Tag: Updates

Europe’s Economic system Shrank in First Quarter, Revealing a Recession: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date April 30, 2021

Shuttered storefronts in Milan last month. Extended lockdowns across Europe have slowed economic growth.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

The eurozone economy contracted by 0.6 percent over the first three months of the year, sliding back into recession, as the still-raging pandemic prompted governments to extend lockdowns.

Coming a day after the United States disclosed that its economy expanded 1.6 percent over the same period, the European downturn presented a contrast of fortunes on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Propelled by dramatic public expenditures to stimulate growth, as well as swift increases in vaccination rates, the United States — the world’s largest economy — expanded rapidly during the first months of 2021. At the same time, the 19 nations that share the euro currency were caught in the second part of a so-called double-dip recession, reflecting far less aggressive stimulus spending and a botched effort to secure vaccines.

But figures for gross domestic product represent a snapshot of the past, and recent weeks have produced encouraging signs that Europe is on the mend. The alarming spread of Covid-19 in major economies like Germany and France has begun to trend downward, factories have revived production, while growing numbers of people are on the move in cities.

Even as the German economy diminished by 1.7 percent from January to March, Italy and Spain slipped by much smaller magnitudes — 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent respectively. The French economy grew by a modest 0.4 percent, though its prospects face a fresh challenge in the form of new pandemic restrictions imposed this month by the government.

The initial lockdowns last year punished Europe’s economies, bringing large swaths of commercial life to a halt. But the current restrictions are calibrated to reflect improved understanding of how the virus spreads. Rather than closing their doors altogether, restaurants in some countries are serving meals on patios and dispensing takeout orders. Roofers, carpenters and other skilled trades have resumed work, so long as they can stay outside.

“We have sort of learned to live with the pandemic,” said Dhaval Joshi, chief strategist at BCA Research in London. “We are adapting to it.”

Vaccination rates are increasing throughout Europe, a trend likely to be advanced by the European Union’s recent deal to secure doses from Pfizer.

Most economists and the European Central Bank expect the eurozone to expand at a blistering pace over the rest of 2021, yielding growth of more than 4 percent for the full year.

Still, even in the most hopeful scenario, Europe’s recovery is running behind the United States, a reflection of their differing approaches to economic trauma.

Since last year, the United States has unleashed additional public spending worth 25 percent of its national economic output for pandemic-related stimulus and relief programs, according to the International Monetary Fund. That compares to 10 percent in Germany.

But Europe also began the crisis with far more comprehensive social safety net programs. While the United States directed cash to those set back by the pandemic, Europe limited a surge in unemployment.

“Europe has more insurance schemes,” said Kjersti Haugland, chief economist at DNB Markets, an investment bank in Oslo. “You don’t fall as hard, but you don’t rebound that sharply either.”

Credit…Lee Celano/Reuters

Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two biggest oil companies in the United States, on Friday reported their first quarterly profits after several quarters of losses, signaling that the energy industry is rebounding from the coronavirus pandemic.

Oil prices have climbed in recent months and are now roughly where they were before the pandemic’s full force was felt. As a result, Exxon reported a $2.7 billion profit in the first three months of the year, compared with a loss of $610 million in the same period a year ago. Chevron said its profit was $1.4 billion, down from $3.6 billion a year earlier. Chevron this week raised its dividend by nearly 4 percent.

The American oil benchmark price, now around $64 a barrel, has tripled since last April. Natural gas prices have also strengthened during the recovery.

“The strong first quarter results reflect the benefits of higher commodity prices and our focus on structural cost reductions,” Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Only six months ago, many analysts warned that Exxon would have to cut its dividend, but now the shareholder payout appears safe because of rising production and higher chemical prices. Exxon this month reported yet another in a string of big oil discoveries off the coast of Guyana, one of its most important growth areas.

At Chevron, sales and other revenue in the quarter increased to $31 billion, $1 billion more than the year-ago quarter.

“Earnings strengthened primarily due to higher oil prices as the economy recovers,” said Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chief executive.

Both companies suffered losses from the severe Texas freeze in February. Exxon reported that lost sales and repairs cost the company nearly $600 million. Chevron said its results were weakened by $300 million in lost oil and refining production and repairs.

Credit…Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

Volkswagen’s American unit was only kidding when it put out the word late in March that it was changing its name to “Voltswagen” to show its commitment to electric vehicles. To say the April Fool’s joke didn’t land is an understatement. Now the misfired marketing gag has prompted an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Volkswagen did not dispute reports in Der Spiegel and other German media that the S.E.C. was looking into whether the carmaker misled shareholders with the faux rebranding. Volkswagen in Germany declined to comment Friday.

Publicly listed companies are not supposed to fool their shareholders, even in jest. Some media reported the purported name change as fact until Volkswagen of America admitted it was all a joke.

German law also requires companies to be honest with their shareholders, but a spokeswoman for the stock market regulator, known as Bafin, said the agency saw no basis to investigate the Voltswagen issue.

It is unlikely that Volkswagen will face a serious penalty if the S.E.C. finds a violation, at least not compared to the tens of billions of dollars that an emissions scandal has cost the company since 2015. The gag does not appear to have had any influence on the price of Volkswagen shares, which rose for several days even after the company admitted it was all a ruse.

Like a comedian bombing onstage, the most painful consequence may be the humiliation.

Credit…Pool photo by Pat Greenhouse/EPA, via Shutterstock

Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, said on Thursday that “in a lot of cases” gig workers in the United States should be classified as employees, not independent contractors. “In some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not, and I think it has to be consistent across the board,” he told Reuters.

Shares of Uber, Lyft, Fiverr and DoorDash fell sharply on the news. These companies’ business models depend on classifying workers as independent contractors, who are not entitled to labor protections like a minimum wage or overtime pay.

But how much control does Mr. Walsh have over how companies classify their employees?

There’s no single law that makes workers employees or contractors. The Labor Department can enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes the federal minimum wage and overtime pay. This law applies only to employees, and who should fall into that category has been the subject of a long-running debate.

In 2015, the Obama administration issued guidance that many interpreted to mean that app-based workers should be considered employees. It was rescinded by the Trump administration.

In 2021, the Trump administration issued a rule that would have made it easier for the same companies to classify workers as contractors. It was nixed by the Biden administration. Mr. Walsh’s comments suggest his interpretation will be similar to the Obama administration’s. And David Weil, reportedly President Biden’s nominee to lead the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, wrote the 2015 guidance.

New guidance wouldn’t change the law, but it could change how the Labor Department decides whether to bring lawsuits against gig economy companies. “It’s implicitly a sign to employers that you should comply with this interpretation or there’s a risk of enforcement,” Brian Chen, a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, told the DealBook newsletter.

Although such guidance is nonbinding, Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School, said courts “tend to give it deference” when making decisions. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw specific action coming from the department sometime this year,” said William Gould, a Stanford law professor and the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

Credit…Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

The Endeavor Group, the entertainment conglomerate run by the Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, pulled its initial public offering at the last minute in 2019, amid lukewarm interest from investors. Last year posed its own difficulties, with a pandemic that hurt its live events business as well as its talent agency.

But Endeavor finally made its market debut on Thursday, closing the day with a market cap of more than $10 billion. Mr. Emanuel spoke with the DealBook newsletter about what changed — and what comes next.

On why the I.P.O. went ahead this time:

“There was confusion with regard to the U.F.C., so we cleaned that up,” Mr. Emanuel said about the mixed-martial arts league that Endeavor is acquiring full control of with proceeds from the offering. Debt was also a worry before, and the company’s leverage will be reduced with help from a $1.7 billion private placement, with Third Point and Elliot Management among the investors. S&P Global upgraded the company’s credit rating on Thursday.

Endeavor also used the pandemic period to restructure and consolidate, shifting further away from its talent agency roots. And Mr. Emanuel expects its events business, entertainment relationships and intellectual property will help feed a demand for “content in all forms” after the pandemic: “We’re the story about coming out.”

On Endeavor’s role in the streaming wars:

“We’re platform agnostic, and we serve all parties,” Mr. Emanuel said. The broadcasters are spending “huge” amounts to build out their streaming platforms. “I don’t have to do that,” he said. “I just have to supply it.”

On how he met Elon Musk, who is joining Endeavor’s board:

“I definitely cold called. That’s kind of in my nature,” Mr. Emanuel said. “We’ve represented him in some of his endeavors. And then over time, he and I became friendly.”

“He’s also a great entrepreneur, meaning he knows how hard it is to build and run a company,” he added, noting that they often call each other for advice.

On whether he has any concerns about putting Mr. Musk on the board given the Tesla chief’s run-ins with securities regulators:

“No.”

Credit…Akos Stiller for The New York Times

The vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford brought in $275 million in sales from about 68 million doses delivered in the first three months of this year, AstraZeneca reported on Friday.

AstraZeneca disclosed the figure, most of which came from sales in Europe, as it reported its first-quarter financial results. It offers the clearest view to date of how much money is being brought in by one of the leading Covid vaccines.

AstraZeneca, which has pledged not to profit on its vaccine during the pandemic, has been selling the shot to governments for several dollars per dose, less expensive than the other leading vaccines. The vaccine has won authorization in at least 78 countries since December but is not approved for use in the United States.

The vaccine represented just under 4 percent of AstraZeneca’s revenue for the quarter; it was nowhere near the company’s biggest revenue generator. By comparison, the company’s best-selling product, the cancer drug Tagrisso, brought in more than $1.1 billion in sales in the quarter.

AstraZeneca has said it is planning to seek emergency authorization for its vaccine to be used in the United States, even as it has become clear that the doses are not needed. The Biden administration said this week that it would make available to the rest of the world up to 60 million doses of its supply of AstraZeneca shots, pending a review of their quality.

If the company does win authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it could help shore up confidence in a vaccine whose reputation been hit by concerns about a rare but serious side effect involving blood clotting. The F.D.A.’s evaluation process is considered the gold standard globally.

Johnson & Johnson, whose vaccine was authorized for emergency use at the end of February, reported last week that its vaccine generated $100 million in sales in the United States in the first three months of the year. The federal government is paying the company $10 a dose. Like AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson has pledged to sell its vaccine “at cost” — meaning it won’t profit on the sales — during the pandemic.

Vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna cost more, and neither company has said that it will forego profits. Pfizer has said that it expects its vaccine to bring in about $15 billion in revenue this year; Moderna said it anticipates $18.4 billion in sales.

Both companies are scheduled to report their first-quarter results next week.

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

U.S. stocks fell in early trading on Friday, with the S&P 500 pulling back from a record high reached the day before, as traders closed positions for the end of the month and continued to react to company earnings.

Despite Friday’s decline, the S&P 500 is still on track for a gain of about 5 percent for April, its best monthly showing since November — when stocks rallied nearly 11 percent in the wake of the U.S. presidential election.

The benchmark stock index had hit a record after data showed the American economy grew strongly at the start of the year. Forecasters predict the economy will be back to its prepandemic size by the summer and will help drive global economic growth.

Oil prices fell, with futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropping more than 2 percent to $63.50 a barrel.

Europe

The Stoxx Europe 600 index was slightly lower. The index is heading for a second consecutive week of losses, which hasn’t happened since October.
The eurozone economy contracted by 0.6 percent over the first three months of the year, sliding back into recession, as the pandemic prompted governments to extend lockdowns. The decline was smaller than economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast, but it still puts much of Europe in a double-dip recession.

Company earnings

AstraZeneca rose 3.4 percent in London after the drugmaker’s first-quarter earnings beat analysts expectations. The company also said that the vaccine it developed with the University of Oxford brought in $275 million in sales from about 68 million doses in the first three months of the year; the company has pledged not to profit from the vaccine.
Barclays shares plunged 6 percent after what the bank’s chief executive described as a “mixed result” for its first-quarter earnings. Income from trading in equities rose but fell for other assets. Still, the bank has a sunny outlook for the future. Jes Staley, the chief executive, said he expected the British economy to grow at the fastest pace since 1948.
Twitter shares dropped 13 percent after the social media platform cautioned investors that its user numbers were unlikely to increase substantially this year when compared with the spike caused by the pandemic.
Amazon rose about 1 percent after it reported $108.5 billion in sales in the first three months of the year, up 44 percent from a year earlier. It also posted $8.1 billion in profit, an increase of 220 percent from the same period last year.

With the pandemic shifting sales online and consumers flush with stimulus checks, Amazon on Thursday reported $108.5 billion in sales in the first three months of the year, up 44 percent from a year earlier. It also posted $8.1 billion in profit, an increase of 220 percent from the same period last year. The high volume of orders during the pandemic has let Amazon operate more efficiently. It has run its warehouses closer to full capacity, and delivery drivers have made more stops on their routes, with less time driving between customers. The number of items Amazon sold grew 44 percent, but the cost to fulfill those orders was up only 31 percent.
Twitter reported on Thursday that its revenue in the first quarter of the year was $1.04 billion, a 28 percent increase from the same quarter the previous year that modestly exceeded analyst expectations. Net income for the quarter was $68 million, a turnaround from an $8.4 million loss in the same quarter a year ago. The banning of former President Donald J. Trump did not appear to have hurt Twitter’s financial performance in the quarter. The company saw a 20 percent jump in daily active users who see ads, to 199 million. It also added new advertising formats, leading to a 32 percent increase in ad revenue in the quarter.

Credit…Caleb Kenna for The New York Times

Tesla’s solar ambitions date to 2015 when it announced that it would sell panels and home batteries alongside its electric cars. A year later, Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, promised that Tesla’s new shingles would turbocharge installations by attracting homeowners who found solar panels ugly.

After delays, Tesla began rolling out the shingles in a big way this year, but it is already encountering a major problem, Ivan Penn reports for The New York Times.

The company is hitting some customers with price increases before installation that are tens of thousands of dollars higher than earlier quotes, angering early adopters and raising big questions about how Tesla, which is better known for its electric cars, is running its once dominant rooftop solar business.

The shingles remain such a tiny segment of the solar market that few industry groups and analysts bother to track installations.

Tesla is not the only company to pursue the idea of embedding solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity, in shingles. Dow Chemical, CertainTeed, Suntegra and Luma, among others, have offered similar products with limited success.

But given Mr. Musk’s success with Tesla’s electric cars and SpaceX’s rockets, Tesla’s glass shingles attracted outsize attention. He promised that they would be much better than anything anybody else had come up with and come in a variety of styles so they could resemble asphalt, slate and Spanish barrel tiles to fit the aesthetic of each home.

During a quarterly earnings call on Monday, Mr. Musk insisted that demand for Tesla’s solar roofs “remains strong” even though the company had raised prices substantially. He described the last-minute increases as a teething problem.

Customers are unhappy with the growing pains. Dr. Peter Quint was eager to install Tesla’s solar shingles on his 4,000-square-foot home in Portland, Ore., until the company raised the price to $112,000, from $75,000, in a terse email. When he called Tesla for an explanation, he was put on hold for more than three hours.

“I said, ‘This isn’t real, right?’” said Dr. Quint, whose specialty is pediatric critical care. “The price started inching up. We could deal with that. Then this. At that price, in our opinion, it’s highway robbery.”

Credit…Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

In the first months of 2021, what was good for the auto industry was decidedly good for the American economy.

Spending on motor vehicles and parts rose almost 13 percent in the first quarter, making a big contribution to the increase in gross domestic product, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Strong sales of new and used vehicles were propelled by consumers who had delayed purchases earlier in the pandemic and by others who — because of the virus — wanted to rely less on public transit or shared transportation services like Uber.

Two rounds of stimulus payments since late December were a big factor. Low interest rates, readily available credit, rising home values and stock prices, and strong trade-in values for used models also eased the path for consumers.

In fact, demand in the first quarter was robust enough that the auto industry was able to post healthy results despite a shortage of computer chips that forced temporary shutdowns of many auto plants.

