal verity to appear. Love came up in 286 essays; science in 128; art in 110; music in 109; and honor in 32. Personal tragedy also loomed large, with 30 essays about cancer alone.

Some students resisted the lure of current events and wrote quirky essays about captaining a fishing boat on Cape Cod or hosting dinner parties. A few wrote poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, politics and the 2020 election were not of great interest.

Credit…Anna Watts for The New York Times

New York City landlords are seeking evictions nearly four times more often in the neighborhoods hit hardest by Covid-19 — predominantly Black and Latino communities that have borne the brunt of both health and housing crises since the virus swept the city last year, according to a new report.

The findings were the latest indication that thousands of the city’s most vulnerable residents could be forcibly removed from their homes as early as May, when a statewide pause on evictions is set to expire.

In New York City, about 40,000 residential tenants have been taken to court for eviction proceedings in the last year, with an average claim of $8,150, according to an analysis of state records by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a coalition of housing nonprofits.

The neighborhoods with the highest Covid-19 death rates, the top 25 percent, received 15,517 eviction filings, while areas with the lowest death rates, in the bottom 25 percent, had 4,224 cases, through late February. Roughly 68 percent of residents in the hardest-hit ZIP codes were people of color, more than twice the share in the least-affected areas.

Marisol Morales, 55, moved to the United States from Panama in 1991, and has lived for 11 years in a two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. She lost her part-time job as a cook last spring and has been unable to pay her subsidized $1,647 rent for several months. Her landlord is now suing her.

“An affordable apartment does not exist in New York,” Ms. Morales said.

Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

Pamela Addison is, in her own words, “one of the shyest people in this world.” Certainly not the sort of person who would submit an opinion essay to a newspaper, start a support group for strangers or ask a U.S. senator to vote for $1.9 trillion legislation.

But in the past five months, she has done all of those things.

Her husband, Martin Addison, a 44-year-old health care worker in New Jersey, died from the coronavirus in April after a month of illness. The last time she saw him was when he was loaded into an ambulance. At 37, Ms. Addison was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son, and to make ends meet on her own.

“Seeing the impact my story has had on people — it has been very therapeutic and healing for me,” she said. “And knowing that I’m doing it to honor my husband gives me the greatest joy, because I’m doing it for him.”

With the United States’ coronavirus death toll — over 535,000 people — come thousands of stories like hers. Many people who have lost loved ones, or whose lives have been upended by long-haul symptoms, have turned to political action.

There are Marjorie Roberts, who got sick while managing a hospital gift shop in Atlanta and now has lung scarring; Mary Wilson-Snipes, still on oxygen more than two months after coming home from the hospital; and John Lancos, who lost his wife of 41 years on April 23.

In January, they and dozens of others participated in an advocacy training session over Zoom, run by a group called Covid Survivors for Change. This month, the group organized virtual meetings with the offices of 16 senators, and more than 50 group members lobbied for the coronavirus relief package.

The immediate purpose of the training session was to teach people how to do things like lobby a senator. The longer-term purpose was to confront the problem of numbers.

Numbers are dehumanizing, as activists like to say. In sufficient quantities — 536,472 as of Wednesday morning, for instance — they are also numbing. This is why converting numbers into people is so often the job of activists seeking policy change after tragedy.

Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The Biden administration will invest $10 billion in congressionally approved funds to vastly expand coronavirus screening for students returning to in-person learning and another $2.25 billion to increase testing in underserved communities, federal health officials said Wednesday.

The plan was announced Wednesday afternoon during the White House’s regular virus briefing. The federal Department of Health and Human Services had previewed the program in an email message to reporters.

Congress approved the $10 billion expenditure when it passed Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which the president signed into law last week. The health department said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would give the money to states “quickly as part of a strategy to help get schools open in the remaining months of this school year.”

Reopening schools has been one of President Biden’s highest priorities — and one of the most contentious issues facing the new administration. Millions of American children have been confined to virtual learning since the start of the pandemic a year ago. Education experts say that many children — and parents — are suffering, psychologically as well as academically. Still, most schools are already operating at least partially in person, and evidence suggests they are doing so relatively safely. Research shows in-school spread can be mitigated with simple safety measures like masking, distancing, hand-washing and opening windows.

