Tag: raise

Categories
Politics

Blake Masters warned to lift more money vs. Mark Kelly

Blake Masters warned to raise more cash vs. Mark Kelly

Republican US senatorial candidate Blake Masters speaks at a campaign event on the eve of the primary, on August 01, 2022 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Republican leaders and megadonors are warning Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters to improve his fundraising or else be doomed in his bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in November’s election, according to people familiar with the matter.

Masters has received urgent private calls in recent weeks from GOP leaders like Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, these people explained. The NRSC is the official campaign arm for the Senate GOP, and has spent over $6 million taking on Masters’ rival Kelly, according to data from the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.

Kelly’s seat has long been considered a potential pickup opportunity for Republicans, as forecaster Cook Political Report labels the race a toss-up. Recent polling, however, suggests that Masters is falling behind. A Fox News poll taken in August shows Kelly leading Masters by 8 points, while an Arizona Republican pollster told NBC News that his own surveys showed Masters trailing Kelly by 10 points.

Longtime GOP megadonors, who want to help Masters overtake Kelly but have not heard from him since he won the party’s primary, have inundated the Republican candidate with calls, these people explained.

A person familiar with one of the recent calls to Masters said a veteran GOP financier “read him the riot act” and told him, in part, that he must start raising money from more wealthy Republican donors and stop relying on billionaire tech executive Peter Thiel , his longtime colleague and friend, to help him like he did in the primary. These people declined to be named in order to speak freely about private conversations.

Shortly after publication of this story, Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for the Masters campaign, denied that the candidate ever heard from a GOP megadonor who “read him the riot act.” Miller told CNBC in an email: “It didn’t happen.”

Kelly has massively outraised Masters, who won a Republican primary in Arizona this month. The incumbent’s campaign has amassed more than $54 million during the 2022 election cycle, compared with just over $4 million for Masters’ campaign, according to the latest Federal Election Commission data.

Thiel contributed $15 million during the primary to a pro-Masters super PAC, Saving Arizona, and he donated $1.5 million to the committee as recently as July. Masters was the chief operating officer at Thiel Capital, an investment firm founded by Thiel.

The calls to Masters come as even some Republican leaders seem to be questioning their Senate candidates. When asked about his predictions for the midterms, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said “candidate quality” has a lot to do with winning Senate elections. He added that he believes there will be an “extremely close Senate” after November’s elections.

The Senate is currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans.

In a statement to CNBC, NRSC spokesman Chris Hartline did not deny that Scott called Masters to urge him to improve his fundraising operation.

“Mark Kelly votes with Joe Biden almost 100% of the time. While he claims to be a moderate, he’s supported reckless Washington spending and done nothing to address the border crisis that’s raging in Arizona. The NRSC will continue to remind Arizona voters of Mark Kelly’s radical agenda and Blake Masters’ plans to fight for Arizona families,” Hartline said in response to questions about Scott’s contact with Masters.

Data from ad tracker AdImpact shows that the NRSC has booked just over $3.8 million in ads in Arizona for September, but nothing yet for October or November. The ad tracker also shows that Masters’ campaign has not yet booked airtime for the fall while Kelly’s team has reserved over $10 million in ad space from September through November.

AdImpact says it has not yet seen data showing the Thiel-backed Saving Arizona reserve airtime for the fall. The last spending it saw from the super PAC was on Aug. 2, the day of the Arizona Senate Republican primary. The super PAC spent over $10 million during the primary, including almost $8.5 million backing Masters, according to OpenSecrets.

Masters and his campaign did not return requests for comment. A spokesman for Saving Arizona did not return requests for comment. Thiel and his spokesman did not return requests for comment, including about whether the billionaire GOP donor plans to help Masters further.

The candidates and outside groups from both sides of the aisle have combined to spend over $90 million in the general election Senate race in Arizona. Yet Democratic organizations appear to be outspending their Republican rivals in the Grand Canyon State on ads in the coming months.

AdImpact’s data shows Democratic outside groups are reserving nearly $28 million worth of ad time in Arizona over the next three months. Republican committees have so far spent just over $16 million on ad buys within the same time span trying to help Masters overtake Kelly, according to the data.

Categories
Politics

Fed Might Increase Charges three Occasions in 2022, Speeds Finish of Bond-Shopping for

Fed Could Raise Rates 3 Times in 2022, Speeds End of Bond-Buying

Federal Reserve policymakers on Wednesday said they will cut back on their stimulus more quickly at a moment of rapid inflation and strong economic growth, capping a challenging year with a pronounced policy pivot that could usher in higher interest rates in 2022.

A policy statement and a fresh set of economic projections released by the central bank detailed a more rapid end to the monthly bond-buying that the Fed has been using throughout the pandemic to keep money chugging through markets and to bolster growth.