The number of new cars and light trucks sold increased 11 percent from the comparable period a year earlier, to 3.9 million, according to the auto-sales data provider Edmunds.com.

On Wednesday, Ford Motor reported it made a $3.3 billion profit in the quarter, its highest total since 2011. While it produced 200,000 fewer vehicles in the quarter than it had planned, the average selling price of Ford models rose to $47,858, 8 percent higher than in the first quarter a year ago, Edmunds reported.

The combination of strong consumer demand and tight inventories — partly a result of the chip shortage — has produced something of a dream scenario for auto retailers. At AutoNation, the country’s largest chain of dealerships, many vehicles are being sold near or at sticker price even before they arrive from the factory.

“I’ve never seen so much preselling of shipments,” said Mike Jackson, the chief executive. “These vehicles are coming in and going right out.”

In the first quarter, AutoNation’s revenue jumped 27 percent, to $5.9 billion, and the company reported $239 million in profit. That was a turnaround from a loss a year ago, when the pandemic crimped sales and forced AutoNation to close stores.

Tags Economy, Europes, Live, quarter, Recession, Revealing, Shrank, Updates

Business

U.S. Economic system Rebounds as Ache Brought on by Pandemic Eases: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date April 29, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

The economy picked up speed last quarter, shaking off some of the lingering effects of the pandemic as consumer spending grew, bolstered by government stimulus checks and an easing of restrictions in many parts of the country.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy expanded 1.6 percent in the first three months of 2021, compared with 1.1 percent in the final quarter last year.

On an annualized basis, the first-quarter growth rate was 6.4 percent.

Gross domestic product,

adjusted for inflation and

seasonality, at annual rates

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation

and seasonality, at annual rates

“This was a great way to start the year,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “We had the perfect mix of improving health conditions, strong fiscal stimulus and warmer weather.”

“Consumers are now back in the driver’s seat when it comes to economic activity, and that’s the way we like it,” he added. “A consumer that is feeling confident about the outlook will generally spend more freely.”

Looking ahead, economists said they expected to see even better numbers this quarter.

“It’s good news, but the better news is coming,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “There’s nothing in this report that makes me think the economy won’t grow at a gangbusters pace in the second and third quarter.”

The expansion last quarter was spurred by stimulus checks, he said, which quickly translated into purchases of durable goods like cars and household appliances.

“This demonstrates the value of government intervention when the economy is on its knees from Covid,” he added. “But in the coming quarters, the economy will be much less dependent on stimulus as individuals use the savings they’ve accumulated during the pandemic.”

Cumulative percent change in

G.D.P. from the start of the

last five recessions

Final quarter

before

recession

5 quarters

into recession

Cumulative percent change in G.D.P.

from the start of the last five recessions

Final quarter

before

recession

5 quarters

into recession

Overall economic activity should return to prepandemic levels in the current quarter, Mr. Anderson said, while cautioning that it will take until late 2022 for employment to regain the ground it lost as a result of the pandemic.

Still, the labor market does seem to be catching up. Last month, employers added 916,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 6 percent, while initial claims for unemployment benefits have dropped sharply in recent weeks.

Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a recruiting and staffing firm in Chicago, said: “It’s the best job market I’ve seen in 25 years. We have 50 percent more openings now than we did pre-Covid.”

Hiring is stronger for junior to midlevel positions, he said, with strong demand for professionals in accounting, financing, marketing and sales, among other areas. “Companies are building up their back-office support and supply chains,” he said. “I think we’re good for at least 18 months to two years.”

Spending on goods like automobiles led the way in the first quarter, but demand for services like dining out should revive in the second quarter, said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “I think we will see a surge in services spending,” she said.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Initial jobless claims fell last week to yet another pandemic low in the latest sign that the economic recovery is strengthening.

About 575,000 people filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, a decrease of 9,000 from the previous week’s revised figure. It was the third straight week that jobless claims had dropped.

In addition, 122,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits. That was a decline of 12,000 from the previous week.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 553,000.

“Today’s report, and the other data that we got today, signals an improving labor market and an improving economy,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. “It is encouraging that claims are continuing to fall.”

Although weekly jobless claims remain above levels reached before the pandemic, vaccinations and warmer weather are offering new hope. Most economists expect the slow downward trend in claims to continue in the coming months as the economy reopens more fully.

But challenges lie ahead. The long-term unemployed — a group that historically has had a more difficult time rejoining the work force — now make up more than 40 percent of the total number of unemployed. Of the 22 million jobs that disappeared early in the pandemic, more than eight million remain lost.

“The labor market is definitely moving in the right direction,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the online job site Indeed. She noted that job postings as of last Friday were up 22.4 percent from February 2020.

Still, she cautioned that industries like tourism and hospitality would probably remain depressed until the pandemic was firmly under control. She also stressed that child care obligations might be preventing people ready to return to work from seeking jobs.

“We still are in a pandemic — the vaccinations are ramping up but there is that public health factor still,” Ms. Konkel said. “We’re not quite there yet.”

Microsoft will decrease the share of money it charges independent developers that publish computer games on its online store, starting in August, the company said on Thursday.

Developers will keep 88 percent of the revenue from their games, up from 70 percent. That could make Microsoft’s store more attractive to independent studios than competitors like Valve’s gaming store, called Steam, which typically starts by taking a 30 percent cut. Epic Games’ store takes 12 percent.

“We want to make sure that we’re competitive in the market,” said Sarah Bond, a Microsoft vice president who leads the gaming ecosystem organization. “Our objective is to have a leading revenue share and really a leading platform.”

The share of revenue that developers get to keep has come under greater scrutiny across the tech industry. Google and Apple have faced antitrust questions for the 30 percent fees they charge developers whose programs appear in their app stores.

Last year, Epic sued Apple and Google separately, claiming they violated antitrust laws by forcing developers to use their payment systems. Epic had tried to bypass the fees by letting customers pay for items in its Fortnite video game directly through Epic. That caused Apple and Google to boot Fortnite from their app stores.

Apple and Google have since reduced fees for some developers. Epic’s lawsuit against Apple is set to head to trial on Monday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif.

Credit…Koen Van Weel/EPA, via Shutterstock

Strong profit increases from two of Europe’s largest energy companies, Royal Dutch Shell and Total, demonstrated that what really matters for the financial performance of these companies remains the price of oil and natural gas.

Their recent investments in clean energy, described by company officials as essential for the future, remain marginal.

Total said that adjusted net income rose by 69 percent compared with the period a year earlier, when the effects of the pandemic were beginning to kick in, to $3 billion, while Shell said that what it calls adjusted earnings rose by 13 percent to $3.2 billion.

The main factor in the improved performance by both companies was a roughly 20 percent rise in oil prices along with an increase in natural gas prices, leading to higher revenues. During a news conference to discuss the results, Jessica Uhl, Shell’s chief financial officer, said that a $10 jump in oil prices would translate into a $6.4 billion increase in cash for the company’s coffers on an annual basis.

Shell, which cut its dividend last year for the first time since World War II, confirmed that it would increase the payout for the quarter by 4 percent, to about 17 cents a share.

Both companies have tethered their futures to generating and distributing renewable sources of energy. Shell in February said its oil production had peaked in 2019, and it has been investing in various clean energy ventures, including a network of 60,000 charging stations for electric vehicles. And Total has, among other things, invested in options to build offshore wind farms off Britain.

In its earnings statement, Total took the lead among the oil majors in providing details on its investments in renewable energy like wind and solar. The company said these businesses brought in $148 million for the quarter, measured as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. This figure was about 2 percent of the overall total for the company of $7.3 billion, according to analysts at Bernstein, a research firm.

Credit…Chema Moya/EPA, via Shutterstock

Airbus announced Thursday that it had returned to a profit in the first quarter following a 1.1 billion euro loss last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, but its top executive warned that the economic toll would continue.

“The first quarter shows that the crisis is not yet over for our industry, and that the market remains uncertain,” Guillaume Faury, chief executive of the world’s largest airplane maker, said in a statement.

Airbus booked a net profit of 362 million euros ($440 million) between January and March, compared with a loss of 481 million euros a year earlier, as cost-cutting measures — which included more than 11,000 layoffs announced last year for its global operations — bolstered the bottom line. Revenue fell 2 percent to 10.5 billion euros.

Airbus delivered 125 commercial aircraft to airlines in the three-month period, up from 122 a year earlier. Over all, Airbus delivered 566 aircraft to airlines in 2020, 40 percent less than expected before the pandemic.

Airbus has previously warned that the industry might not recover from the disruption caused by the pandemic until as late as 2025, as new virus variants delay a resumption of worldwide air travel.

Given the uncertain outlook, Airbus won’t ramp up aircraft deliveries this year. The company said it expected to deliver 566 aircraft on back order from airline companies, the same number as last year.

It maintained its forecast for an underlying operating profit of two billion euros for the year.

As of

Data delayed at least 15 minutes

Source: Factset

Stocks on Wall Street jumped on Thursday, rising with European stock indexes, amid indications that the economy is moving toward a recovery to prepandemic levels.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the U.S. economy expanded 1.6 percent in the first three months of 2021, compared with 1.1 percent in the final quarter last year, or 6.4 percent on an annualized basis.

A day earlier, the Federal Reserve said that the outlook was improving and that it would continue to provide substantial monetary support, easing investors’ concerns that it would soon start easing the stimulus efforts it launched a year ago when the Covid-19 crisis forced a near shutdown of many parts of the economy.

“While the level of new cases remains concerning,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said, “continued vaccinations should allow for a return to more normal economic conditions later this year.” The central bank kept interest rates near zero and said it would continue buying bonds at a steady clip.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7 percent. Market sentiment continued to rise after President Biden detailed more of his spending plans — which total $4 trillion — to fund expanded access to education and reduce the cost of child care, among other things.

Oil prices rose. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, climbed more than 2 percent to above $5 a barrel.

The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.3 percent as a measure of economic confidence for the eurozone surged higher.

Company earnings

Facebook shares rose nearly 6 percent after the company said on Wednesday that profit nearly doubled to $9.5 billion in the first quarter as advertising revenue and user numbers increased.
Apple shares rose about half a percent after the iPhone maker’s profit more than doubled to $23.6 billion in the first quarter. The company also said it would buy back $90 billion of its own stock, part of its continued program to return much of its earnings to shareholders.
Qualcomm, which makes chips for smartphones, rose nearly 6 percent after the company said its revenue increased 52 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the previous year.
Airbus shares rose 2.7 percent after the French plane maker said it had returned to a profit in the first quarter following a 1.1 billion euro loss last year. But the company’s chief executive added that the crisis was not over for the industry.

Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Amazon will increase pay between 50 cents and $3 an hour for half a million workers in its warehouses, delivery network and other fulfillment teams, the company said on Wednesday.

The action follows scrutiny of Amazon from lawmakers and an unsuccessful unionization push that ended this month at its large warehouse in Alabama. In 2018, Amazon raised its minimum pay to $15 an hour. In recent months, it has publicly campaigned to raise the federal minimum to $15, too.

Amazon has been on a hiring spree during the pandemic. As more customers ordered items online, the company added 400,000 employees in the United States last year. Its total work force stands at almost 1.3 million people.

Amazon typically revaluates wages each fall, before the holiday shopping season. But this year, it moved those changes earlier, said Darcie Henry, an Amazon vice president of people experience and technology. The new wages will roll out from mid-May through early June. Ms. Henry said the company was hiring for “tens of thousands” of open positions.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, recently told shareholders in his annual letter that he recognized the company needed “a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success.” He said that Amazon had always striven to be “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company,” and that now he wanted it to be “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work” as well.

Amazon is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Thursday.

Gary Gensler’s tenure leading the Securities and Exchange Commission is off to a rocky start: Alex Oh, who he named just days ago to run the regulator’s enforcement division, has resigned following a federal court ruling in a case involving one of her corporate clients, ExxonMobil.

In her resignation letter on Wednesday, Ms. Oh said the matter would be “an unwelcome distraction to the important work” of the enforcement division.

Ms. Oh’s resignation letter followed a ruling on Monday from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia over the conduct of Exxon’s lawyers during a civil case involving claims of human rights abuses in the Aceh province of Indonesia.

According to Judge Lamberth’s ruling, Exxon’s lawyers claimed without providing evidence that the plaintiffs’ attorneys were “agitated, disrespectful and unhinged” during a deposition. He ordered Exxon’s lawyers to show why penalties were not warranted for those comments.

The ruling did not single out any lawyers by name. Ms. Oh was one of the lead lawyers for Exxon.

The judge’s order also granted the plaintiffs’ motion that Exxon pay “reasonable expenses” associated with litigating their request for sanctions and with an accompanying motion to compel additional testimony from Exxon related to the deposition.

Ms. Oh’s resignation letter did not mention the Exxon case by name, but a person briefed on the matter confirmed that the ruling from Judge Lamberth had prompted her to step down.

Ms. Oh, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who worked for the elite firm Paul, Weiss for nearly two decades, was picked by Mr. Gensler to oversee the S.E.C.’s 1,000-attorney enforcement division on April 22. The same day, she filed a notice with the court in the Exxon case saying she had withdrawn from the matter because she had resigned from the firm to join the federal government.

The civil litigation involving Exxon is nearly two decades old and involves allegations by the plaintiffs that Exxon’s security personnel “inflicted grievous injuries” on them. The lawsuit was brought under the federal Alien Tort Claims Act, which enables residents of other countries to sue in the United States for damages arising from violations of U.S. treaties or “the law of nations.”

Mr. Gensler said in a news release that Melissa Hodgman, who had been the enforcement division’s acting chief since January, will return to that position. Ms. Hodgman has been an enforcement attorney with the agency since 2008. He thanked Ms. Oh for her “willingness to serve the country.”

Ms. Oh could not immediately be reached for comment.

Brad Karp, chairman of Paul, Weiss, said the firm would not comment on the matter because it involved ongoing litigation. “Alex is a person of the utmost integrity and a consummate professional with a strong ethical code,” he added.

Ms. Oh is a highly respected lawyer, but her selection had been criticized by the Revolving Door Project, a good-government group, because she had been in private practice for so many years and had defended some of the largest U.S. companies.

Apple said on Wednesday that its profits more than doubled to $23.6 billion in the most recent quarter. Apple said its revenues soared by 54 percent to $89.6 billion. As usual, the main driver of Apple’s success was sales of the iPhone, which rose by 66 percent to $47.9 billion, its steepest increase in years. In the latest quarter, iPhones accounted for 54 percent of Apple’s revenues.
Facebook said on Wednesday that revenue rose 48 percent to $26.2 billion in the first three months of the year, while profits nearly doubled to $9.5 billion. Advertising revenue, which makes up the bulk of Facebook’s income, rose 46 percent to $25.4 billion. Nearly 3.5 billion people now use one of Facebook’s apps every month, up 15 percent from a year earlier.
Ford Motor said on Wednesday that the global shortage of computer chips will take a greater toll on its business than previously expected and would likely cut its vehicle production in the second quarter by about half. Ford expects the shortage to lower its operating profit this year by $2.5 billion, to between $5.5 billion to $6.5 billion. The company made a $3.3 billion profit in the first quarter, a turnaround from a year ago when the company lost $2 billion as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to shut down much of the world’s economy.

Credit…Sara Hylton for The New York Times

Before the pandemic, when suppliers raised the cost of diapers, cereal and other everyday goods, retailers often absorbed the increase because stiff competition forced them to keep prices stable.

Now, with Americans’ shopping habits having shifted rapidly — with people spending more on treadmills and office furniture and less at restaurants and movie theaters — retailers are also adjusting, Gillian Friedman reports for The New York Times.

The Consumer Price Index, the measure of the average change in the prices paid by U.S. shoppers for consumer goods, increased 0.6 percent in March, the largest rise since August 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Procter & Gamble is raising prices on items like Pampers and Tampax in September. General Mills, which makes cereal brands including Cheerios, is facing increased supply-chain and freight costs that could translate into higher retail prices for customers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, companies were focused on fulfilling demand for toilet paper, cleaning supplies, canned food and masks, said Greg Portell, a partner at Kearney, a consulting firm. The government was watching for price-gouging, and customers were wary of being taken advantage of.