Mr. Biden, who initially called for all schools to reopen within 100 days of his inauguration, later narrowed that goal to elementary and middle schools, and has set the reopening benchmark at “the majority of schools” — 51 percent. But there are still many hurdles, including convincing teachers unions that policies are in place to ensure a safe return and easing the fears and frustrations of parents.

One stumbling block to reopening has been the C.D.C.’s recommendation that people remain six feet apart from one another if they do not live in the same household. Amid a growing understanding of how the virus spreads, some public health experts are calling on the agency to reduce the recommended distance from six feet to three.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s senior medical adviser for the pandemic, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, have said the guidance is being revisited.

The administration said Wednesday that the C.D.C. and state and local health departments would help states and schools in implementing testing programs. The agency intends to release the state-by-state allocation table on Wednesday, with final awards to be made early April.

The administration said the C.D.C. would also update its guidance on which types of tests should be used in different settings, such as schools, prisons or nursing homes.

The $2.25 billion for testing in underserved populations is intended to address the racial disparities laid bare by the pandemic. Black and Latino people are far more likely than white people to get infected with the coronavirus and to die from Covid-19, and those disparities extend to testing, experts say. The vaccination rate for Black people in the United States is half that of white people, and the gap for Hispanic people is even larger, according to a New York Times analysis of state-reported race and ethnicity information.

The money will be given in grants to public health departments to improve their ability to test for and track the virus.

“Testing is critical to saving lives and restoring economic activity,” Norris Cochran, the acting health secretary, said in a statement, adding that the department is determined to “expand our capacity to get testing to the individuals and the places that need it most.”

Credit…Marie Eriel Hobro for The New York Times

People who get Covid-19 shots at thousands of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores may soon be able to verify their vaccination status at airports, schools and other locations using a health passport app on their smartphones.

The retail giant said on Wednesday that it had signed on to an international effort to provide standardized digital vaccination credentials to consumers. The company joins a push already backed by major health centers and tech companies including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, the Mitre Corporation and the Mayo Clinic.

The participation of Walmart, which is offering vaccines at thousands of stores, is likely to accelerate the adoption of digital vaccination credentials.

Credit…Commons Project

The company said people who get Covid shots at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores will be able to use free health passport apps to verify their vaccination records and then generate smartphone codes that could allow them to board a plane or enter a sports area.

The apps include Health Pass developed by Clear, a security company that uses biometric technology to confirm people’s identities at airports, and CommonPass, developed by the Commons Project Foundation, a nonprofit in Geneva.

JetBlue and Lufthansa are already using the CommonPass app to verify passengers’ negative virus test results before they can board certain flights.

“Walmart is the first huge-scale administrator of vaccines that is committing to giving people a secure, verifiable record of their vaccinations,” said Paul Meyer, the chief executive of the Commons Project. “We think many others will follow.”

Tags Covid19, eligibility, Live, News, Tourism, Updates, Vaccine, Variants

Business

Fb and Information Corp Strike Pay Deal for Australian Content material

Post author By
Post date March 16, 2021

Facebook and News Corp Strike Pay Deal for Australian Content

MELBOURNE, Australia – Facebook agreed to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for its journalistic content in Australia a month after the social media platform temporarily blocked news links within the country because legislation pushed digital giants to compensate publishers.

The multi-year deal, announced on Tuesday, includes news content from major conservative Murdoch media outlets such as The Australian, a national newspaper and news site news.com.au, as well as other publications from major cities, regions and communities.

It comes a month after Google announced its own three-year global agreement with News Corp to pay for the publisher’s news content, and under heavy criticism Facebook stepped back from its drastic move to block news links from being shared or viewed in Australia.

Few details were released, including how much Facebook News Corp pays for content.

In a statement on Tuesday, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said the agreement, which he called a “milestone”, “would have a material and significant impact on our Australian news business.”

News Corp leaders, Thomson added, “had a global debate” as the rise of the digital giants impoverished the news industry. With the deal, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and his team would have contributed to “creating a future for journalism that was under extreme stress”.

However, critics said the deal did little to guarantee the kind of public interest journalism touted by the Australian government when it proposed legislation that was passed last month.