Officials are slashing their purchases by twice as much as they had announced last month, a pace that would put them on track to end the program altogether in March. That decision came “in light of inflation developments and the further improvement in the labor market,” according to the policy statement.

Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell, speaking at a news conference following the Fed’s meeting, said a “strengthening labor market and elevated inflation pressures” prompted the central bank to speed up the reductions in asset purchases.

“Economic developments and changes in the outlook warrant this evolution,” Mr. Powell said. He noted that supply chain disruptions have been larger and lasted longer than expected and said price gains will likely continue well into next year.

Ending the bond-buying program sooner will position the central bank to more quickly raise its policy interest rate — the Fed’s more traditional and more powerful tool — if officials decide that doing so is necessary to keep inflation under control. The Fed’s economic projections suggested that officials expected to make three interest rate increases next year, setting up for a faster pace of rate increases as the economy recovers. Rates are currently set near-zero and officials project rates to stand at 2.1 percent at the end of 2024.

“With inflation having exceeded 2 percent for some time, the committee expects it will be appropriate to maintain this target range until labor market conditions have reached levels consistent with the committee’s assessments of maximum employment,” the Fed said in its new statement — putting the onus for rate increases squarely on labor market progress.

Mr. Powell, in his remarks, suggested that the labor market was getting closer to meeting that test.

“In my view we are making rapid progress toward maximum employment,” Mr. Powell said.

By slowing bond-buying and moving decisively toward raising borrowing costs, the Fed is adding less juice to the economic expansion and completing a pivot toward inflation-fighting mode. While officials spent much of the year laying out a patient path for winding down their pandemic-era help for the economy, they have turned more proactive in recent weeks as they have become more worried that a burst in prices this year could linger.

Consumer prices climbed 6.8 percent in November from a year earlier, the quickest pace of increase since 1982. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge has shown slightly slower gains but has also moved up sharply.

Mr. Powell said that a quicker conclusion to bond-buying will better position the Fed to react to a range of possible economic outcomes.

“The economy is so much stronger now,” Mr. Powell said, asked if there would be a big gap between when bond buying ended and when rate increases began. “There wouldn’t be the need for that kind of long delay.”

Fed officials initially expected a pop in prices this year to fade. Instead, pressures have broadened beyond goods affected by the pandemic, which have fallen victim to tangled supply chains, and into rent and shelter. In those big categories, upward trends can prove more lasting. Wages are climbing, as are consumer inflation expectations, which could also help price increases to persist.

The Fed has been watching the evidence accumulate warily, though most officials still hold out hope that inflation will fade back toward their 2 percent annual average goal as global shipping routes clear through backlogs, factory production increases to meet demand, and consumers shift toward more normal spending patterns after scrambling to buy couches, cars and stationary bikes during the pandemic.

But officials had begun to back away from helping the economy so much, announcing the initial plan to slow their bond-buying program following their November meeting. Mr. Powell signaled late last month and early in December that the central bank was increasingly focused on managing the risk that rapid price gains might linger — teeing up the central bank’s shift.

“I think the risk of higher inflation has increased,” Mr. Powell said while testifying before Congress in late November.

The transition became official on Wednesday.

“They are revising up inflation, revising down unemployment, and as a result they’re pushing up the path for interest rates,” Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, said in reaction to the news. “It’s a bit of a 180 on Powell’s part.”

Fed officials have also taken heart in the speed of the labor market recovery. The jobless rate has fallen to 4.2 percent, down sharply from the double-digits heights it reached early in the pandemic. Officials now expect unemployment to fall to 3.5 percent — matching its very low level headed into the pandemic — by the end of next year, their updated economic projections showed.

“Job gains have been solid in recent months, and the unemployment rate has declined substantially,” the Fed said in its new policy statement.

Still, many people remain out of the labor market — some because they have retired, but others because of virus fears or a lack of child care. That is making judging how close the economy is to the Fed’s goal of “maximum employment” a more complicated task.

Mr. Powell at times has suggested that full employment could be reached next year, but he also has expressed uncertainty around that call.

“I think there’s room for a whole lot of humility here as we try to think about what maximum employment would be,” he said at a news conference in November.

Categories
Politics

Afghanistan Collapse and Strikes in Somalia Increase Snags for Drone Warfare Guidelines

Afghanistan Collapse and Strikes in Somalia Raise Snags for Drone Warfare Rules

WASHINGTON – The Biden government has almost completed its policy of regulating drone strikes and commando strikes outside conventional war zones, but the abrupt collapse of the Afghan government and a recent spate of strikes in Somalia have created new problems, according to current and former officials.

The government has hoped to have its playbook ready by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was slated as part of a broader recalibration as President Biden seeks to end the “eternal war” on terrorism and realign national security policy as the world has changed since 2001.

But his team’s ability to meet that deadline is in doubt in the face of rapidly changing events and uncertainties about the future. Many of the same officials who would develop and approve an updated drone plan for Afghanistan are focusing on evacuation operations in the capital, Kabul, officials said.