Now that the economy is beginning to stabilize, companies are starting to rebalance pricing so that it better fits their profit expectations and takes into account inflation. “This isn’t an opportunistic profit-taking by companies,” Mr. Portell said. “This is a reset of the market.”

Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

For many cryptocurrency supporters and investors, regulatory approval of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in the United States represents the holy grail. It would allow the crypto-curious to get exposure to Bitcoin without having to buy the tokens themselves, signifying that digital assets are really, truly mainstream.

But it’s not meant to be — yet. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission delayed a decision on a Bitcoin E.T.F. proposal from the investment manager VanEck, saying it needs more time but offering no other explanation.

Delay is not denial, and it may be a good sign, Todd Cipperman, the founder of the compliance services firm CCS, told the DealBook newsletter. When considering the concept of a crypto E.T.F. in 2018, the S.E.C. raised questions about investor protection issues and put a “wet blanket on the whole idea,” he said.

Now, crypto is much bigger, and Gary Gensler, who taught courses about blockchain technology at M.I.T., is chair of the S.E.C. His expertise doesn’t guarantee success for crypto E.T.F.s, but it will be easier for an expert in the field to approve them, Mr. Cipperman suggested.

The S.E.C. gave itself until mid-June, with the option to take more time, but it must decide before year’s end. The regulator has rejected every proposal to date, starting with the first Bitcoin E.T.F. pitch in 2013, presented by the Winklevoss twins, which was eventually dismissed in 2017 (and again in 2018). There are several E.T.F. proposals on the table now, including one from the traditional finance giant Fidelity.

Canada is moving faster, approving all kinds of crypto E.T.F.s, after allowing its first Bitcoin E.T.F. in February. Hester Peirce, an S.E.C. commissioner and vocal crypto champion, told DealBook earlier this month that she has been “mystified” by her agency’s response to some prior applications, which met the standards in her view. With more players now engaging in the process, approval could be looming — eventually.

Credit…Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

The first-quarter economic recovery was powered by spending. Specifically, by spending on stuff.

Consumer spending rose 2.6 percent in the first three months of the year, with a 5.4 percent increase in spending on goods accounting for most of the growth. Americans ramped up spending on cars, furniture, recreational vehicles and other long-lasting items, as well as on clothes and food. Spending on services, which has slumped throughout the pandemic, rose by a more modest 1.1 percent.

Services spending is likely to pick up in the second quarter, as the acceleration of the vaccine rollout allows more Americans to return to restaurants, airplanes and other activities that they avoided during the pandemic. The data released Thursday by the Commerce Department largely predates that surge.

What the first-quarter data does capture is the impact of two rounds of relief checks from the federal government. After-tax personal income, adjusted for inflation, jumped 12.7 percent in the first quarter, with the government payments accounting for most of the increase. There was a similar jump in income when the first round of relief checks hit last year, which was followed by a similar surge in spending on goods.

“To some extent, when people have money, they’re going to spend it,” said Ben Herzon, executive director of IHS Markit, a forecasting firm. “If they’re not spending on services because they’re not going to movies or amusement parks, they’re going to derive utility from goods.”

He said he expected goods spending to ease in the second quarter as services spending begins to rebound more strongly.

Americans still have plenty of cash to spend. Households were sitting on a collective $4.1 trillion in savings in the first quarter, up from $1.2 trillion before the pandemic began — although such aggregates can obscure the fact that many families have seen their finances wiped out by the crisis.

Ample savings and rising consumer optimism are giving businesses the confidence to bet on the future as well. Business investment rose 2.4 percent in the first quarter and is now above its prepandemic level. The housing market has been juiced by low interest rates and strong demand; residential construction spending rose 2.6 percent in the first quarter.

Tags Caused, Eases, Economy, Live, pain, Pandemic, rebounds, Updates

Business

Boeing Sees Restoration Forward Regardless of Persevering with Losses: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 28, 2021

Boeing 777X jets at the company’s production facility in Everett, Wash. Boeing said it continued to expect the recovery to take years to unfold.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Boeing said Wednesday that it lost $561 million in the first three months of the year as it emerged from its prolonged 737 Max crisis and contended with new problems related to the 787 Dreamliner jet. Revenue fell 10 percent to $15.2 billion compared with the same period last year.

But, like his counterparts at major airlines, Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive, struck an optimistic tone.

“While the global pandemic continues to challenge the overall market environment, we view 2021 as a key inflection point for our industry as vaccine distribution accelerates and we work together across government and industry to help enable a robust recovery,” he said in a statement.

In an investor presentation, Boeing said it continued to expect the recovery to take years to unfold, with passenger traffic unlikely to return to 2019 levels until 2023 or 2024. It also said its financial results for this year “hinge” on a recovery in the commercial airplane market.

At the end of March, the company had a backlog of more than 4,000 commercial airplane orders, valued at $283 billion. Its defense and space backlog was valued at $61 billion.

The company’s results were weighed down by quality concerns with the 787, though deliveries of the plane resumed at the end of the quarter “following comprehensive reviews,” Boeing said in a statement. The company also suffered a $318 million charge related to development of the next Air Force One, which was affected by a pandemic slowdown and problems with a key supplier, which Boeing recently sued.

It was also the first full quarter since the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision in November to lift its ban on the 737 Max, which had been grounded globally nearly two years following two fatal crashes in which hundreds were killed.

Since the ban was lifted, Boeing has delivered more than 85 Max’s to customers worldwide. It also reported that it sold more planes than were canceled in February and March, its first months of positive sales in more than year. Nearly two dozen airlines have put the plane back into service on more than 26,000 flights, Boeing said.

Mr. Calhoun also provided an update on an electrical concern with some Max planes that was disclosed this month. The F.A.A. has said the issue could affect the operation of a backup power control unit in 106 planes worldwide, all of which have been grounded. Boeing is working with the agency on a fix that should take a “few days per airplane” once approved, Mr. Calhoun said in a letter to staff.

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe brand is headed to Wall Street. Allbirds is interviewing banks over the next few weeks to help it make a market debut, people familiar with the matter told the DealBook newsletter, requesting anonymity because the process is confidential. The direct-to-consumer company was last valued at around $1.7 billion.

The talks come as consumer brands that were founded with a heavy (if not exclusive) internet presence, including Honest Company and Warby Parker, are taking advantage of a pandemic-driven boom in online shopping to see if investor enthusiasm for tech offerings extends to them as well. Many of those companies, including Allbirds, have since opened some retail stores, which has proved an easier transition than the legacy retailers trying to build digital operations after making their names in the offline world.

Allbirds was founded by the New Zealand soccer star Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger, a renewables expert. Its mantra is to “create better things in a better way,” and the company advertises that the merino wool in its shoes uses 60 percent less energy than typical synthetic materials.

“One of the worst offenders of the environment from a consumer product standpoint is shoes,” Mr. Zwillinger told The New York Times in 2017. “It’s not the making; it’s the materials.”

The brand’s flashy-but-logo-free shoes are popular among techies, celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio is an investor) and former President Barack Obama. The company has raised more than $200 million since 2016.

Allbirds is a B Corp, a certification earned by focusing on social good as well as profit. (Mr. Zwillinger joined a DealBook Debrief call last year to talk about the purpose of business.) Wall Street hasn’t always taken kindly to such companies: Etsy had to drop the status after taking a beating from the public markets following its I.P.O. Allbirds, though, said the $100 million funding round it announced last September was “indication of investors’ continued enthusiasm for its stakeholder-centric business model.”

“Allbirds has always been focused on building a great company, and as a B Corp and Public Benefit Corporation, doing what is best for our stakeholders (planet, people, investors) at the right time and in a way that helps the business grow in a sustainable fashion,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement.

Credit…Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

Deutsche Bank reported its best quarterly profit in seven years Wednesday as it benefited from lively financial markets and avoided losses from the investment firm Archegos Capital that has battered rivals.

The first-quarter profit of 900 million euros, or $1.1 billion, was better than expected and suggested that Deutsche Bank may be emerging from a decade of scandals and disasters that earned it a reputation as Europe’s most troubled lender.

James von Moltke, the chief financial officer of Deutsche Bank, said in response to a question about Archegos during an interview with Bloomberg News that the bank had been able to exit its involvement without a loss.

That is in contrast to rivals like Credit Suisse, which lost $4.7 billion it had lent to Archegos after the firm collapsed in March. Swiss bank UBS disclosed Tuesday that it lost $774 million from its involvement with Archegos.

Deutsche Bank, like most big corporations, is assessing how the pandemic may have permanently changed the way employees do their jobs. Mr. von Moltke said the bank was working on a plan that would allow employees to work from home two or three days a week.

Like many of its peers, Deutsche Bank has benefited from frenetic activity on financial markets, earning fees as it helped governments issue debt to finance stimulus programs or sell shares in blank-check investment vehicles known as SPACs.

The bank said it had also benefited from a European Central Bank stimulus program that effectively pays commercial lenders to provide credit to businesses and consumers in the eurozone. In addition, Deutsche Bank slashed the amount of money it set aside for bad loans.

The financial results are a vindication for Christian Sewing, the bank’s chief executive, who has been trying to show large shareholders like the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management that he can generate consistent profits. Deutsche Bank shares rose 9 percent in Frankfurt trading Wednesday and are up more than 20 percent since the end of January.

“Our first quarter is further evidence that Deutsche Bank is on the right path,” Mr. Sewing said in a statement.

Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh

When Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, speaks to reporters in a webcast news conference on Wednesday afternoon, he’s likely to face questions about a simmering topic: inflation.

Prices are expected to pop in the coming months, both as inflation indexes lap very weak 2020 readings and as supply chains experience short-term reopening bottlenecks. The unknowns facing the Fed, and the investment world, are how big the jump will be and how long it will last.

Most forecasters and the Fed itself expect the increases to be only temporary. But some economists have warned that they could be significant enough to become a problem as businesses reopen, consumers start to spend their savings and the government pumps stimulus money into the economy.

If the increases are big enough and sustained, the Fed could find itself in a tough spot, forced to choose between letting prices rise or raising interest rates before the labor market is fully recovered.

Inflation also worries stock investors: If the Fed lifts interest rates to cool off the economy, it could make investing in bonds more attractive and corporate borrowing more expensive, both bad news for equities.

The Fed wants inflation to average 2 percent annually over time, and it defines that goal using the Commerce Department’s headline personal consumption expenditure index. But officials look at a variety of indicators to gauge conditions. Here’s where a handful of critical inflation measures stand and, when it’s relevant, where economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect them to go in the coming months:

P.C.E., the Fed’s preferred gauge: 1.6 percent in February, and expected at 2.3 percent in March and 2.2 percent for the full year.
Core P.C.E., which strips out volatile food and energy prices: 1.4 percent in February, and expected at 1.8 percent in March and 1.9 percent for the full year.
Consumer Price Index, an important Labor Department gauge: 2.6 percent in March and expected at 2.6 percent for the full year.
Producer Price Index, a measure of wholesale prices: 4.2 percent in March, the highest since 2011.
University of Michigan consumer inflation expectation for next year: 3.7 percent as of this month, up from 3 percent at the start of the year.
University of Michigan consumer inflation expectation for five years from now: 2.7 percent as of this month, little changed from start of the year.
Five-year, five-year forward inflation expectation rate, a market-based measure: 2.25 percent in recent days, roughly matching 2018 levels.

Fed officials regularly point out that inflation has been too tepid in recent years, not too high, and they don’t expect that to change quickly. To raise rates, they say, they would need to see that inflation was going to remain higher sustainably — for instance, if it came alongside heftier wage increases.

Part of the Fed’s comfort with a period of faster price gains is that consumer and business expectations have remained relatively low, despite some recent increases. If people aren’t anticipating higher prices, it’s likely to put a lid on how much more companies can charge.

Credit…Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Government bond yields jumped on Wednesday ahead of the latest Federal Reserve policy meeting.

Economists expect Fed officials to keep interest rates near zero and continue their bond-buying program, but central bank watchers will be looking for clues for how much longer the support will last as the U.S. economy improves. Higher yields on government bonds may reflect expectations that the Fed is inching closer signaling that it will change its policy, including raising its benchmark rate, even if that’s still years in the future.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, will speak to reporters Wednesday afternoon. Fed officials have said they would telegraph any changes well in advance and expected the current rise in inflation to be temporary, which would diminish the need for a monetary policy reaction.

The yield on 10-year Treasury notes as high as 1.65 percent on Wednesday. Yields on British and German government bonds also climbed.

“We think risks around this meeting are firmly skewed toward higher rates,” analysts at ING said of bond yields. “This is particularly true if the Fed breaks with its cautious tone of late, or simply decides to hedge its bets by saying it will react as appropriate if the economy overheats.”

Stocks

The S&P 500 was slightly higher on Wednesday.
Deutsche Bank rose nearly 11 percent after the German bank reported its best quarterly profit in seven years. The bank also avoided losses from the collapse of Archegos Capital Management that were a blow to some of its European rivals.
Alphabet rose 4 percent after the tech company said revenue in its most recent quarter increased sharply from the same period a year ago, supported by strong demand for online advertising.
Pinterest shares dropped more than 13 percent after the company said the growth in its number of users would probably slow down as pandemic restrictions were lifted.
On Wednesday, Boeing, Apple, Facebook and Ford report earnings.

European Economy

A group that monitors risk in the eurozone warned on Wednesday that corporate bankruptcies could surge after government support measures for businesses expire. “More than a year of restrictions on economic activity has so far not resulted in financial instability,” the European Systemic Risk Board said in a statement. “However, the threat of a wave of insolvencies looms large.”
The risk board, led by Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, said that governments needed to continue supporting businesses even after the economic effects of the pandemic fade.

Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said on Tuesday that it posted revenue of $55.31 billion in the first three months of the year, up 34 percent from a year earlier, and net profit more than doubled to $17.93 billion in the first quarter. It was the third straight quarter of record profit for the company. Advertising revenue rose 32 percent in the quarter spurred by strong demand for search marketing. Alphabet also generated $6 billion in YouTube ads, an increase of 49 percent.
Microsoft on Tuesday reported that its quarterly sales grew at one of its strongest rates in years, as the company was poised to cross $2 trillion in market value. Revenue rose to $41.7 billion for the fiscal third quarter, up 19 percent from a year earlier, its biggest quarterly increase since 2018. Profits jumped 44 percent to $15.5 billion. Gaming revenue grew 50 percent, fueled by spending on the new Xbox gaming console, which was launched late last year, as well as on Xbox content and services.
The coffee giant Starbucks said that its sales in the United States made a “full recovery” in the first three months of the year. Same-store sales in the U.S. climbed 9 percent in the company’s second quarter compared with the same period last year, while global revenues climbed 11 percent to $6.7 billion. Starbucks made a profit of $659 million in the quarter.

California is expecting a roughly $15 billion budget surplus next fiscal year, which runs from July through June, according to its most recent forecast. The state is so flush that it is now running its own stimulus program, writing one-time checks of $600 or $1,200 to poorer households and spending some $2 billion on aid for small businesses.