“There are no guarantees that the public will benefit,” said Tanya Notley, a communications professor at Western Sydney University, who noted that the first major news companies to do business with Facebook were conservative and aligned with the current government were.

Others said it further emphasized the excessive power of social media companies to control news and public information. “They’re the keepers of the news for public consumption,” said Marc Cheong, a researcher on digital ethics at the University of Melbourne.

In a statement, Facebook said the agreements would help people gain access to news articles and breaking news videos from a network of national, urban, rural and suburban newsrooms.

“We are determined to bring Facebook news to Australia,” said Andrew Hunter, director of Facebook partnerships in Australia and New Zealand.

That was a distinctly different tone from what the tech giant struck in February when Facebook blocked messages in Australia.

At the time, William Easton, executive director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, said of the draft Australian law: “The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content.”

While the Australian government has pointed to the consolidation of digital advertising spending in companies like Google and Facebook, the tech giants say they are benefiting news companies by driving traffic to their websites.

Facebook has also announced tentative collective bargaining agreements with independent news organizations such as Private Media, Schwartz Media and Solstice Media. So far, however, only agreements with News Corp and Seven West Media, another large conservative news company, have been cemented.

Sky News Australia, also owned by Mr. Murdoch, extended an existing agreement with Facebook.

Tags Australian, content, Corp, Deal, Facebook, News, Pay, Strike

World News

Treasury yields increased following stimulus, vaccine information

Post author By
Post date March 12, 2021

Dow rises 80 points as market tries to build on February's rally

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

Source: The New York Stock Exchange

The yield on 10-year government bonds reached its highest level in over a year on Friday. This is a sign of optimism on an economic comeback, but it also reflects heightened fears of inflation after the $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package came into effect.

The yield on the 10-year benchmark Treasury note rose 9 basis points to 1.619% at 9:40 am CET and briefly reached 1.642%, its highest level since February 2020. The yield on the 30-year treasury bond rose 10 basis points to 2.382%. The returns move inversely to the prices and 1 basis point equals 0.01%.

“The bearish of bonds was compounded by Biden’s return to normal time update. The president has outlined a path out of the pandemic that would bring the US back to some semblance of normality by July 4th,” said Ian Lyngen, rate strategist at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in an email on Friday.

“While last week the Friday afternoon bear pattern has been a significant challenge that has been felt for much of this year, when we think about the information on offer, there is little else we can do to prevent the higher variance in returns the remaining price movements in other markets. “

The yield curve between the 2-year rate of return and the 10-year rate of return reached 1.486%, the highest spread since September 2015.

The yield curve for government bonds is the interest rate difference between different maturities of bonds. When it gets steeper it is considered a positive sign for the economy. Meanwhile, a flattening curve is seen as a warning of economic weakness.

The volatility in returns weighed on US stocks, with the S&P 500 falling 0.3%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite lost more than 1% on concerns about rising interest rates.

Government bond yields rose after Biden signed the $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package Thursday afternoon.

The plan calls for direct payments of up to $ 1,400 to most Americans. Direct deposits will come into Americans’ bank accounts as early as this weekend, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.

In addition to announcing his plan to make Covid vaccines available to all adults ages 18 and older, Biden said in his first prime-time address Thursday night that hopefully Americans should be able to gather in small groups around the to celebrate the fourth of July.

Yields were also higher after the number of weekly new jobless claims fell lower than expected on Thursday, reaching 712,000 for the week ended March 6, down from the estimate of 725,000.

The 10-year yield has been rising rapidly lately, increasing from 1% since late January amid concerns about rising inflation. These concerns were compounded by fears that the US government’s tax relief package, in addition to reopening the economy, could stimulate it too quickly and cause prices to rise.

Investors will watch out for the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates over the next week and for comments on the central bank’s stance on rising bond yields.

“If the bond sell-off intensifies ahead of the March 17th FOMC decision, the Fed may have to finally take action against the movement in government bond yields,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, told clients. “The Fed has clearly been sticking to the script that tighter financial conditions or disorderly markets would warrant action. If yields stay at a rapid rate, they will get clamor.”

There are no auctions on Friday.

– with reports from Jesse Pound, Yun Li and Tom Franck of CNBC.

Tags higher, News, stimulus, Treasury, Vaccine, yields