In January, Mr Biden set out to develop his own overarching policy for drone strikes targeting terrorist threats from countries where the United States does not have troops. His new administration viewed with suspicion how in 2017 President Donald J. Trump relaxed an earlier version of such rules imposed by President Barack Obama in 2013.

The Biden team has spent more than seven months reviewing these two guidelines – including the resulting civilian casualty figures – and assessing the evolution of the global terrorist threat. Their deliberations centered on a hybrid approach that would pick up elements from both the Obama and Trump systems, officials said.

As conceived now, the Biden-era playbook would revert to a centralized cross-agency review of proposed strikes – a hallmark of the Obama approach – in countries where such operations are rare, they said. But for places where strikes are likely to be more routine, like Somalia and Afghanistan, it would remain part of the Trump approach of issuing “country plans” that set policy goals and objectives, and then giving commanders in the field more leeway to make their own decisions to carry out special strikes.

Still, the country plans are more restrictive than the Trump versions, officials said. For example, protections against the death of civilian bystanders under Mr Trump often offered adult men less protection than women and children, but Biden’s future plans would make the protections on par. The Biden rules are also designed to require the military to seek the approval of State Department heads of mission for strikes, they said.

But the recent riots in Afghanistan have made what the Biden team originally envisioned for that country obsolete. Administrative officials now need to develop a new playbook to resolve any future strikes there before Mr Biden can put the general policy in place, officials said.

The future of the attacks in Afghanistan is particularly important as Mr Biden and his team defended his decision to withdraw American ground forces by pledging to maintain a robust ability to combat any new or resurgent terrorist threats emanating from there.

“We are conducting effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in several countries where we do not have a permanent military presence,” Biden said this month. “If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We have developed counter-terrorism capabilities that enable us to keep a close eye on the direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively when necessary. “

However, their original plan for Afghanistan was based on a scenario in which the United States, with the consent of President Ashraf Ghani, would launch air strikes in support of his administration’s efforts to resist transnational terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State that did Use land as a base of operations. The Taliban would vie separately for control of the country, but would be at least superficially neutral in this conflict category.

Instead, Mr Ghani fled, the Afghan army abdicated abruptly, and the Taliban came to power as the de facto government. In light of the uncertainty about the Taliban’s intentions, including whether they will host terror camps again as they did in the 1990s, a playbook must now be developed for all future counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, officials said.

The current and former officials who were informed of the deliberations on the drone attack policy spoke of the delicate internal discussions only on condition of anonymity. Asked for comment, the New York Times National Security Council press office retransmitted a statement it had made in March on an article on the policy review, which was at an early stage at the time.

Updated

Aug 28, 2021, 7:25 p.m. ET

The Biden plans make sense to both raise standards for civilian protection and provide greater flexibility for different environments around the world, said Luke Hartig, who is the National Security Council’s chief anti-terrorism director on drone attack policy worked for the Obama administration.

But he added: “Afghanistan will have to be very fluid. I would hate to have to write a guide for Afghanistan now. “

But creating a bureaucratic system and planning drone strikes contradicts Mr Biden’s repeated statements that he wants to end the eternal war, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who frequently writes on national security legal policy.

Understanding the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan

Map 1 of 5

Who are the Taliban? The Taliban emerged in 1994 amid the unrest following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including flogging, amputation and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here is more about their genesis and track record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who for years have been on the run, in hiding, in prison and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to rule, including whether they will be as tolerant as they say they are.

What is happening to the women of Afghanistan? When the Taliban was last in power, they banned women and girls from most jobs or from going to school. Afghan women have gained a lot since the Taliban was overthrown, but now they fear that they are losing ground. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are indications that they have begun to reintroduce the old order in at least some areas.

“I’m not blaming them because I think real threats remain,” he added. “It’s better to have a system to deal with them than just let the Pentagon do what it wants. But creating a system for drone attacks doesn’t sound like the way to end the eternal war. “

The need for a new Afghanistan playbook has added to another unsolved problem that surfaced late in the deliberations on Biden-era politics: the uncertainty about how much leeway the military should have to launch attacks in defense of partner forces without the usual steps to take review.

This issue came into focus after the military’s Africa command launched three drone strikes against the al-Shabab militant group in Somalia in late July and early August, breaking a lull that had not been there for six months Had carried out more air strikes.

The hiatus followed a policy directive from the President’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, shortly after Mr Biden’s inauguration on January 20. Under the temporary rule, all drone strikes outside the battlefield zones had to be approved by the White House while the new government drafted its policy.

However, the policy included an exception for strikes in self-defense. And when the military resumed attacks against al Shabab, they invoked this exception instead of seeking prior White House approval.