Less than a year ago, the state was facing a $54 billion shortfall, Matt Phillips reports for The New York Times. Here’s how the state’s fortunes were turned around:

Almost half of the personal income taxes that California collects comes from the top 1 percent of the state’s earners. Since much of that group’s income comes from stock holdings and stock-based compensation, their fortunes are tied to the performance of the stock market. After hitting a bottom in March 2020, the S&P 500 is up nearly 90 percent, creating close to $17 trillion in paper gains.
Last year, 457 companies sent public, raising $167.8 billion, both records, according to Dealogic. Almost a quarter of those dollars were destined for the 100 California companies that made the jump — the most of any state.
The governor’s office projects that revenue from capital gains taxes next fiscal year will top $18 billion, a key driver of the state’s surplus. “With Silicon Valley, when entrepreneurs get stock grants that they exercise, or stock options, California makes out very well,” said David Hitchcock, the primary analyst on California for bond-rating firm S&P Global.
California’s budget rebound was aided by larger-than-expected federal government spending that kept people afloat and the economy from complete collapse. When California’s governor revises his most recent budget next month as required by law, analysts expect it will show an additional $26 billion in federal funding to California as a result of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed last month.

Tags ahead, Boeing, Continuing, Live, Losses, recovery, Sees, Updates

Business

Lobbyists urge updates to federal automobile security guidelines after Tesla crashes

Post author By
Post date April 27, 2021

Lobbyists urge updates to federal car safety rules after Tesla crashes

Two major US auto industry lobby groups are pushing for updates to federal vehicle safety regulations following major accidents involving Tesla vehicles.

During a Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday, executives from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association said the U.S. needed better standards and protocols to sell automated driving systems like Tesla’s under the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving brand names to address.

Tesla has been critical of the development, testing, and marketing of these systems, including the failure to prevent drivers from misusing or overestimating the capabilities of the autopilot and FSD.

There are questions about whether autopilot or FSD were in any way to blame for the recent Tesla accidents that the National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are investigating. To date, the NHTSA has initiated around 28 investigations into Tesla vehicle accidents, of which around 24 are active. NTSB has launched 8 such investigations.

Automated driving systems, also known as driver assistance systems, can control some functions of a vehicle. However, automakers continue to require drivers to remain alert and drive even when the systems are in use.

In general, driver assistance is based on a mixture of cameras and sensors. Some automakers use advanced maps along with sensors to restrict the use of their systems to specific streets.

Despite their commercial availability, the United States does not regulate precise federal regulations or performance standards for automated driving systems.

“The US is at risk of losing our competitive advantage because of a lack of clear national guidelines,” said Ann Wilson, senior vice president of government affairs for the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, during the hearing on Tuesday. She later added, “NHTSA can and should do more.”

John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said a “more strategic and robust approach” is needed for the government’s New Car Assessment program. He also said any modernization of the government’s Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which set requirements for the design, construction, performance and durability of vehicles, should also be analyzed in relation to highly automated and autonomous vehicles.

“We need a national strategy, a framework that accommodates a new kind of regulation,” he said.

The comments came Tuesday afternoon during a Senate Land Transport, Shipping, Freight and Ports subcommittee on how automotive innovations will affect the future of vehicle safety, mobility and technology in a global economy.

It came a day after three Democratic U.S. Senators on Monday introduced laws mandating performance standards for driver monitoring systems and requiring those systems to be installed in new vehicles.

Tesla is not a member of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation or the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association. The company did not respond to a comment.

A steering wheel light bar and cluster icons indicate the status of Super Cruise ™ and prompt the driver to return their attention to the road if the system detects that the driver’s attention has been turned away from the road for too long.

Source: General Motors

Driver monitoring

Prior to the hearing, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents automotive suppliers and manufacturers who produce nearly 99% of new cars and light trucks sold in the US, published several safety principles related to driver monitoring in vehicles with driver assistance systems such as Tesla Autopilot.

Among other things, the guidelines call on car manufacturers to introduce camera-based driver monitoring systems for vehicles with automated driving or driver assistance systems. These are intended to recognize whether the drivers are attentive and ready to drive manually in situations in which the automated program is insufficient.

General Motors, Subaru, and BMW already have camera-based driver monitoring systems, and others like Ford Motor have announced similar plans. Tesla vehicles have cabin cameras, but according to the company’s operating instructions, they are not used for driver monitoring. With Tesla’s systems, the driver has to “check in” by touching the steering wheel.

“This issue that we are now debating – and I agree with you – is a consumer awareness and confidence issue. That is why we have set out these driver monitoring principles today,” Bozzella said during the hearing, without any company or specific company To mention system. “Driver monitoring is an important element in this.”

Tesla research

Last week consumer reports found that a 2020 Tesla Model Y “can easily get the car to drive even if no one is in the driver’s seat.”

The test included upgrading the Tesla steering wheel to bypass the vehicle’s safety features that otherwise might have disabled the autopilot. The test followed a fatal spring 2019 Model S crash in Texas in April that sparked two federal investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

After a preliminary investigation, a Harris County police officer named Mark Herman told television that his investigators were “sure” that no one was in the driver’s seat of the Tesla at the time of the crash.

Extensive investigations have not been completed, and authorities have not disclosed whether the autopilot or Tesla’s premium automatic driving system FSD was in use before or at the time of the collision. Tesla advises in its owner’s manual that the autopilot and FSD require active monitoring.

The remains of a Tesla vehicle can be seen in this still from a video captured via social media after the crash in The Woodlands, Texas on April 17, 2021. Video recorded on April 17, 2021.

Scott J. Engle | via Reuters

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said in a tweet earlier this month, “Data logs recovered so far show that autopilot was not activated and this car did not purchase an FSD. Also, the standard autopilot would require turning on lane lines that this road does not would have. “”

In a first quarter earnings call on Monday, Musk said journalists should be “ashamed” of their coverage of the crash. Tesla’s vice president of automotive technology, Lars Moravy, also shared additional details Tesla learned from helping with the local and state investigation to date.

Among other things, Moravy said that in the spring incident in Texas, “Autosteer couldn’t and couldn’t get into the road condition as it was designed.” He added that the car “only accelerated to 30 mph” before hitting a tree, and that a steering wheel deformity indicated to Tesla a “likelihood that someone was in the driver’s seat at the time of the accident”.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, unveils a new all-wheel drive version of the Model S on October 9, 2014 in Hawthorne, California.

Lucy Nicholson | Reuters

During Tuesday’s government hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Criticized Tesla and Musk for speaking about the crash while the federal investigation was ongoing.

“I was very disappointed that Tesla took to Twitter through its CEO to downplay the involvement of the company’s advanced driver assistance system before both the NTSB and NTHSA completed their ongoing investigations into the fatal accident,” he said.

The NTSB emailed CNBC, “Our investigation is ongoing and we are focused on the operation of the vehicle and the post-accident fire.”

The NHTSA and Spring, Texas police were not immediately available for comment.

Blumenthal said he agrees with some auto lobbyists that federal safety standards and new regulations are required.

He said, “Tesla’s crash shows that there are many unanswered questions about the technology that is supposed to be automated. Unfortunately, there are no current regulations that give the public much convenience that more automation is the answer without much improved consumer protection.”

Tags car, Crashes, federal, lobbyists, Rules, safety, Tesla, Updates, urge

Business

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

Post author By
Post date April 27, 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

Europe

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tags Biden, Contractors, federal, Live, Minimum, raise, Updates, Wage

World News

Covid-19 and Vaccine Information: Dwell International Updates

Post author By
Post date April 27, 2021

People comforted a man infected with Covid-19 who was receiving oxygen while he waited outside a hospital for a bed in Delhi on Sunday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

As a second wave of the pandemic rages in India, which set a global record new cases for the fifth consecutive day on Monday, countries around the world are trying to help. But their efforts to send oxygen and other critical aid are unlikely to plug enough holes in India’s sinking health care system to end its deadly catastrophe.

The Indian health ministry reported almost 353,000 new cases and 2,812 deaths on Monday. Enormous funeral pyres have spilled into parking lots and city parks. Experts say that India’s reported overall toll of more than 195,000 deaths could be a vast undercount.

The emergency in India, where a worrying virus variant is spreading rapidly, has global implications for potential infections worldwide, as well as for countries relying on India for the AstraZeneca vaccine, millions of doses of which are manufactured there.

“It’s a desperate situation out there,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, the founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, adding that donations will be welcome, but may make only a “dent on the problem.”

Scientists fear that part of the problem is the emergence of a virus variant known as the “double mutant,” B.1.617, because it contains genetic mutations found in two other difficult-to-control versions of the coronavirus. One of the mutations is present in the highly contagious variant that ripped through California earlier this year. The other mutation is similar to one found in the variant dominant in South Africa and is believed to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.

Still, scientists caution it is too early to know with certainty how pernicious the new variant emerging in India really is.

In the early months of 2021, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi acted as if the coronavirus battle had been won, holding huge campaign rallies and permitting thousands to gather for a Hindu religious festival.

Now, Mr. Modi is striking a far more sober tone. He said in a nationwide radio address on Sunday that India has been “shaken” by a “storm.” And countries, companies and powerful members of the diaspora have pledged to pitch in.

Patients are suffocating in the capital, New Delhi, and other cities because hospitals’ oxygen supplies have run out. Frantic relatives have appealed on social media for leads on intensive-care-unit beds and experimental drugs. The government has extended New Delhi’s lockdown by another week.

India’s Supreme Court last week ordered the government to come up with a “national plan” for distributing oxygen supplies.

The problems in India’s hospitals go beyond oxygen shortages. In the western state of Gujarat, more than a dozen patients were evacuated from a hospital on Sunday night after an air-conditioning unit caught fire, the Press Trust of India reported, the third accident involving virus patients in India in the past seven days.

Mr. Modi appears to be looking to the rest of the world to help India quell the wave. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have promised oxygen generators. The United States has pledged raw material for coronavirus vaccines and intends to share up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other nations, so long as the doses clear a safety review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, officials said Monday. Indian-American businessmen have pledged millions in cash from the companies they lead.

At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, called the situation in India “beyond heartbreaking.” He said the organization has deployed 2,600 staff to India to provide surveillance and vaccination help.

A global coronavirus surge, driven largely by the devastation in India, continues to break daily records and run rampant in much of the world, even as vaccinations ramp up in wealthy countries. More than one billion shots have now been administered globally.

On Sunday, the world’s seven-day average of new cases hit 774,404, according to a New York Times database, higher than the peak average during the last global surge, in January. Despite the number of shots given around the world, far too small a percentage of the global population of nearly eight billion have been vaccinated to slow the virus’s steady spread.

United States ›	United StatesOn Apr. 25	14-day change
New cases	33,662	–16%
New deaths	282	–3%

World ›	WorldOn Apr. 25	14-day change
New cases	378,263	+15%
New deaths	7,655	+4%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

President Biden, under intense pressure to do more to address the surging pandemic abroad, including a humanitarian crisis in India, intends to make up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine available to other countries, so long as federal regulators deem the doses safe, officials said Monday.

The announcement came after Mr. Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and the two pledged to “work closely together in the fight against Covid-19.” It is a significant, albeit limited, shift for the White House, which has until now been reluctant to make excess doses of coronavirus vaccine available in large amounts.

But the commitment is a tricky one to make: The AstraZeneca doses are manufactured at the Baltimore plant owned by Emergent BioSolutions, where production has been halted amid fears of contamination. The New York Times has reported extensively on problems at the plant, which had to throw out millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine between October and January, and later discarded up to 15 million doses of the vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson, also because of concern about possible contamination.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine, unlike those of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, has also not been granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. And the administration would not specify which countries will receive the vaccine.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, cautioned at a news conference that the donations of doses would not happen right away. She said about 10 million doses could be released “in the coming weeks” if the F.D.A. determines that the vaccine meets “our own bar and our own guidelines,” and that another 50 million doses are in various stages of production.

“Right now we have zero doses available of AstraZeneca,” Ms. Psaki said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for AstraZeneca said that the company would not comment on specifics but that “the doses are part of AstraZeneca’s supply commitments to the U.S. government. Decisions to send U.S. supply to other countries are made by the U.S. government.”

Correction: April 26, 2021

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a safety review that the Food and Drug Administration is required to conduct before AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine doses are shared with other nations. The doses themselves must clear an F.D.A. safety review, not the plant where the doses are manufactured.

Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Brazil’s health authority, Anvisa, said late on Monday that it would not recommend importing Sputnik V, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Russia.

Anvisa said that important safety tests had not been performed, and that questions remained about the vaccine’s development, safety and manufacturing.

Data about the vaccine’s efficacy were “uncertain,” Gustavo Mendes Lima Santos, Anvisa’s manager of medicine and biological products, said in a lengthy presentation explaining the health authority’s decision.

A tweet from the official Sputnik V Twitter account — in Portuguese — pushed back on Monday, saying that the vaccine’s developers had shared “all the necessary information and documentation” with Anvisa. In another tweet, it urged Anvisa that “we have no time to waste — let us start saving lives in Brazil. Together.”

Russia is using Sputnik V in its mass vaccination campaign, and the vaccine has been approved for emergency use in dozens of other countries. Its rollout has been entangled in politics and propaganda, with President Vladimir V. Putin announcing its approval for use even before late-stage trials began. For months, it was pilloried by Western scientists.

The Gamaleya Research Institute, part of Russia’s Ministry of Health, developed the vaccine, also known as Gam-Covid-Vac. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet in February said the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent.

Skepticism from Western experts has focused mostly on its early approval, not the vaccine’s design, which grew out of decades of research on adenovirus-based vaccines. Other Covid-19 vaccines are also based on adenoviruses, such as one from Johnson & Johnson using Ad26, and one by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca using a chimpanzee adenovirus.

While Sputnik V’s developers have yet to release detailed data on adverse events observed during the trials, the Russian government has been using the vaccine to inoculate its own citizens for months. Russia has also exported Sputnik V to Belarus, Argentina and other countries, suggesting that any harmful side effects overlooked during trials would by now have come to light.

As vaccine supply woes in Europe worsened, the European Union’s drug regulator announced last month that it was reviewing the Sputnik V vaccine after member nations began announcing they would acquire the shot on their own.

Video

transcript

Back

transcript

E.U. Sues AstraZeneca

The European Union has sued AstraZeneca over its failure to deliver hundreds of millions of Covid vaccination doses by the end of June as promised.

Indeed, the commission has started last Friday a legal action against the company AstraZeneca on the basis of breaches of the advance purchase agreement. The reason indeed being that the terms of the contract or some terms of the contract have not been respected, and the company has not been in a position to come up with a reliable strategy to ensure the timely delivery of those. What matters to us in this case is that we want to make sure that there’s a speedy delivery of a sufficient number of doses that the European citizens are entitled to and which have been promised on the basis of the contract. So the commission has indeed started legal action on its own behalf and on behalf of the 27 member states that are fully aligned in their support for this procedure.

The European Union has sued AstraZeneca over its failure to deliver hundreds of millions of Covid vaccination doses by the end of June as promised.CreditCredit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

The European Union has sued AstraZeneca over what the bloc has described as delays in shipping hundreds of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines, a sharp escalation of a longstanding dispute between the bloc and the maker of one of the world’s most important vaccines.

AstraZeneca has said that it would be able to deliver only a third of the 300 million doses that European officials had been expecting by the end of June. As a result, European officials said on Monday that they believed AstraZeneca had broken its contract, and that they were seeking speedier deliveries than the company said it could muster.

The two sides’ relationship had grown acrimonious in January when AstraZeneca slashed its expected deliveries for the first quarter of the year, setting back the bloc’s vaccination campaign by weeks as cases picked up across the continent and political leaders faced scorching criticism for inadequate planning.

For AstraZeneca, whose cheap and easy-to-store shot is being used by 135 countries, the lawsuit could create further difficulties in a bruising stretch. No company had been as instrumental in the race to vaccinate poorer countries around the world, but AstraZeneca has been buffeted in recent weeks by the discovery of an exceedingly rare, though serious, side effect that has prompted restrictions on its use in parts of Europe.

At issue in the legal dispute was whether AstraZeneca had done everything in its power to meet its delivery schedule. Pascal Soriot, the company’s chief executive, has said that the contract required only that it make its “best efforts” to deliver the purchased doses on time.