The catch was that those at risk were Somali government forces that had marched out against Al Shabab, not Americans. Instead, the Africa Command described the attacks as “collective self-defense” by a partner force. She said this week that she carried out another such strike in defense of “our Somali partners”.

That the military can routinely bypass normal drone strike procedures by invoking the need to defend partner forces – including some that may be threatened by adversaries who are not part of the US Congress-approved war against al-Qaeda and theirs Descendants are – urged doubting whether the new policy would manage to control air strikes away from conventional battlefields more strictly, officials said.

As a result, the government has begun addressing the issue, including the ability to tighten the standards for when commanders can view a foreign unit as a partner and clean up the list of such groups. (The comprehensive list is classified, officials said.)

That problem was still unresolved, officials said when the case of Afghanistan threw the government’s anti-terrorist strike policy into major turmoil. But the evacuation of the Afghan army has made things easier in one respect: there seem to be no partner forces left to defend in this country.

Eric Schmitt contributed to the reporting.

Categories
Health

Olympics Covid Circumstances Increase Tough Questions About Testing

Olympics Covid Cases Raise Tricky Questions About Testing

In addition, questions about transmission remain unanswered. Vaccinated people with asymptomatic or breakthrough infections may still be able to pass the virus on to others, but it is not yet clear how often this happens.

Until this science is more definitive or vaccination rates go up, it’s best to stay on the safety and regular testing side, many experts said. At the Olympics, for example, frequent testing could help protect the wider Japanese population, who have relatively low vaccination rates, as well as support staff, who may be older and at higher risk.

“It is these people that I really worry most about,” said Dr. Lisa Brosseau. on Research Advisor at the Center for Infection Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Not only can they become infected with the virus, which puts a strain on the Japanese health system, but they can also become sources of transmission: “Everyone is at risk and anyone could potentially be infected,” she said.

According to the Tokyo 2020 Press Office, all Olympics staff and volunteers were given the opportunity to get vaccinated, although officials did not provide any information about how many had received the syringes.

Instead of testing less frequently, officials could rethink how they respond to positive tests, said Dr. Binney. For example, if someone who is vaccinated and tested positive asymptomatically should still be isolated – but maybe close contacts could just be monitored instead of being quarantined.

“You are trying to balance the disruptive nature of what you do when someone tests positive against any benefits in slowing or stopping the spread of the virus,” said Dr. Binney.

Categories
Business

White Home companions with courting apps to lift vaccine consciousness

White House partners with dating apps to raise vaccine awareness

Tinder has encouraged users to keep “virtual” appointments during the coronavirus pandemic.

Budrul Chukrut / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Aside from asking about your perfect day or favorite vacation spot, popular dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Plenty of Fish ask members if they want to tell if they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19.

The White House announced on Friday that it is partnering with the apps to raise vaccine awareness and encourage young adults across the country to get vaccinated.

Andy Slavitt, senior Covid-19 official at the White House, said one of the apps, OkCupid, says members who show their vaccination status are “14% more likely to get a match. We finally found what makes us all more attractive. ” A vaccination. ”

More than 60% of adults in the United States have received at least one Covid-19 shot, but 42% of adults ages 18 to 34 say they are unwilling to take a Covid-19, according to a Quinnipiac poll in February – Get vaccine. As more and more variants emerge, the summer weather approaches and the mask mandates decrease, efforts to reach hesitant young adults intensify.

“The pandemic has also negatively affected the social lives of young people. Social distancing and dating have always been a challenging combination,” Slavitt told reporters in a briefing.

As part of President Biden’s goal of having 70% of adults in the US vaccinated with at least one shot by July 4th, Slavitt announced that dating apps Tinder, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, BLK, Hinge, Match , Chispa, Bumble and Badoo are rolling out features to promote vaccination among users. The apps collectively serve more than 50 million people in the United States and many are young adults.

Badges are displayed in the apps that a user can view on their profile to determine that they have been or should be vaccinated.

Additional functions include access to premium content such as “Boosts”, “Super-Likes” and “Super-Swipes” for vaccinated people, as well as search filters with which users can search specifically for other users who have been vaccinated or are planning a vaccination.

OkCupid said their features will be implemented on May 24th, Chispa and BLK said theirs will be implemented on June 1st. The other apps will start rolling out the new features in the next few weeks.

“In all seriousness, people care about other things in life besides their vaccine. But the vaccine allows people to get back to the things they enjoy in life,” Slavitt said, noting that people want to know they are be able to resume their normal life in a safe manner.

Categories
Business

McDonald’s Will Elevate Wages at Firm-Owned Eating places

McDonald's Will Raise Wages at Company-Owned Restaurants

Competing with fast-food chains, restaurants, and other workers-owned businesses, McDonald’s said Thursday that it will also raise wages in some restaurants to attract employees.

The company announced it would increase its hourly wages for current employees by an average of 10 percent and raise the entry-level wage for new employees to $ 11-17 an hour, depending on the restaurant’s location.

The salary increases will not affect 95 percent of the nearly 14,000 independently owned restaurants in the United States, only the 650 company-owned restaurants.

Reacting to a tight job market, McDonald’s repeated a move by the Chipotle burrito chain earlier this week. He hoped the higher wages would attract up to 10,000 new employees over the next three months as the busy summer season approaches and restrictions are lifted in many of his restaurants.

At its in-house restaurants, McDonald’s said the average employee wage would rise to $ 13 an hour, with some restaurants seeing an average wage of $ 15 an hour later this year. All of the company’s restaurants are slated to have an average salary of $ 15 by 2024, according to the company.

However, this is not the minimum wage of $ 15 an hour required by the Fight for $ 15 organization supported by the Service Employees International Union. The organization Fight for $ 15 leads a strike by McDonald’s employees in several cities across the country on Wednesday before the company’s annual general meeting.

A Fight for $ 15 leader rejected McDonald’s move to raise wages, saying it wasn’t enough.

“We showed up to work every day in the midst of a global pandemic and risked our lives without adequate PPE or paid time off to keep our businesses open and company profits flowing,” said Doneshia Babbitt, McDonald’s employee in St. Louis and union leaders said in a statement. “You have called us essential for over a year, but your announcement today shows that you have considered us available all along.”

The strikes in 15 cities on Wednesday would continue as planned.

In 2019, McDonald’s announced it would no longer use its powerful lobbying arm to combat attempts to raise the federal, state and local minimum wage to $ 15 an hour. Speaking to Wall Street analysts in January, McDonald’s chief executive Chris Kempczinski said the company was “okay” in the more than two dozen states where minimum wages have been gradually increased.

Although many of its dining rooms were closed due to much of the pandemic or had limited capacity in parts of the country, the strength of McDonald’s passageways helped push profits to over $ 4.7 billion in 2020. It paid its shareholders more than $ 3.7 billion in dividends and an additional $ 874 million to buy back shares before the program was suspended in early March last year.

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

Categories
Business

Why Biden’s Plan to Elevate Taxes for Wealthy Traders Isn’t Hurting Shares

Why Biden’s Plan to Raise Taxes for Rich Investors Isn’t Hurting Stocks

“Most Democrats appear to be on board to reduce the differential between the capital gains tax rate and ordinary income, but there is resistance to treating the rates as the same,” wrote analysts at Beacon Policy Advisors, a policy advisory firm. “This means that there is likely to be a middle ground to increase the capital recovery rate for top earners to, say, 28 percent.”

Updated

May 5, 2021, 10:31 p.m. ET

If stocks continued to climb, it would be broadly in line with the previous periods when capital gains taxes were raised.

In 2013, when the tax on Americans with the highest incomes rose from 15 percent to its current 23.8 percent, the S&P 500 rose nearly 30 percent. It’s been the best year for stocks in two decades. And after the maximum rate had risen from 20 percent to 28 percent at the end of 1986, the market continued to grow by almost 40 percent through most of 1987.

Stocks finally suffered the worst one-day collapse ever on Black Monday in October 1987, but that crash had little to do with taxation and the markets ended the year a little higher. In 1991, a small increase in the capital gains rate for those with the highest incomes to 28.9 percent coincided with a 26 percent increase in the S&P 500. The main driver of this profit had nothing to do with taxes; It was the beginning of a recession.

Similarly, investors seem to be focused on evidence that the economy is on the verge of breakneck growth. That surge is fueled by a flow of federal government spending, rock-bottom interest rates, and more Covid-19 vaccinations. In the first three months of the year, the economy grew by 6.4 percent on an annual basis. At this rate, 2021 would be the best year of growth since 1984.

Economic growth and corporate profits tend to increase together. The earnings reports of listed companies are already showing signs of an additional upswing in the economy.

Tech giants like Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google’s parent company Alphabet reported first-quarter earnings that exceeded analysts’ expectations.

Categories
Business

Biden to Elevate Minimal Wage for Federal Contractors to $15: Stay Updates

Joseph R. Biden Jr., then vice president, at a 2015 event calling for a $15 minimum wage in New York.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

President Biden plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday raising the minimum wage paid by federal contractors to $15 an hour, the latest in a set of ambitious pro-labor moves at the outset of his administration.

The new minimum is expected to take effect next year and is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of workers, according to a White House document. The current minimum is $10.95 under an order that President Barack Obama signed in 2014. Like that order, the new one will require that the new minimum wage rise with inflation.

White House economists believed the increase would not lead to significant job losses, a finding in line with recent research on the minimum wage, and that it was unlikely to cost taxpayers more money, two administration officials said in a call with reporters. They argued that the higher wage would lead to greater productivity and lower turnover.