Vaccine production is a notoriously fickle science, with live cultures needing time to grow inside bioreactors, for instance. In an effort to supply doses not only to richer nations that had purchased them well in advance, but also to poorer nations, AstraZeneca had partnered with manufacturing sites around the world, rather than relying on only a few factories, as Pfizer and Moderna have.

AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with the University of Oxford, has also said that the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, finalized its contract months after Britain did, giving the company less time to iron out any manufacturing difficulties.

Legal experts said that the “best efforts” language in the contract raised the burden on the Europeans to prove that AstraZeneca did not act diligently enough to supply the promised doses. But they also said that it did not entirely insulate the company from being deemed in breach of contract.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Credit…Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey ordered a national lockdown for three weeks, closing nonessential businesses and sending all students home, as the nation struggles to contain the latest surge in cases of the coronavirus.

Turkey ranks fourth in the world in new daily cases per person, averaging 63 cases per 100,000 people, according to a New York Times database. Its seven-day average for deaths ranks 11th in the world.

The lockdown starts on April 29 and will end on May 17, coinciding with Eid al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan, Mr. Erdogan said after meeting with his cabinet. Schools and restaurants will close and travel within Turkey will require a permit, he said. Government employees will either work from home or in shifts. Essential businesses like those in the food, manufacturing and health sectors will be exempt, Mr. Erdogan said.

“In a period where Europe is opening up, we have to pull the number of cases’’ lower, Mr. Erdogan said. “Otherwise, it would be inevitable to face a heavy cost from tourism to trade to education.’’

So far, about 16 percent of its total population has received at least one dose of the vaccine from Sinovac or Pfizer-BioNTech, according to data from the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

Turkey reported about 63,000 new cases on April 16, its highest daily tally since the start of the pandemic.

In other updates from around the world:

Brazil’s health regulator rejected the use of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine late on Monday, citing “inherent risks” and a lack of information about the vaccine’s safety and quality, Reuters reported.
The governments of Singapore and Hong Kong said on Monday that a long-delayed travel bubble between the two Asian financial centers would begin next month, allowing travelers on designated flights to bypass quarantine. The travel arrangement, which was originally supposed to begin last November, was suspended at the last minute when Hong Kong experienced a sudden surge in cases.
The Philippines surpassed the one million mark on Monday in the total number of coronavirus cases it has reported, as the country struggles with newer, deadlier forms of the virus. The Philippines reported very few cases last year, and did not see a significant surge until recently. In response, Manila and four other suburbs went into lockdown earlier this month.
For the first time in nearly nine months, Portugal’s health authority on Monday reported no coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours, according to Reuters. Portugal has reported nearly 17,000 Covid-19 deaths and more than 830,000 cases.
Health authorities in Germany will allow all adults to sign up for vaccine appointments beginning in June, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday. The announcement came after a meeting with lawmakers to discuss lifting social restrictions for fully vaccinated people, a sign that Germany may be moving closer to emerging from its latest lockdown.
More than 78,000 people attended an Australian rules football match in Melbourne on Sunday night in what is believed to be the world’s biggest crowd at a sporting event since the coronavirus pandemic began. Just three days earlier, the government of the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, had increased the attendance cap for the 100,000-capacity venue, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, to 85 percent from 75 percent.

Credit…Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Scotland and Wales reopened restaurants, cafes, and nonessential shops on Monday, marking the next phase of a gradual relaxation of coronavirus restrictions that have been in place for months.

In Scotland, restaurants can serve food but not alcohol indoors until 8 p.m., and they can serve food and alcohol outdoors without restrictions. Stores, beauty salons, museums and galleries also reopened, and people are permitted to book travel in the rest of Britain.

The first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said she was hopeful that the country would continue its progress and lift more restrictions by the summer. But she cautioned that the virus was more infectious now than it had been in earlier waves and, therefore, “We must stick to the rules.” Free rapid tests will be available to the public.

In Wales, places of worship and retail stores reopened, and restaurants resumed outdoor service. Outdoor wedding receptions with up to 30 people can take place.

Cases remain low in Britain, with more than 40 percent of the population having received at least one dose of a vaccine. On Sunday, the country reported just over 1,700 new cases and 11 deaths, according to a New York Times database.

Credit…Stephen Zenner/Getty Images

West Virginia will give $100 savings bonds to 16- to 35-year-olds who get a Covid-19 vaccine, Gov. Jim Justice said on Monday.

There are roughly 380,000 West Virginians in that age group, many of whom have already gotten at least one shot, but Mr. Justice said he hoped the money would motivate the rest to get inoculated, as “they’re not taking the vaccines as fast as we’d like them to take them.”

The state will use federal funds from the CARES Act to pay for the bonds, Mr. Justice, a Republican, said at a news conference, adding that he had “vetted this every way that we possibly can” to ensure that the unconventional use of the funds was allowed.

The bonds will be also be available to anyone in that age group who has already been vaccinated, Mr. Justice said.

West Virginia has the 16th highest rate of new coronavirus cases per person among U.S. states and ranks 12th in hospitalizations, according to a New York Times database.

Mr. Justice said the state needed to stop the virus “dead in its tracks,” and that if it did, “these masks go away, the hospitalizations go away, the death toll and the body bags start to absolutely become minimal.”

Earlier this year, at the start of the country’s vaccination effort, West Virginia had stood out for its success in vaccinating its residents. At one point, it had administered second doses to more of its population than any other state; it was also behind only Alaska for the percent of its residents that had received a first dose.

But now West Virginia is fallen behind, ahead of only nine states for the portion of its residents that have had a first dose, according to a New York Times database tracking vaccines.

Mr. Justice said that young West Virginians could “always stand an extra dose of patriotism.” He urged them to “accept that wonderful savings bond” — which will allow the recipient to retrieve the $100, plus interest, at a later date — adding, “I hope that you keep it for a long, long, long time.”

Credit…Pool photo by Becky Bohrer

Alaska Airlines has suspended an Alaska state lawmaker from its flights for violating its mask policies, the company said.

Lora Reinbold, a Republican state senator, was arguing with employees at Juneau International Airport about the airline’s mask rules, according to footage posted on Twitter.

“We need you to pull the mask up, or I’m not going to let you on the flight,” an employee is heard saying to Ms. Reinbold on the videos, which were posted on Thursday.

“It is up,” Ms. Reinbold responds.

“It is not,” an employee says. “It’s down below your nose. We can’t have it down.”

The airline said it had told Ms. Reinbold that she was “not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” adding that the suspension is being reviewed.

The clash over the company’s rule was the latest to surface in the country about masks during the pandemic. Mask mandates have become a rallying cry for some activists and a divisive political talking point. Disputes about the rules have sometimes led to angry confrontations.

Credit…Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

U.S. airlines have been bolstered by the return of customers eager to travel within the country or just outside its borders, but the nation’s largest carriers are still lamenting the loss of two particularly lucrative parts of the business: international and corporate travel. At least one of those could rebound this summer.

In an interview with The New York Times over the weekend, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said she expected the European Union to ease travel restrictions for vaccinated American tourists, a move that could let the airline industry cash in during the year’s busiest travel season.

“Long-haul international flying represents a significant opportunity for United,” Andrew Nocella, the chief commercial officer for United Airlines, told investors last week. “We have seen in recent weeks that immediately after a country provides access with proof of a vaccine, leisure demand returns to the level of 2019 quickly.”

American Airlines and United said this month that international travel remained about 80 percent lower than in 2019. They and other airlines expect strong demand for domestic flights this summer, and the restoration of trans-Atlantic travel could provide the industry a much-needed boost as it works to generate profits again.

American, Delta Air Lines and United each reported a loss of more than $1 billion in the first three months of the year. Southwest Airlines reported a small profit, of $116 million, though its chief executive said the airline would have lost $1 billion without federal aid.

The news of the E.U. reopening to vaccinated American tourists was also welcomed by Willie Walsh, the director general of the International Air Transport Association, a global airline industry group, who said it could bode well for carriers elsewhere, too.

He said in a statement that coordination between the European Commission and the industry was essential “so that airlines can plan within the public health benchmarks and timelines that will enable unconditional travel for those vaccinated,” not just Americans but passengers from other countries as well.

Credit…Adam Dean for The New York Times

Only a few weeks ago, Phuket seemed poised for a comeback. After a year of practically no foreign tourists arriving in Thailand, the national government decided that Phuket would start welcoming vaccinated visitors in July, without requiring them to go through quarantine. The project was called Phuket Sandbox.

But Thailand is now gripped by its worst Covid-19 outbreak since the pandemic began, spread in part by the well-heeled Thais who partied in Phuket and Bangkok with no social distancing. The confirmed daily caseload — albeit low by global standards — has increased from 26 on April 1 to more than 2,000 three weeks later, in a country that in early December had about 4,000 cases total.

The opening that Phuket had planned for July 1 now appears unlikely, Thailand’s tourism minister acknowledged this month.

“If you ask me how optimistic I am, I cannot say,” said Nanthasiri Ronnasiri, the director of the tourism authority’s Phuket office. “The situation changes all the time.”

The virus’s resurgence after so many months of economic hardship is devastating for the majority of Phuket’s residents, who depend on foreign tourists for their livelihoods.

Credit…Lynne Sladky/Associated Press

A private school in the fashionable Design District of Miami sent its faculty and staff a letter last week about getting vaccinated against Covid-19. But unlike institutions that have encouraged and even facilitated vaccination for teachers, the school, Centner Academy, did the opposite: One of its co-founders, Leila Centner, informed employees “with a very heavy heart” that if they chose to get a shot, they would have to stay away from students.

In an example of how misinformation threatens the nation’s effort to vaccinate enough Americans to get the coronavirus under control, Ms. Centner, who has frequently shared anti-vaccine posts on Facebook, claimed in the letter that “reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated.”

“Even among our own population, we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person,” she wrote, repeating a false claim that vaccinated people can somehow pass the vaccine to others and thereby affect their reproductive systems. (They can do neither.)

In the letter, Ms. Centner gave employees three options:

Inform the school if they had already been vaccinated, so they could be kept physically distanced from students;
Let the school know if they get the vaccine before the end of the school year, “as we cannot allow recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known”;
Wait until the school year is over to get vaccinated.

Teachers who get the vaccine over the summer will not be allowed to return, the letter said, until clinical trials on the vaccine are completed, and then only “if a position is still available at that time” — effectively making teachers’ employment contingent on avoiding the vaccine.

Credit…Romain Maurice/Getty Images for Haute Living

Ms. Centner required the faculty and staff to fill out a “confidential” form revealing whether they had received a vaccine — and if so, which one and how many doses — or planned to get vaccinated. The form requires employees to “acknowledge the School will take legal measures needed to protect the students if it is determined that I have not answered these questions accurately.”

Ms. Centner directed questions about the matter to her publicist, who said in a statement that the school’s top priority throughout the pandemic has been to keep students safe. The statement repeated false claims that vaccinated people “may be transmitting something from their bodies” leading to adverse reproductive issues among women.

“We are not 100 percent sure the Covid injections are safe and there are too many unknown variables for us to feel comfortable at this current time,” the statement said.

The Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and many other authorities have concluded that the coronavirus vaccines now in emergency use in the United States are safe and effective.

The Centner Academy opened in 2019 for students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, promoting itself as a “happiness school” focused on children’s mindfulness and emotional intelligence. The school prominently advertises on its website support for “medical freedom from mandated vaccines.”

Ms. Centner founded the school with her husband, David Centner, a technology and electronic highway tolling entrepreneur. Each has donated heavily to the Republican Party and the Trump re-election campaign, while giving much smaller sums to local Democrats.

In February, the Centners welcomed a special guest to speak to students: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the prominent antivaccine activist. (Mr. Kennedy was suspended from Instagram a few days later for promoting Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.) This month, the school hosted a Zoom talk with Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a New York pediatrician frequently cited by anti-vaccination activists.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

The number of students that dropped out of school in Italy because of the coronavirus pandemic is rising, aggravating what was already a crisis before the disease spread across the nation.

Italy had among the worst dropout rates in the European Union, and the southern city of Naples was particularly troubled by high numbers. When the coronavirus hit, Italy shuttered its schools more than just about all the other European Union member states, with especially long closures in the Naples region, pushing students out in even higher numbers.

While it is too early for reliable statistics, principals, advocates and social workers say they have seen a sharp increase in the number of students falling out of the system. The impact on an entire generation may be one of the pandemic’s lasting tolls.

Italy closed its schools — fully or in part — for 35 weeks in the first year of the pandemic — three times longer than France, and more than Spain or Germany.

And experts say that by doing so, the country, which has Europe’s oldest population and was already lagging behind in critical educational indicators, has risked leaving behind its youth, its greatest and rarest resource for a strong post-pandemic recovery.

Tags Covid19, global, Live, News, Updates, Vaccine

Business

Second Cryptocurrency Platform in Turkey Shuts Down: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 26, 2021

Outside a cryptocurrency exchange in Istanbul. Dozens of online cryptocurrency trading platforms have sprung up in Turkey in recent years, and the business is little regulated.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

Turkish authorities arrested four employees of a cryptocurrency trading platform on suspicion of fraud after customer accounts were frozen, authorities said, the second collapse of a digital currency firm in Turkey within a week.

The collapse of Vebitcoin, one of dozens of cryptocurrency trading platforms that have sprung up in Turkey in recent years, came after the Thodex trading platform shut down last week, more than 60 of its employees were arrested, and its chief executive left the country.

Vebitcoin was a relatively small operation and the losses from it are unlikely to be big, said Turan Sert, who advises BlockchainIST, a cryptocurrency research center affiliated with Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

Ilker Bas, the chief executive of Vebitcoin, told police after his arrest that the platform has 90,000 registered users and had a trading volume of 600 million lira to 800 million lira, or $72 million to $96 million, per month, the private news agency Demiroren reported. Customer losses are probably much smaller, because the same assets are typically traded repeatedly during the course of a month.

“Due to the recent developments in the crypto money industry, our transactions have become much more intense than expected,” Vebitcoin said on its website. “We have decided to cease our activities in order to fulfill all regulations and claims.”

Cryptocurrency trading is little regulated in Turkey, and the number of platforms has proliferated because of the relatively low cost of setting up. Off-the-shelf trading software costs around $100,000, said Mr. Sert, who also advises Paribu, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms.

Mr. Sert estimated that there were more than 90 platforms, mostly “very small mom-and-pop shops.”

The phenomenon is by no means limited to Turkey. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Dogecoin have attracted the attention of serious investors and become a hot topic on Wall Street. Coinbase, a U.S.-based cryptocurrency trading platform, sold shares to the public for the first time this month and is valued by the stock market at $58 billion. Regulators in the United States and other countries have struggled to keep up with the fast growth of digital money.

The Turkish Central Bank barred the use of cryptocurrencies for purchases this month, citing their riskiness and popularity with criminals, and signaled that more regulation of the sector is coming. The prospect of greater scrutiny could be prompting some platforms to shut down, Mr. Sert said.

Customers of Thodex may have lost $2 billion, a lawyer for the firm’s clients said last week, but Mr. Sert said that figure probably referred to the site’s trading volume and greatly overstated the potential losses. Many platforms exaggerate their trading volume to attract customers, he said.

The total losses to cryptocurrency investors, while devastating to some individuals, are not large enough to push Turkey’s already shaky economy into crisis, Mr. Sert said.

“I don’t think this will create any instability in the system,” he said.

The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1.

The pandemic compounded these disparities, as hundreds of companies awarded their leaders pay packages worth significantly more than most Americans will make in their entire lives, David Gelles reports for The New York Times.