The White House also contends that although the number of workers directly affected by the increase is relatively small as a share of the economy, the executive order will indirectly raise wages beyond federal contractors by forcing other employers to bid up pay as they compete for workers.

Several cities have a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, and several states have laws that will raise their minimum wage to at least that level in the coming years. There is so far little evidence on how a $15 minimum wage affects employment in lower-cost areas of such states.

Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, but the legislation has faced long odds in the Senate. Mr. Biden sought to incorporate such a measure in his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package so that it could pass on a simple majority vote, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it could not be included.

Mr. Biden’s executive order will also eliminate the so-called tipped minimum wage for federal contractors, which currently allows employers to pay tipped workers $7.65 an hour as long as their tips put them over the regular minimum wage. Under the new minimum, all workers must be paid at least $15 an hour.

The order will technically begin a rule-making process that is expected to conclude by early next year. The wage will be incorporated into new contracts and existing contracts as they are extended.

Traffic in Philadelphia last month. BP reported higher earnings on Tuesday, and said it expected demand for oil would continue to recover from the pandemic.Credit…Matt Rourke/Associated Press

BP reported a sharply higher profit for the first quarter of 2021 on Tuesday, signaling that after a grim 2020, oil companies’ earnings are recovering along with demand for their products.

BP said that underlying replacement cost profit, the metric most closely watched by analysts, was $2.6 billion, up from $791 million in the period year earlier. The London giant said that the price it received for its oil in the quarter was up more than 20 percent. BP described its trading and marketing of natural gas, where prices also increased, as “exceptionally strong.”

Citing strong economic growing in China and the United States, BP said that it expected the oil market to continue to recover from the effects of the pandemic.

Bernard Looney, the chief executive, has said he wants to use the cash from oil and gas operations to finance a shift toward electric power and other clean energy.

In the first quarter, the plan seemed to work well. The company raked in about $10.9 billion, a sum that included revenue from sales of fossil fuel businesses, among them a stake in a gas field in Oman. Because of divestments, BP’s oil production fell by 22 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

At the same time, BP expanded into the offshore wind business. It entered into a partnership with Equinor, the Norwegian energy company that is developing wind farms off the East Coast of the United States, and is acquiring offshore wind acreage off Britain at what some in the industry considered high prices.

BP also said that, having met debt reduction targets, it would resume a program of buying back shares, a way to increase the price of BP stock; it had not bought back shares since the first quarter of last year, as its business was battered by the pandemic. In the second quarter the company plans to spend $500 million on such purchases.

Last summer, BP also cut its dividend for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon disaster a decade ago, to 5.25 cents a share. The dividend will remain at that level, the company said.

BP said it could generate a surplus with oil prices above $45 a barrel. Lately, prices have been considerably higher, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, at about $66 a barrel.

Nonprofit organizations “across the ideological spectrum” filed briefs supporting Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted. Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

A Supreme Court case argued on Monday has created strange bedfellows, which did not escape the attention of the justices.

The matter pits charities against the State of California over donor disclosure requirements, and it’s a dispute over a seemingly small technical issue that some say has serious implications for political donations. It has turned groups that are often on opposite sides of political fights into — tentative — allies, the DealBook newsletter reports.

Nonprofit organizations “across the ideological spectrum” filed briefs supporting the petitioners, the Koch-backed charity Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted. The foundation argues that California violates the constitutionally protected right to anonymous association by collecting major donor data and failing to protect it (the state’s website has experienced security breaches). Justice Kavanaugh cited a filing from the American Civil Liberties Union, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Education Fund and others who all agreed that “a critical corollary of the freedom to associate is the right to maintain the confidentiality of one’s associations.”

“Certainly, we don’t see eye to eye with the petitioners in this case on every issue,” Brian Hauss of the A.C.L.U. said at a news conference after arguments at the court. In this case, the A.C.L.U. standing with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation because of what it calls California’s “systemic incompetence” in failing to protect nonpublic data. Legally speaking, however, it recognized a distinction between public disclosure and nonpublic disclosure. In other words, the brief didn’t argue for a general extension of anonymity.

Opponents say this is a case about “dark money.” Democratic senators argued in a brief that the foundation is advancing the matter as a way to make it easier for special interests to influence politics with untraceable money. “This case is really a stalking horse for campaign finance disclosure laws,” Justice Stephen Breyer said. A ruling is expected in June.

Shares in UPS were rising in premarket trading after the delivery company released first-quarter results that showed consolidated operating profit up 158 percent compared with a year ago.Credit…Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

  • U.S. stocks were little changed on Tuesday as investors digested more company earnings reports and awaited the Federal Reserve’s next policy decision on Wednesday. The S&P 500 drifted between gains and losses soon after the start of trading.

  • Tesla fell 2 percent even after the electric-car maker posted a quarterly profit of $438 million, its highest ever. UPS rose 11 percent after the parcel delivery company reported earnings that beat analysts’ expectations.