In the course of his reporting, corporate public relations teams employed various tactics to justify their bosses’ big paydays:

A Hilton spokesman stressed that the figure in its latest proxy filing did not represent take-home pay for Chris Nassetta, because the company restructured several stock awards. “Said directly, Chris did not take home $55.9 million in 2020,” the spokesman said. “Chris’s actual pay was closer to $20.1 million.” Hilton lost $720 million last year.
Boeing wanted to make clear how much money Dave Calhoun “voluntarily elected to forgo to support the company through the Covid-19 pandemic” — some $3.6 million, according to a spokesman. Nonetheless, Mr. Calhoun was awarded $21.1 million last year, while Boeing lost $12 billion.
Starbucks, which awarded Kevin Johnson $14.7 million, was among many companies making the case that their chief executive was essential to future success. “Continuity in Kevin’s role is particularly vital to Starbucks at this time,” said Mary Dillon, a member of the compensation committee. The company made a $930 million profit in its latest fiscal year, down three-quarters from the previous year.

Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Music club operators, theater owners and others in the live-event market have been waiting nearly four months for a $16 billion federal grant fund for their industry to start taking applications. Their hopes were briefly raised two weeks ago when the program’s application website opened, then dashed as a technical malfunction prevented the site from accepting any applications.

Now, the Small Business Administration, the federal agency that runs the program, plans to try again on Monday at noon — but only after one last round of confusion and frustration.

Late Thursday, the agency announced that it would reopen its application system for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant on Saturday. After heavy pushback from angry applicants — especially Jewish business owners who do not use electronics on Saturdays in observation of the Sabbath — the agency changed course Friday night and rescheduled the reopening for Monday.

“We understand the challenges a weekend opening would bring, and to ensure the greatest number of businesses can apply for these funds, we decided to reschedule,” the agency said in a statement. “We remain committed to delivering economic aid to this hard-hit sector quickly and efficiently.”

The money will be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis and is widely expected to run out fast. That means many applicants will feel pressure to submit paperwork as soon as the application system opens — even if it is at an inconvenient time.

Applicants were generally relieved by the shift to Monday, but annoyed by the whiplash.

“It’s been a mess on so many levels. I feel like they’re torturing us,” said Dani Zoldan, the owner of Stand Up NY, a comedy club in Manhattan. Mr. Zoldan is Jewish and had been vocal on Twitter about the obstacles of a Saturday start.

The National Independent Venue Association, an industry group that lobbied for the relief fund, said it endorsed the decision to postpone the start.

“While we’re all anxious to apply as soon as possible, we support the S.B.A.’s decision to reopen the portal Monday and encourage a fair and equitable process for all,” said Audrey Fix Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the group. “The S.B.A. has responded to our desperate need and we’re grateful for that.”

The Small Business Administration is also preparing to open a second grant program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which is a $28.6 billion support fund for bars, restaurants and food trucks. That program is planning a seven-day test to help the agency avoid the kind of technical problems that plagued the venue program.

Credit…Aly Song/Reuters

China’s fast-moving campaign to rein in its internet giants is continuing apace with an antitrust investigation into Meituan, a leading food-delivery app.

The investigation, which the country’s market regulator announced with a terse, one-line statement on Monday, focuses on reports that the company blocked restaurants and other merchants on its platform from selling on rival food-delivery sites.

Earlier this month, the regulator imposed a record $2.8 billion fine on the e-commerce titan Alibaba for exclusivity requirements of this sort. In a statement on Chinese social media, Meituan said that it would cooperate with the authorities and that its operations were continuing as usual.

Meituan is a powerhouse in China. It made more than 27 million food-delivery transactions a day last year and reported around $18 billion in revenue, making it larger than Uber by sales. Meituan’s main rival in takeout delivery in China is Ele.me, a service owned by Alibaba.

Alibaba has been an early major target in China’s efforts to curb what officials describe as unfair competitive practices in the internet industry. But Beijing has made clear that it will be keeping a much closer eye on all of the sector’s biggest and richest companies.

Meituan was one of 34 Chinese internet firms that were summoned to meet with the antitrust authority this month. The following day, the regulator began publishing on its website statements from the companies, Meituan included, in which they vowed to obey laws and regulations.

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

NEW DELHI — With a devastating second wave of Covid-19 sweeping across India and lifesaving supplemental oxygen in short supply, India’s government on Sunday said it had ordered Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to take down dozens of social media posts critical of its handling of the pandemic.

The order was aimed at roughly 100 posts that included critiques from opposition politicians and calls for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to resign. The government said that the posts could incite panic, used images out of context and could hinder its response to the pandemic.

The companies complied with the requests for now, in part by making the posts invisible to those using the sites inside India. In the past, the companies have reposted some content after determining that it didn’t break the law.

The takedown orders come as India’s public health crisis spirals into a political one, and set the stage for a widening struggle between American social media platforms and Mr. Modi’s government over who decides what can be said online.

On Monday, the country reported almost 353,000 new infections and 2,812 deaths, marking the fifth consecutive day it set a world record in daily infection statistics, though experts warn that the true numbers are probably much higher. The country now accounts for almost half of all new cases globally. Its health system appears to be teetering. Hospitals across the country have scrambled to get enough oxygen for patients.

In New Delhi, the capital, hospitals this weekend turned away patients after running out of oxygen and beds. Last week, at least 22 patients were killed in a hospital in the city of Nashik, after a leak cut off their oxygen supplies.

Online photos of bodies on plywood hospital beds and the countless fires of overworked crematories have gone viral. Desperate patients and their families have pleaded online for help from the government, horrifying an international audience.

Mr. Modi has been under attack for ignoring the advice of experts about the risks of loosening restrictions, after he held large political rallies with little regard for social distancing. Some of the content now offline in India highlighted that contradiction, using lurid images to contrast Mr. Modi’s rallies with the flames of funeral pyres.

Credit…Emily Kask for The New York Times

More than five million Americans, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccination campaign.

Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health officials are confronting a new challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully, Rebecca Robbins reports for The New York Times.

The reasons that people are missing their second shots vary. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, including flulike symptoms, which were more common and stronger after the second dose. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot.

Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn’t have the right brand in stock.

Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that had only the other vaccine on hand.

Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff members, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up.

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

U.S. stocks were expected to fall on Monday with oil prices amid a surge in coronavirus cases, led by the outbreak in India. More the one billion vaccinations have been administered globally, but the uneven rollout has allowed the virus to continue spreading rapidly in some countries. And so, the daily average number of cases globally has reached a new high.
Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, fell 1.8 percent to $61 a barrel. The S&P 500 index was set to open 0.3 percent lower when trading begins, after falling 0.3 percent last week.
European stocks are mixed and the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index was little changed.
Still, stocks remained close to recent record highs, and on Monday, yields on U.S. Treasury bonds rose. The yield on 10-year notes climbed 3 basis points to 1.59 percent. Later this week, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest monetary policy decisions, but forecasters aren’t expecting a change. Policymakers have promised to telegraph any pull back in monetary stimulus well in advance.
Late last week, stocks on Wall Street rebounded from the news that the Biden administration was considering raising taxes on the wealthy, including nearly doubling the capital gains tax.
“With a lot of good news already priced into markets, stocks could be vulnerable to negative surprises, whether from growth disappointments, higher inflation, or policy missteps,” strategists at UBS Global Wealth Management wrote in a note.

Tags Cryptocurrency, Live, Platform, Shuts, Turkey, Updates

Health

CDC Updates Masks and Distancing Steerage for Summer season Camps

Post author By
Post date April 26, 2021

CDC Updates Masks and Distancing Guidance for Summer Camps

Children camping this summer can be in the same group within three feet of their peers, but must wear masks at all times, according to federal health officials. Children should only remove their masks when swimming, napping, eating, or drinking. They should be far apart for these activities, positioned head-to-toe for naps, and at least three feet apart for meals, snacks, and water breaks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the expected updated guidelines for summer camp operators this weekend, just weeks before many camps resume operations in mid-May. Many parents were anxious to find camps for their children who had spent months in distance learning classes during the pandemic.

One topic covered in the updated guidelines is the emphasis on engaging in as many activities as possible outdoors, where the risk of infection is considered to be much lower than indoors. If activities need to be brought indoors, rooms should be well ventilated and windows should be kept open (windows should also be open on camp buses and vans), the CDC said.

The guide tells children not to share toys, books, or games. Every camper should have a labeled storage room for their belongings, and sleeping mats should be assigned to individual children and disinfected before and after use.

However, some activities should be avoided altogether, including close-knit or indoor sports, and large gatherings or gatherings. Singing, singing, shouting, or playing instruments is recommended for outdoor use.

Wearing a mask is a crucial part of prevention efforts, even as federal health officials are weighing whether to reduce this restriction for outdoor use, especially for those who are fully vaccinated.

“All persons in camp facilities should wear masks at all times, with the exception of certain people or certain attitudes or activities, e.g. B. when eating and drinking or swimming, ”says the guide in the only sentence that is highlighted in bold in the 14-page advice.

The federal health authorities also issued rules for overnight camps requiring eligible staff, volunteers, campers, and family members to be fully vaccinated two weeks before traveling to the camps, while those who are not vaccinated should self-vaccinate two weeks prior to their arrival at the camp should quarantine. Those who are not fully vaccinated should also have a negative test for the virus one to three days before arrival at the warehouse.

Campers and staff should be screened for symptoms of Covid upon arrival at camps, and screening tests should be done if there is significant community transmission in the area. Daily symptom checks should also be done to monitor for possible illnesses, the council said.

Anyone who works in a camp who is 16 years of age or older is “strongly encouraged” to get vaccinated “as soon as the opportunity arises,” health officials said.

But vaccinated people still have to wear masks around children who cannot yet be vaccinated and stay three feet away from them. Children should also stay six feet from children in other groups.

Tags camps, CDC, Distancing, Guidance, Masks, Summer, Updates

Business

Housing Market in Frenzy Like No Different Since 2008 Disaster: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date April 23, 2021

Homes typically sold in 18 days in March, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press

The median sale price of an existing home in the United States was $329,100 in March, up 17.2 percent from a year earlier, when a 3 to 5 percent annual increase is considered healthy, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors, a trade group.

Nationwide, housing inventory was at 1.07 million units at the end of March, just above its record low of 1.03 million the prior month and down 28.2 percent from a year earlier, the group said on Thursday.

Sales of new single-family houses soared the highest level since 2006 in March, the Census Bureau reported on Friday, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.021 million, up 21 percent from February. The typical new home sold for $330,800, down from its recent peak of $365,300 in December.

Existing homes typically sold in 18 days, a record speed. Normally, 60 days is typical, Lawrence Yun, the group’s chief economist, told Stefanos Chen of The New York Times.

When the housing market peaks will depend largely on where you live and how the pandemic continues to reorder buyer priorities, but it will hinge on two trends: rising mortgage rates and incredibly tight inventory in some markets, which will likely keep demand strong through the rest of 2021, even as price growth moderates, several analysts said.

In Manhattan, where commercial real estate was battered and home buyers fanned outward to surrounding suburbs in search of affordability and more space, the sales market fell off at the beginning of the pandemic but appears to have turned the corner.

“The rate at which homes are selling nationally is not sustainable, but in New York, the uptick is just getting started,” said Nancy Wu, an economist for StreetEasy, a listing website.

In the week ending April 11, there were 783 new signed contracts citywide, the highest since the company began tracking weekly pending sales in 2019, when the peak was 491 contracts, she said.

Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Music club operators, theater owners and others in the live-event market have been waiting nearly four months for a $16 billion federal grant fund for their industry to start taking applications. Their hopes were briefly raised two weeks ago, when the program’s application website opened — then dashed as a technical malfunction prevented the site from accepting any applications.

Now, the Small Business Administration, the agency that runs the program, plans to try again on Saturday.

The agency’s announcement late Thursday night of its timing for restarting the program was immediately met with a deluge of criticism. “People have weekend plans, need child care, have to pay overtime for weekends. This is SO inconsiderate,” one typical reply tweet said.

Because the money will be awarded on a first-come, first-serve basis — and is widely expected to run out fast — many applicants feel pressured to submit their paperwork as soon as the application system opens.

That will be a particular obstacle for Jewish business owners who observe the Sabbath, which prohibits them from using electronics on Saturdays before sundown. “I’m in shock,” said Dani Zoldan, the owner of Stand Up NY, a comedy club in Manhattan. “There are many Sabbath observers in the performing arts industry. How did they not think through this decision before making this announcement?”

Mr. Zoldan, who is Jewish, hopes the agency will reconsider its decision. He said he would wait until after sunset to submit his application. “It’s been a mess on so many levels. I feel like they’re torturing us,” he said.

The Small Business Administration has not yet said what time on Saturday it plans to open its application portal. The agency said it would provide further details on Friday.

Credit…Josh Haner/The New York Times

ABC has sold out its advertising inventory for the pandemic-delayed Academy Awards on Sunday, with companies like Google, General Motors, Rolex and Verizon spending an estimated $2 million for each 30-second spot, according to media buyers — only a slight decline from last year’s pricing even though the television audience is expected to be sharply smaller.

Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising Sales, which sells ads on Disney-owned ABC, announced the sellout. She declined to comment on pricing or say how much revenue Disney will generate from the telecast. Last year, the Oscars pulled in about $129 million across 56 ads, according to Kantar Media, a research firm. (A red-carpet preshow attracted $16.3 million across 42 ads.)

Additional revenue comes from “integrations” and other sponsorships. For the first time, for instance, ABC will have a sponsor for closed-captioning (Google). The upshot: ABC’s revenue for the telecast is estimated to have declined only 3 to 5 percent from last year — a tiny drop compared with the expected 50 to 60 percent decline in viewing.

The ceremony is “one of those big cultural moments,” Andrew McKechnie, Verizon’s chief creative officer, said of the company’s decision to buy ad space. “The broadcast this year will be a bit different,” he acknowledged, “but the event will still be an impactful one and an important one for us to show up in.”

Last year, about 23.6 million people watched “Parasite” win the Academy Award for best picture, according to Nielsen data. That was a 20 percent drop from the previous year and a record low. On Sunday, nine million to 12 million people are expected to tune in.

Audiences have been turning away from awards telecasts for years, but ratings have nose-dived during the pandemic. Without live audiences, the shows have been drained of their energy. Big studios have also postponed major movies, leaving this year’s awards scene to downbeat art films.

ABC does not guarantee an audience size to Oscar advertisers, thus removing any potential for so-called make-goods — additional commercial time at a later date — if ratings tumble.

ABC has been able to keep ad rates high in part because of the fragmentation of television viewing. Oscars night is a shadow of its former self — it attracted 57 million viewers in 1998 — but still pulls in one of the largest audiences on broadcast television, certainly for a nonsports telecast. New advertisers this year include Apartments.com and Freshpet dog and cat food. Expedia and Adidas have bought commercial time to introduce new campaigns.

“We’re very pleased with where we are,” Ms. Ferro said, citing “the quantity, the caliber and the diversity of the advertisers in the show.”

Credit…Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase apologized on Friday for its role in arranging billions of dollars in financing for a breakaway European soccer league, admitting in a statement that it had “misjudged” how the project would be viewed by fans.

JPMorgan Chase had pledged about $4 billion to underwrite the new league, but the American investment bank did not end up issuing it or losing any money: The league collapsed only 48 hours after it was announced, after more than half of its 12 founding clubs changed their minds and announced they would not take part, Tariq Panja and and Andrew Das for The New York Times.

Like the 12 clubs involved in the breakaway group — which included European giants like Real Madrid and Barcelona, Manchester United and Liverpool, Juventus and A.C. Milan — JPMorgan had come under intense criticism from fans and others merely for participating in the plan.

Designed as a 20-team league with 15 permanent members, the Super League would have severely cut in to the revenues of dozens of national leagues, imperiled the finances and values of the hundreds of European clubs who were left out, and upended the structures that have underpinned European soccer for a century — all while funneling billions to a few elite teams.

In a corporate statement rare for its contrition and self-criticism, JPMorgan admitted it had been a mistake to finance the proposal without considering its effects on others.

“We clearly misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community and how it might impact them in the future,” a company spokesman said. “We will learn from this.”