  • Alphabet, Microsoft and Visa are among companies also reporting earnings on Tuesday after the market closes.

  • By last Friday, a quarter of companies in the S&P 500 had published their first-quarter results, with 84 percent of them reporting earnings that were better than expected, according to FactSet. If this trend holds, it would be the highest percentage since FactSet started tracking the metric in 2008.

  • Most European stock indexes fell. The Stoxx Europe 600 declined nearly 0.3 percent.

  • HSBC rose 2 percent, becoming the best performer in the FTSE 100, after the bank said its pretax profits rose nearly 80 percent in the first quarter compared with last year. As the global economic outlook has improved, the bank released $435 million it had set aside for loan losses.

  • UBS dropped 3 percent after the Swiss bank said it lost $774 million in the first quarter from the collapse of the American hedge fund Archegos Capital Management.

Talasheia Dedmon enrolled her son Braylon in a college savings account through SEED for Oklahoma Kids, an effort to help a new generation climb the educational ladder and build assets. Credit…September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times

An experiment called SEED for Oklahoma Kids, or SEED OK, is one of a growing number of efforts by cities and states — governed by Democrats and Republicans alike — to help a new generation climb the educational ladder and build assets

SEED OK is a far-reaching research project begun in Oklahoma 14 years ago to study whether creating savings accounts containing $1,000 for newborns would improve their graduation rates and their chances of going to college or trade school years later, Patricia Cohen reports for The New York Times.

Research about the Oklahoma project published this month by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, which created SEED OK, found that families that had been given accounts were more college-focused and contributed more of their own money than those that hadn’t been. And the effects are strongest among low-income families.

The 1,300-plus children who were chosen at random to be given accounts in 2007 had an average of $3,243 saved by the end of 2019. Among the control group — another 1,300 children who were randomly selected to take part but were not given any money — only 4 percent had an account.

Proposals at the federal level to establish savings accounts at birth, for college, homes, business or retirement savings, go back to the 1990s. Canada, Israel, South Korea and Singapore have established versions of the idea. Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Illinois are among the states that have created programs.

Technical problems marred the Small Business Association’s first attempt at accepting applications for the grant program.Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times

After months of delays and technical problems, the federal government finally opened a $16 billion grant fund for music club operators, theater owners and others in the live-event business on Monday.

Thousands of people hit the website for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program the moment it began accepting applications. Speed mattered: The money — awarded on a first-come-first-served basis — is widely expected to run out fast.

One applicant posted a screenshot showing that he was in line behind more than 6,000 others waiting for their turn to apply. “Hunger Games” memes — “May the odds be ever in your favor” — popped up in Twitter posts from desperate business owners venting their collective anxiety.

But this time, the system stayed up. As of 5 p.m. on Monday, the agency had received 6,040 grant applications, according to Andrea Roebker, an agency spokeswoman. Nearly 8,400 more had been created but not yet been completed.

Sarah Elger, chief executive of Pseudonym Productions, an events production company in Philadelphia, successfully submitted her application 16 minutes after she got access to the system.

“It was such a relief,” Ms. Elger said. She was one of thousands of business owners who had their hopes dashed earlier this month, when the Small Business Administration, the agency that runs the program, tried — and failed — to start taking applications. After four hours, the agency took the system offline for what turned into weeks of technology repair work.

Ms. Elger estimated that she uploaded more than 100 documents for her application, which she and her husband, Ricky Brigante, spent months preparing. They knew they would have to move quickly once the application website opened.

“We turned it into a game,” Ms. Elger said. “We had lots of folders on the desktop and raced through the uploads.”

The Small Business Administration said it would immediately start reviewing the applications, which are intended to yield grants for 45 percent of applicants’ prepandemic gross earned annual revenue, up to $10 million.

“We recognize the urgency,” said Barb Carson, the deputy associate administrator of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance. “With venue operators in danger of closing, every day that passes by is a day that these businesses cannot afford.”

The program, created in the $900 billion economic support package that President Donald J. Trump approved in December, is the first large direct-to-businesses grant program the Small Business Administration has ever run. The process, for both the agency and applicants, has for months been fraught with complexity and confusion.

John Russell, the executive director of the Montford Park Players, a nonprofit community theater group in Asheville, N.C., submitted his application on Monday afternoon. He is relying on the grant to help cover his group’s return to the stage.

After a full year of hosting only virtual events, the group is planning to open its first full in-person production, the Shakespeare play “The Comedy of Errors,” next month.

“We figured people are in the mood for comedy,” Mr. Russell said. The show’s actors are volunteers, but the production creates paid jobs for its director, stage manager, lighting designer, food vendors and others, as well as for the theater troupe’s support staff.

The Small Business Administration is also preparing to open a second grant program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a $28.6 billion support fund for bars, restaurants and food trucks that was created in last month’s $1.9 trillion relief bill. That program is planning a seven-day test to help the agency avoid the kind of technical problems that plagued the venue program.

Lyft lost $1.8 billion last year as the pandemic cut into its revenue.Credit…Mike Blake/Reuters

Lyft will sell its unit devoted to developing autonomous vehicles to Woven Planet, a Toyota subsidiary, the companies announced on Monday. Woven Planet will pay $200 million in cash for Level 5, Lyft’s self-driving car initiative, and will follow up with additional payments of $350 million over five years.

Lyft is among several tech companies that have stepped back from developing autonomous vehicles over the last year as the technology has proved difficult to master and the pandemic has placed pressure on the company’s bottom lines. In December, Uber essentially paid Aurora, a self-driving truck start-up, to take its autonomous vehicle unit.

Some automotive executives have said they overestimated how soon the technology would be ready for the road. And although Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has recently expanded its operations, the chief executive of Waymo stepped down earlier this month to pursue “new adventures.”

Lyft said unloading Level 5 would cut about $100 million in annual expenses, helping the company edge closer to profitability after the pandemic sliced into its revenue. Lyft lost $1.8 billion last year. The company is set to report earnings for the first three months of 2021 next month.

Lyft will still have a team focused on third-party self-driving technology and will continue to collect data from trips to help train autonomous systems, the company said.

“Not only will this transaction allow Lyft to focus on advancing our leading autonomous platform and transportation network, this partnership will help pull in our profitability timeline,” Lyft’s president, John Zimmer, said in a statement.

Categories
Health

Sleeping Too Little in Center-Age Might Increase Dementia Threat, Examine Finds

Sleeping Too Little in Middle-Age May Raise Dementia Risk, Study Finds

The correlation was also whether or not people were taking sleeping pills and whether or not they had a mutation called ApoE4, which increases the likelihood of people developing Alzheimer’s disease, said Dr. Sabia.

The researchers did not find a general difference between men and women.

“The study found a modest, but I would say, somewhat important link between short sleep and risk of dementia,” said Pamela Lutsey, an adjunct professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the research. “Short sleep is very common and can therefore be important on a societal level, even if it is only marginally linked to the risk of dementia. Short sleep is something that we are in control of and that you can change. “

As with other research in the field, however, the study had limitations that prevent it from being proven that inadequate sleep can lead to dementia. Most of the sleep data was self-reported, a subjective measurement that isn’t always accurate, experts said.

At one point, nearly 4,000 participants had sleep duration measured with accelerometers, and that data was consistent with their self-reported sleep times, the researchers said. However, this quantitative measurement came late in the study, when participants were around 69 years old, which made it less useful than if it had been obtained at a younger age.

In addition, most of the participants were white and better educated and healthier than the entire UK population. And when researchers rely on electronic health records to diagnose dementia, they may have missed some cases. They also couldn’t identify the exact types of dementia.

“It is always difficult to know what to draw from such studies,” wrote Robert Howard, professor of geriatric psychiatry at University College London, one of several experts who gave Nature Communications comments on the study. “Insomnia – which probably doesn’t need anything else to think about in bed,” he added, “shouldn’t worry about heading for dementia unless you fall asleep right away.”

There are compelling scientific theories about why not getting enough sleep could worsen your risk of dementia, especially Alzheimer’s. Studies have shown that cerebrospinal fluid amyloid, a protein that clumps up in plaques in Alzheimer’s disease, “increases when you are sleep deprived,” said Dr. Music. Other studies on amyloid and another Alzheimer’s protein, tau, suggest that “sleep is important in removing proteins from the brain or limiting production,” he said.

Categories
Business

Dogecoin Merchants Push ‘Doge Day’ in Effort to Increase Its Worth

Dogecoin Traders Push 'Doge Day' in Effort to Raise Its Price

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started out as a joke, now has a market value that is hard to laugh about: more than $ 50 billion. On Tuesday, Dogecoin traders attempted to raise the price to coincide with April 20 or April 20, a date linked to smoking cannabis.

The hashtags #DogeDay and # Doge420 were trending on Twitter. The price of Dogecoin, which has risen recently, fluctuated between gains and losses on Tuesday and was quoted at around 40 cents according to Coindesk. A month ago it was about 5 cents.

The effects of the boom in the crypto markets can be felt far and wide. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange that went public last week and is helping to push the industry mainstream, has a market value of $ 66 billion. Central banks have stepped up their plans to research digital currencies to provide people with a safe alternative to cryptocurrencies that are beyond their control. On Monday, the Bank of England announced at the latest that it was dealing with a digital currency from the central bank.

On Tuesday morning, prices for cryptocurrencies and related stocks fell. Bitcoin’s fell 1 percent and traded just over $ 55,000. Coinbase and Riot Blockchain stocks were slightly lower in premarket trading.