But in an interview with Bloomberg TV, the bank’s co-president, Daniel E. Pinto, also sought to distance JPMorgan from the blowback that is still buffeting the clubs.

“We arranged a loan for a client,” Pinto said. “It’s not our place to decide what is the optimal way for football to operate in Europe and the U.K.”

Credit…Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

The riot at the Capitol in January prompted a reckoning on corporate political donations that will be a prominent feature of proxy season, with many shareholder proposals demanding greater disclosure of company spending. And shareholders already seem to be meeting with more success than in previous years, the DealBook newsletter reports.

“Companies are reading the writing on the wall,” said Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State’s comptroller and trustee for the state’s public pension fund. “Political and social polarization are bad for their business, and they need to decide if political donations are worth the risk.”

“Time will tell if their increased attention to these issues is lip service or if it represents a sincere change in corporate culture,” Mr. DiNapoli said. “At a minimum, investors need disclosure of this spending.”

New York’s public pension fund is the third-largest in the United States, and since 2010, it has filed more than 155 shareholder proposals on political spending, winning more than 40 adoptions or agreements, including from Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and PepsiCo. Three of five resolutions it has advanced this year have already been withdrawn, with the companies agreeing to make changes without putting them to a vote. That’s a 60 percent hit rate, and companies that wouldn’t engage before are now at least responsive, a spokesman for the fund said.

The fund got CMS Energy, a Michigan public utility, to agree to be more transparent about political spending, DealBook is first to report; First Energy, an Ohio utility, and the multinational brewer Molson Coors also agreed to more disclosure.

“Companies are now expected to have core values — almost personalities,” said Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability, a nonprofit organization that teams up with shareholders on proposals. Recent agreements, like the ones brokered by Mr. DiNapoli, are a “strong indication” that corporations are feeling “real pressure,” he said. Nine of 30 companies (including those noted above) have agreed this year to provide more disclosure on political donations. Last year, eight of 40 companies facing similar proposals agreed to act instead of putting the question to shareholders in a vote.

The Capitol riot “raised the stakes,” Mr. Freed said, and the pressure on companies has not relented since.

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

U.S. stocks climbed on Friday, rebounding from a drop on Thursday that had followed reports that the Biden administration was considering nearly doubling capital gains taxes and other taxes on the rich to fund child care and education projects.

Friday’s gains came as investors heard more good news about the American economy, with readings on the manufacturing and services sectors showing growth, and home sales data indicating that sales are at their highest level since 2006.

Most European stock indexes were lower. The Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 0.2 percent even as data showed an improvement in manufacturing and services industries across the eurozone.

The S&P 500 climbed 1 percent, recouping its drop from Thursday. The Nasdaq composite climbed more than 1 percent.

Crypto sell-off

Bitcoin slid nearly 9 percent on Friday, continuing its drop from a record hit earlier this month. The cryptocurrency topped out above $63,000 per coin in mid-April, and was trading at around $49,800 on Friday morning — a drop of more than 20 percent.
Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, was down as much as 2 percent in early trading before it rebounded to climb about 2 percent on Friday.

Britain’s economy

The bill for Britain’s pandemic response is starting to become clear: In the 12 months through March, government borrowing was 303.1 billion pounds (about $421 billion), up from £57 billion the previous year, according to an estimate by the Office for National Statistics. It’s the most since records began in 1947. And at 14.5 percent of G.D.P., it’s the highest since the end of World War II.
As tax receipts fell, the government spent hundreds of billions of pounds on emergency support programs, including furlough. But the borrowing estimate is still smaller than previously forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent fiscal watchdog.

Retail sales in Britain rose 4.9 percent in March, far outpacing economists’ forecasts for a 2 percent increase, separate data showed, while the manufacturing and services industry also picked up further in April.

Credit…Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

A cryptocurrency exchange in Turkey suspended operations this week amid accusations of fraud, freezing an estimated $2 billion in investors’ money, and authorities said they were seeking the company’s founder.

Turkish authorities raided offices in Istanbul associated with Thodex, a cryptocurrency trading platform, on Friday morning and arrested more than 60 people, the private news agency Demiroren reported.

Thodex’s 27-year-old founder, Faruk Fatih Ozer, left Turkey for Albania on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said, who added that they were seeking his extradition.

The cryptocurrency firm has nearly 400,000 active users whose accounts were nominally worth a total of $2 billion, according to Oguz Evren Kilic, a lawyer in Ankara who is representing Thodex investors. If their money has gone missing, the losses would add another element of instability to Turkey’s already shaky economy.

Living standards in Turkey suffer from double-digit inflation and a wobbly currency. Though cryptocurrencies are inherently risky, many Turks have turned to them as a way to protect their savings as the Turkish lira lost more than one-quarter of its value against the dollar in the last year.

Last week, Turkey’s central bank banned the use of cryptocurrencies for purchases, citing the “significant risks” involved.

Thodex had promoted itself with ads that featured female Turkish celebrities dressed in bright red outfits and draped over a highly polished black automobile.

“For sure the economic situation has an affect on this,” Mr. Kilic, the lawyer, said in an interview. “In such times of crisis, people want to diminish the loss of value of the assets they have.”

The sagging lira has raised the cost of imported goods and fueled inflation, leading to a steady erosion in living standards. In March, the annual rate of inflation was 16 percent, according to official figures, which many economists say understate the true rate.

In a statement on Thodex’s website, Mr. Ozer, the firm’s founder, insisted he had left the country merely to consult with foreign investors and would return. He said the accusations were a “smear campaign” and blamed the shutdown of the trading platform on a cyberattack.

Thodex “has not victimized anyone,” he said, adding that only about 30,000 accounts “have a suspicious situation.”

Mr. Kilic noted that none of Thodex’s customers could gain access to their accounts. “If you cannot access the account, then you are a victim,” he said.

On Twitter, people reacted to a statement from Thodex with crying face emojis. “There are people who trust and invest everything in you,” one user wrote.

Credit…Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

As many as 100 new electric vehicle models are coming to showrooms by 2025 as automakers insist we’re “this close” to an E.V. tipping point.

But outside of Tesla, the American record for sales of an electric vehicles is the mere 30,200 Leafs that Nissan sold in 2014. A single gasoline sport utility vehicle, the Toyota RAV4, finds well over 400,000 annual buyers, compared with roughly 250,000 sales last year for all E.V.s combined — 200,000 of which were Teslas, Lawrence Ulrich reports for The New York Times.

Globally, Volkswagen is poised to pass Tesla as the world’s biggest electric vehicle seller as early as next year, according to Deutsche Bank, with Europe and China its key markets. In the United States, where the brand remains an underdog, VW and other legacy automakers are concentrating fire on the sales fortress of compact S.U.V.s.

The latest electric-S.U.V. hopefuls to reach showrooms are the VW ID.4, Ford Mustang Mach-E and Volvo XC40 Recharge. The Nissan Ariya, BMW iX and Cadillac Lyriq are set to arrive between late 2021 and next March.

Tags Crisis, frenzy, Housing, Live, market, Updates

World News

Covid-19 Dwell Updates: Vaccines, Variants and Instances

Post author By
Post date April 23, 2021

South African health care workers were given the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a hospital in Johannesburg in March.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Joao Silva/The New York Times

South Africa will resume the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to inoculate health care workers next week, offering some relief to the country that has suffered a series of blows to its vaccination efforts in recent months, according to South African authorities.

The country suspended an early-access Johnson & Johnson vaccination program last week after health officials in the United States put a pause on the vaccine amid concerns of rare blood clots that emerged in a handful of people who received it.

South Africa’s decision to move forward again was the second green light this week for Johnson & Johnson. On Tuesday, the European Union drug regulator also recommended resuming the rollout of the company’s vaccine.

Now, many eyes are on Washington, where a federal advisory panel is scheduled to meet Friday to discuss whether to lift the pause in the United States.

The blood clots that led to the Johnson & Johnson suspensions were all reported in the United States. In South Africa, officials confirmed Thursday that no cases of clots have been reported among the roughly 290,000 health care workers who have received the vaccine so far.

“The temporary suspension in South Africa was in line with government’s commitment to ensure comprehensive measures are undertaken regarding vaccine rollout,” Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, a cabinet minister, told reporters on Thursday.

Health experts welcomed the resumption of the vaccine campaign in South Africa, which has recorded more coronavirus cases than any other country on the continent and has suffered serious setbacks in its attempt to combat the virus in recent months.

In February, health officials scrapped plans to use the AstraZeneca vaccine after it proved ineffective against a variant of the virus now dominant in South Africa. The decision came a week after a million doses of the vaccine arrived in the country and amid a devastating second wave of virus cases.

Though the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has not yet been approved for general use in South Africa, it has been used as part of a research study offering early access to the vaccine to the country’s 1.2 million health care workers.

South African health officials are gearing up to extend vaccinations to the general public starting in May. In a first step to launching a national rollout, the country last week opened its vaccine registration to people over 60 years old, who will be among the first to be inoculated.

That plan depends on tens of millions of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires two doses and will be used in major cities. The single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is easier to store and better for hard-to-reach populations, will be used in the country’s rural areas.

United States ›	United StatesOn Apr. 21	14-day change
New cases	64,853	–4%
New deaths	879	–1%

World ›	WorldOn Apr. 21	14-day change
New cases	952,928	+23%
New deaths	17,951	+14%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Federal health officials appear to be leaning toward lifting their recommended pause on the use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine after finding only a limited number of additional cases of a rare blood clotting disorder among recipients.

Instead, the Food and Drug Administration is likely to attach a warning to the vaccine’s label to inform health practitioners — and the public — about the exceedingly uncommon, but dangerous possible side effect.

Federal health officials are waiting to act until they hear from a committee of outside experts who advise the C.D.C. The committee is scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss whether to recommend lifting, extending or modifying the pause that was initiated on April 13.

“We know that it’s not a good thing to leave the pause going for any longer than it absolutely has to go for,” Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, said Thursday, adding that a protracted pause could contribute to greater vaccine hesitancy. “Once, essentially, the adequate discussion has occurred, we’re prepared to move as quickly as we possibly can.”

When top federal health officials abruptly decided early last week to recommend a temporary halt in the use of the shot, six women had been reported to have suffered from the disorder, a combination of clots in the brain that led to bleeding and low platelets, components of the blood that normally help to heal wounds.

That was fewer than one in a million recipients of Johnson & Johnson’s shot in the United States. But officials worried that more cases were hidden or could develop shortly as the new vaccine rolled out.

That fear has not materialized.

Dr. Marks and Dr. Janet Woodcock, the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner, said the clotting disorder appeared to be nearly as rare as they hoped it would be when they recommended the pause.

“We’ve now received more cases, but it isn’t an avalanche,” Dr. Woodcock said “We’re not seeing a big surge, which is a great relief.”

Even if the C.D.C.’s advisory committee decides Friday that the benefits of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine outweigh its risks, the company will still face manufacturing hurdles at a Baltimore plant that regulators have refused so far to certify. That plant was supposed to deliver the bulk of the nearly 100 million doses the firm had promised to have ready by the end of May.

But it would mean a temporary surge of about 10 million shots that were effectively put on hold when the pause was announced.

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

India’s rapidly worsening coronavirus outbreak is now expanding on a scale beyond any previously measured in more than a year of the pandemic: The health ministry reported more than 310,000 new infections on Thursday, the most recorded in any country on a single day.

India’s total eclipsed the previous one-day high of 300,669 recorded coronavirus cases, set in the United States on Jan. 8, according to a New York Times database, though differences in testing levels from country to country, and a widespread lack of tests early in the pandemic, make comparisons difficult.

Over the past two months, the outbreak in India has exploded, with reports of superspreader gatherings, oxygen shortages and ambulances lined up outside hospitals because there were no ventilators for new patients.

As cases worldwide reach weekly records, a substantial proportion of the new infections are coming in India, a sobering reminder that the pandemic is far from over, even as infections decline and vaccinations speed ahead in the United States and other wealthy parts of the world. India has surpassed 15.6 million total reported infections so far, second-most after the United States.

The death toll has also begun to climb precipitously.

On Thursday, the Indian government recorded 2,104 deaths, and an average of more than 1,600 people have died of the virus every day for the past week. That is less than the tolls at the worst points of the pandemic in the United States or Brazil, but it is a steep increase from just two months ago, when fewer than 100 people in India were dying daily.

There are signs that the country’s health system, patchy even before the pandemic, is collapsing under the strain. On Tuesday, at least 22 people died in an accident in the central city of Nashik when a leak in a hospital’s main oxygen tank cut the flow of oxygen to Covid-19 patients.

The picture is staggeringly different from early February, when India was recording an average of just 11,000 cases a day, and domestic drug companies were pumping out millions of vaccine doses. More than 132 million Indians have received at least one dose, but supplies are running low and experts warn that the country is unlikely to meet its goal of inoculating 300 million people by the summer.

Critics say Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who imposed a harsh nationwide lockdown in March 2020 in the early stages of the pandemic, failed to prepare for a second wave or to warn Indians to remain vigilant against the virus, especially as more infectious variants began to spread.

Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has also allowed a massive Hindu festival to take place, drawing millions of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges River, and his party has held packed political rallies in several states.

“India’s rapid slide into this unprecedented crisis is a direct result of complacency and lack of preparation by the government,” Ramanan Laxminarayan, the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington, wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday.

The hardest-hit region is Maharashtra, a populous western state that includes the financial hub of Mumbai. On Wednesday, the state’s top leader ordered government offices to operate at 15 percent capacity and imposed new restrictions on weddings and private transportation to slow the spread of the virus.

This week, Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, and Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, called off plans to visit India. On Thursday, the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said that direct flights from India would be reduced by about 30 percent, and that Australians would be allowed to travel to India only in “very urgent circumstances.” Canada also suspended all direct flights from India and Pakistan starting Thursday night for 30 days.

Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The French government outlined plans on Thursday to gradually reopen the country starting in early May, stoking hopes that life might finally return to something close to normal after more than a year of on-and-off pandemic restrictions.

Prime Minister Jean Castex said at a news conference that primary school students would be allowed to return to classrooms on Monday, followed by middle and high school students the following week. Travel restrictions will be lifted on May 3.

Depending on how things are going at that point, Mr. Castex said, retail stores, outdoor dining, and certain cultural and sporting activities could start to reopen in mid-May.

The pandemic situation appears to be improving in France, with the daily average number of new cases falling to about 32,000 from 42,000 the week before. Hospitalizations seem to have plateaued at nearly 6,000.

“The peak of the third wave seems to be behind us,” Mr. Castex said.

The government is hoping to alleviate the deep sense of pandemic fatigue that has taken root in France. When the country went into its third lockdown at the start of April, once again closing schools and “nonessential” retail stores, the move was met with anger and some pointed protests.

Hundreds of lingerie shops across France, closed under the lockdown order, have been mailing panties to Mr. Castex since the beginning of the week, as part of a campaign called “Action Culottée,” meaning “cheeky action,” which was coordinated on Facebook.

The country’s vaccination campaign, which stumbled for months, has gathered speed recently, and is now administering about 2.5 million doses a week. More than 13 million people have received at least one dose so far, and the country aims to raise the figure to 20 million — 30 percent of the population — by mid-May. Even so, France lags far behind countries like the United States, Britain and Israel in its vaccination efforts.

To limit the spread of highly transmissible virus variants, Mr. Castex said, France will tighten testing and quarantine requirements for travelers arriving from five countries — Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and India — where the variants are circulating widely.

Credit…Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

With summer on the horizon, states are beginning to rethink social-distancing measures.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Dan McKee said that starting May 7, the state will stop requiring masks outside, and social gatherings can increase to 25 people indoors and 75 people outdoors. By May 28, the state will lift capacity limits on businesses and houses of worship; the bar areas of restaurants will be able to open; and dance floors can once again be filled.

“It’s a good day for everyone here in the Ocean State,” Mr. McKee said at a news conference Thursday. “It’s a little early to put a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign up but we’re getting ready to order that sign.”

Mr. McKee attributed the reopening plans to the state’s vaccination rate — 48 percent of residents have received at least one shot and 33 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database. But masks will still be required indoors.

Rhode Island is not alone.

On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut announced that his state would phase out all pandemic restrictions, except the indoor mask mandate, by May 19. And in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday that he would announce “a pretty significant amount of guidance” for summer activities next week.

“We don’t want to lurch, in other words go forward and then have to pull something back,” Mr. Murphy said at his weekly news conference. “And we don’t want to start that now. But we also owe people our best guesses for what it’s going to look like for graduation, summer, the beaches and what not.”

As more people get vaccinated and the outdoors become more appealing with spring weather and sunshine, one question persists: Do we still need to wear masks outside? Science shows that the risk of viral transmission outside is very low. The Times’ Well columnist, Tara Parker-Pope, suggests making sure your activity meets two out of the following three conditions: outdoors, distanced and masked.

Global Roundup

Credit…Christian Mang/Reuters

BERLIN — State lawmakers in Germany approved a new version of a law on Thursday boosting the federal government’s power to enforce uniform coronavirus lockdown rules. New restrictions are expected in most districts soon after the president signs the bill into law, which could be as early as Thursday afternoon.

The law, which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet passed last week, is a response to a disjointed virus response by state governments, which previously had the ultimate say in carrying out restrictions. For months, experts have called for a lockdown to control Germany’s surging third wave of coronavirus infections.

Under the law passed by the federal council of states on Thursday, the rules would apply uniformly across the country but would depend on the rate of infection in each district, leading to more severe lockdowns in highly affected areas. There would be a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in districts with more than 100 new infections per 100,000 people in a week. Restaurants would remain closed, and nonessential stores would require an appointment and a negative test result in districts with more than 150 new infections per 100,000 people. Schools would close if 165 new infections per 100,000 were registered.

Germany is currently measuring 161 infections per 100,000 in a week, according to the health authorities, which also counted 29,518 new infections on Wednesday.

As many as 8,000 people, including right-wing extremists and coronavirus deniers, took to the streets in Berlin to protest the measures on Wednesday. Several lawsuits against it have already been announced.

Germany has recorded more than 80,000 deaths so far.

In other developments across the world:

Japan’s auto industry group canceled the biennial Tokyo Motor Show, scheduled for the fall, because of rising coronavirus cases, the Kyodo News agency reported. It was the first cancellation in the 67-year history of the event, which drew around 1.3 million people in 2019. Akio Toyoda, the chairman of the industry group and president of Toyota Motor Corp., said at a news conference that “it seems difficult to offer main programs in a safe environment.” The cancellation came as Japan reported 5,291 new infections, the highest daily total in three months. And it raised more questions about plans for the Tokyo Olympics, which organizers have insisted will begin in July even as officials plan to impose emergency measures in Tokyo and other municipalities.
The European Union will not order an extra 100 million vaccines from AstraZeneca foreseen in its contract, a European Commission spokesman said Thursday, underscoring the soured relationship between the pharmaceutical company and the bloc of 27 countries. The bloc could have added 100 million doses of vaccines to its existing order of 300 million from AstraZeneca but the time to do so has passed, Stefan de Keersmaecker, the spokesman, said. The European Union is embroiled in a dispute with the British-Swedish company over its inability to deliver expected doses, which has set the bloc’s vaccination efforts back significantly. They have been in a legal arbitration process for weeks, and the bloc is considering suing.

Credit…Kim Raff for The New York Times

At the beginning of the pandemic, one of Megan Fairchild’s former dance teachers gave her some advice: Now would be a really great time to get pregnant. Ms. Fairchild, a principal at New York City Ballet, was aghast.

“I was like, that’s a ridiculous idea and the last thing on my mind right now,” she said. “This is going to last a couple months, and I don’t want to not be there when we get back.”

But when it became clear that her kind of live performance, dancing for thousands at Lincoln Center, would not be resuming anytime soon, the decision to have another child came to her in three words when she was meditating: Do it now.

For much of the pandemic year, Ms. Fairchild, 36, was pregnant with twins. On April 10, she gave birth to two girls.

She’s not the only one to have taken advantage of the theatrical shutdown. The dance world is experiencing a full-blown baby boom.

Credit…Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have found serious flaws at the Baltimore plant that had to throw out up to 15 million possibly contaminated doses of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine, casting doubt on further production in the United States of a vaccine that the government once viewed as essential in fighting the pandemic.

The regulators for the Food and Drug Administration said that the company manufacturing the vaccine, Emergent BioSolutions, may have contaminated additional doses at the plant. They said the company failed to fully investigate the contamination, while also finding fault with the plant’s disinfection practices, size and design, handling of raw materials and training of workers.

The F.D.A. has not yet certified the plant, in Baltimore’s Bayview neighborhood, and no doses made there have gone to the public. All the Johnson & Johnson shots that have been administered in the United States have come from overseas.

The report amounted to a harsh rebuke of Emergent, which had long played down setbacks at the factory, and added to problems for Johnson & Johnson, whose vaccine had been seen as a game changer because it requires only one shot, can be produced in mass volume and is easily stored.

The inspection began after routine checks showed that Emergent workers had contaminated at least part of a batch of 13 million to 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with the harmless virus that is used to make the AstraZeneca shot, which is not yet authorized in the United States.

The F.D.A. findings, based on an inspection that ended on Tuesday, underscore questions raised in reports by The New York Times about why Emergent did not fix problems earlier and why federal officials who oversee its lucrative contracts did not demand better performance.

In statements on Wednesday, the F.D.A., Emergent and Johnson & Johnson all said they were working to resolve the problems at the factory. There was no indication of how long that would take.

Credit…Sameer Sehgal/Hindustan Times, via Getty Images

KATHMANDU, Nepal — At the beginning of this month, Nepal’s dethroned king, Gyanendra Shah, and his wife, Komal, traveled to northern India for the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage where millions seek a dip in the Ganges River to absolve themselves of their sins.

Gyanendra bathed in the river, and for 10 days, he and his aides mingled in crowds and met ascetics, Hindu leaders and other dignitaries. On April 18, he and Komal flew home to Nepal, where supporters welcomed them at the airport and formed a procession to escort them home, chanting pro-Hindu and pro-monarchy slogans along the way.

Three days later, the couple tested positive for the coronavirus. Now they are in quarantine at their residence in Kathmandu, the capital, while health officials in Nepal try to trace anyone who was in contact with them.

“Both king and queen have isolated themselves from other family members,” said Phani Raj Pathak, an aide to Gyanendra, who was dethroned when Nepal became a republic in 2008 and ended a two-century-old Hindu monarchy. The former ruler, who is in his 70s, retains support among some Hindus in Nepal as well as among critics of the elected government.

The infections have cast a harsh spotlight on the Kumbh Mela, where millions of Hindu pilgrims have gathered for weeks, shoulder to shoulder and often maskless, even as highly infectious variants of the coronavirus surge across South Asia. On Thursday, India reported more than 312,000 new infections, the highest daily total in any country since the pandemic began.

The Indian government has defended the gathering as safe, even as news media report thousands of infections among participants. Organizers say that attendees are required to wear masks and show proof of a negative coronavirus test, but they acknowledge that given the size of the event, many could have flouted the rules.

Now there are fears that the Kumbh Mela will cause the virus to explode in Nepal, which shares a porous border with India.

“The majority of people weren’t wearing face masks,” said Yogini Saritanandi, a pilgrim who returned to Nepal. She said she had seen “nothing other than a sea of humans on the bank of the Ganges.”

She said the authorities in the northern city of Haridwar, where the Kumbh Mela is being observed this year, began to slightly restrict entry after a few ascetics were reportedly infected and after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, urged organizers to observe social distancing. But it appeared to be too late.

“People got Covid one after another,” said Ms. Saritanandi, 43. “When I saw this, I thought of my 10-year-old son, and I cut my visit short to return to Nepal earlier.”

As Indian states impose new lockdowns, tens of thousands of Nepali migrant workers have returned from India without undergoing coronavirus tests. After reporting no new infections for much of January, Nepal is now averaging more than 1,100 cases a day, according to a New York Times database.

The government has closed schools and colleges in urban areas and tried to speed up vaccinations, with more than 1.7 million people having received at least one shot. But the inoculation drive was slowed after India restricted exports of vaccines to fight the outbreak at home, leaving Nepal to rely on a donation of shots from China.

Credit…Pete Kiehart for The New York Times

The health effects of Covid-19 not only can stretch for months, but also appear to increase the risk of death and chronic medical conditions even in people who were never sick enough with Covid to be hospitalized, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Researchers looked at medical records of more than 73,000 people across the United States who were infected with the coronavirus between March and November 2020 and did not require hospitalization. In the period from one to six months after becoming infected, those patients were 20 percent more likely to need outpatient medical care, and 60 percent more likely to die, than people who had not contracted the coronavirus.

The Covid survivors experienced a vast array of long-term medical problems that they had never had before — not just lung issues from the respiratory effects of the virus, but symptoms that could affect virtually any organ system or part of the body, from neurological to cardiovascular to gastrointestinal. They were also at greater risk of mental health problems, including anxiety and sleep disorders.

Some of the patients’ post-Covid medical issues — like diabetes, kidney disease and some heart problems — could become chronic conditions that would require treatment for the rest of their lives.

Most of the nearly 32 million people who have contracted the coronavirus in the United States have not needed hospitalization, so the findings may have wide implications. But the study sample and the control group they were compared with may not be very representative of the general public: They were Veterans Health System patients, overwhelmingly men with a median age over 60.

Credit…Hannah Beier/Reuters

In an early analysis of coronavirus vaccine safety data, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found no evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines pose serious risks during pregnancy.

The findings are preliminary and cover just the first 11 weeks of the U.S. vaccination program. But the study, which included self-reported data on more than 35,000 people who received one of the vaccines during or shortly before pregnancy, is the largest yet on the safety of the coronavirus vaccines in pregnant people.

During the clinical trials of the vaccines, pregnant women were excluded. That left patients, doctors and experts unsure whether the shots were safe to administer during pregnancy.

“There’s a lot of anxiety about whether it’s safe and whether it would work and what to expect as far as side effects,” said Dr. Stephanie Gaw, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.

The new data, Dr. Gaw said, demonstrate that “a lot of pregnant people are getting the vaccine, there isn’t a significant increase in adverse pregnancy effects at this point, and that side effect profiles are very similar to nonpregnant people.”

“I think that’s all very reassuring,” she said, “and I think it will really help providers and public health officials more strongly recommend getting the vaccine in pregnancy.”

Covid-19 poses serious risks during pregnancy. Pregnant women who develop symptoms of the disease are more likely to become seriously ill, and more likely to die, than nonpregnant women with symptoms.

Because of those risks, the C.D.C. has recommended that coronavirus vaccines be made available to pregnant women, though it also suggests that they consult with their doctors when making a decision about vaccination.

The new study, which was published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is based largely on self-reported data from V-safe, the C.D.C.’s coronavirus vaccine safety monitoring system. Participants in the program use a smartphone app to complete regular surveys about their health, and any side effects they might be experiencing, after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine.

The researchers analyzed the side effects reported by V-safe participants who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine between Dec. 14, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021. They focused on 35,691 participants who said that they had been pregnant when they received the vaccine or became pregnant shortly thereafter.

After vaccination, pregnant participants reported the same general pattern of side effects that nonpregnant ones did, the researchers found: pain at the injection site, fatigue, headaches and muscle pain.

Women who were pregnant were slightly more likely to report injection site pain than women who were not, but less likely to report the other side effects. They were also slightly more likely to report nausea or vomiting after the second dose.

Pregnant V-safe participants were also given an opportunity to enroll in a special registry that tracked pregnancy and infant outcomes.

By the end of February, 827 of those enrolled in the pregnancy registry had completed their pregnancies, 86 percent of which resulted in a live birth. Rates of miscarriage, prematurity, low birth weight and birth defects were consistent with those reported in pregnant women before the pandemic, the researchers report.

“This study is of critical importance to pregnant individuals,” Dr. Michal Elovitz, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email. “It is very reassuring that there were no reported acute events in pregnant individuals” over the course of the study, she said.

But the report has several limitations and much more research is needed, experts said. Enrollment in the surveillance programs is voluntary and the data are self-reported.

In addition, because the study period encompassed just the first few months of the U.S. vaccination campaign, the vast majority of those enrolled in the pregnancy registry were health care workers. And there is not yet any data on pregnancy outcomes from people who were vaccinated during the first trimester of pregnancy.

“I think we can feel more confident about recommending the vaccine in pregnancy, and especially with pregnant people that are at risk of Covid,” Dr. Gaw said. “But we do need to wait for more data for complete pregnancy outcomes from vaccines early in pregnancy.”

Credit…Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Fully vaccinated baseball fans will be granted their own section at the Los Angeles Dodgers game this weekend against the San Diego Padres.

The set-aside seats, reported by The Los Angeles Times, are part of the many incentives being offered — from doughnuts to beer — to encourage people to get vaccinated against Covid-19. The Miami Heat and the San Francisco Giants have introduced similar sections at their stadiums.

To prove they are fully vaccinated, fans will have to show government-issued I.D. and documentation like a vaccination card, according to the Dodgers’ website. Everyone 16 years and older will have to show proof that at least two weeks have passed since they were fully vaccinated. Fans younger than 16 will be required to show proof of a negative coronavirus test taken within 72 hours before admission.

Face masks will still be required, but social distancing will not. The team said spectators in the sections for the fully vaccinated will be seated directly next to each other.

The game Saturday won’t mark the first time fans have entered Dodger Stadium since the pandemic began. The team’s home opener on April 9 was attended by fans — just not all that many of them. Attendance was capped at around 11,000, about 20 percent of capacity.

In the past week, there has been an average of more than 2,300 daily coronavirus cases in the state, and Los Angeles County has seen an average of 435 daily cases — a 20 percent drop over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database.

As of Wednesday, more than 40 percent of Californians had received at least one dose of the vaccine, and more than 20 percent had been fully vaccinated.

On April 15, Gov. Gavin Newsom loosened some restrictions in the state, permitting limited outdoor gatherings and live events, depending on a region’s Covid-19 risk level.

Credit…John Minchillo/Associated Press

New York Road Runners, the club that puts on the New York City Marathon, has announced the return of its first regularly scheduled race since the beginning of the pandemic.

On Thursday, the club said that it would hold the annual New York Mini 10K on June 12. The 10-kilometer, women-only race has been held annually since 1972, with the exception of last year.

“This is our first real table setting,” said Kerin Hempel, the organization’s interim chief executive. “It’s starting to feel like ‘OK, we’re back, we’re coming back.’”

This will not be the first race the club has held since the onset of the pandemic.

The organization has held a series of “return to racing” events as pilots starting last fall, allowing very small fields to run with safety protocols in place. Among other measures, the races had temperature checks, staggered starts and different corralling of runners.

Those events, Ms. Hempel said, have given N.Y.R.R. the confidence to move ahead with its first regularly scheduled race since March 2020.

The Mini 10K field will be smaller than in past years, with a cap of 1,200 runners. The race will also have safety protocols, such as requiring runners to mask up at the start and finish. (They will be strongly encouraged to wear masks during the race, too.)

It will be the first time N.Y.R.R. has welcomed elite athletes since the 2019 New York City Marathon, with 25 elite athletes expected at the starting line. The 2019 Mini 10K champion, Sara Hall, will return to defend her title.

The announcement comes as runners look ahead — with cautious optimism — to the return of major road races. Ms. Hempel anticipated the question on the minds of many: What does this mean for the New York City Marathon?

“We’ve been saying the marathon is going to happen,” she said. “It’s more about what it’s going to look like, and how many people we can accommodate on the course.”

Tags cases, Covid19, Live, Updates, vaccines, Variants