Tag: Updates

Jobless Claims Fall, Providing Recent Proof of a Restoration: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 22, 2021

Shoppers in the Bronx this month. Government assistance has enabled more consumer spending, contributing to recent gains in the labor market.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

New claims for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level of the pandemic, the government reported on Thursday, offering fresh evidence of the labor market’s recovery.

A total of 566,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits during the week that ended April 17, the Labor Department said, a decrease of 57,000 from the previous week’s revised figure. In addition, 133,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers freelancers, part-timers and others who do not qualify for state benefits.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted.

“The bigger story — even though we’re going to see volatility week to week — is that the labor market continues to heal and labor demand is coming back quite strongly in line with robust growth,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics.

Warmer weather, more extensive coronavirus vaccination efforts and a stream of government assistance that has enabled consumer spending have all contributed to recent gains.

Encumbrances remain. The labor market is weighed down by continuing anxiety about coronavirus infections and the demands of child care when regular school schedules have been disrupted.

According to the Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey, more than four million people who were unemployed in March said they were not working because they were afraid of catching Covid-19.

“It’s important to keep in mind that the trend is going in the right direction,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “but we’re still at crisis levels of unemployment claims.”

The weekly level of new claims is still near historical highs recorded before the pandemic. And there are roughly 8.4 million fewer jobs than there were in early 2020.

The long-term unemployed face particular hurdles. A new report from the California Policy Lab, a research institute based at the University of California, said some states were prematurely ending extended unemployment insurance because of the way they count claims.

Credit…Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The worst appears to be over for airlines. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting for the summer travel frenzy to begin.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines on Thursday were the last two major U.S. airlines to report financial results for the first three months of the year. American lost nearly $1.3 billion, while Southwest earned $116 million, a welcome profit after weathering its first annual loss in half a century last year.

“While the pandemic is not over, we believe the worst is behind us, in terms of the severity of the negative impact on travel demand,” Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chairman, said in a statement. “Vaccinations are on the rise, and Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States are down significantly from their peak in January 2021. As a result, we are experiencing steady weekly improvements in domestic leisure bookings, which began in mid-February 2021.”

That sentiment is shared across the industry.

“With the momentum underway from the first quarter, we see signs of continued recovery in demand,” Doug Parker, American’s chief executive, said in a statement on Thursday. His counterpart at United Airlines issued a similarly hopeful statement this week, despite posting a loss of $1.4 billion. Last week, Delta Air Lines reported a $1.2 billion loss.

The industry has been buoyed by federal support, receiving $54 billion in grants to pay workers over the past year and another $25 billion in loans. Mr. Kelly of Southwest credited that support for the airline’s slight profit, saying that the airline would have lost $1 billion in the first quarter without it.

Southwest was also buoyed by its limited exposure to corporate and international travel, which have been slow to rebound and are lucrative parts of the business for American, Delta and United. Leisure travel within the United States, which all of the airlines serve, is almost fully recovered.

Air travel started to recover meaningfully in early March, with Transportation Security Administration data showing a steady rise in the number of people screened at airport security checkpoints relative to the same period in 2019. That surge has subsided somewhat since earlier this month, with screenings down about 42 percent over the past week compared with 2019.

Southwest said demand for travel continues to improve with summer fast approaching and customers once again feeling comfortable making travel plans further out. The airline estimates that it has about 35 percent of expected bookings in place for June and 20 percent for July.

Credit…Ennio Leanza/Keystone, via Associated Press

Credit Suisse said on Thursday that it suffered a loss in the first quarter stemming from loans it made to the collapsed investment fund Archegos Capital Management, a debacle that has prompted Switzerland’s financial regulator to investigate whether the bank was doing a poor job monitoring the riskiness of its investments.

The loss of 252 million Swiss francs, about $275 million, from January through March, came after a loss of 4.4 billion francs from Archegos that wiped out a big increase in revenue. Credit Suisse also said on Thursday that it had sold bonds to investors to raise $2 billion to shore up its capital.

The bank expects additional losses from Archegos of about $655 million as it finishes winding down its exposure to the firm, Thomas Gottstein, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, said during a conference call with reporters Thursday.

The bank, based in Zurich, has suffered a series of calamities this year that have severely damaged its reputation and finances. Swiss regulators are also investigating a spying scandal and Credit Suisse’s sale of $10 billion in funds packaged by Greensill Capital. The funds were based on financing provided to companies, many of which had low credit ratings or were not rated at all. Greensill collapsed in March, and its ties to former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain have caused a political scandal.

Mr. Gottstein promised Thursday that Credit Suisse would overhaul its systems for tracking risk to avoid future disasters. Several top executives have already left the bank as part of a management shake-up, including Lara Warner, the chief risk and compliance officer.

Credit Suisse also plans to pare back the size of a unit that serves hedge fund clients and was involved in the Archegos losses. Mr. Gottstein declined to say whether the debacle would lead to major changes at Credit Suisse’s investment bank, which has a large presence in New York.

But he suggested that Credit Suisse would not retreat from investment banking. “The underlying results show that the strategy is working,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t say that because we had two disappointing incidents we should throw the whole strategy overboard.”

If not for the Archegos loss, Credit Suisse would have made a pretax profit of 3.6 billion francs, the bank said. Revenue for the quarter rose 30 percent to 7.6 billion francs as Credit Suisse raked in fees from lively trading on stock and bond markets.

The bank is certain to face intense official scrutiny in months to come. The Swiss regulator, known as Finma, said it would “investigate in particular possible shortcomings in risk management” at Credit Suisse. Finma also said that it would “continue to exchange information with the competent authorities in the U.K. and the U.S.A.”

Mr. Gottstein acknowledged Thursday that the bank had received inquiries from regulators in the United States and Britain, but did not give details.

He declined to confirm a report in the The Wall Street Journal that Credit Suisse’s exposure to Archegos had reached more than $20 billion before the fund collapsed in late March. Mr. Gottstein conceded that Credit Suisse was one of the banks most exposed to Archegos.

The quarterly loss, which Mr. Gottstein described as “unacceptable,” compared with a profit of 1.3 billion francs in the first quarter of 2020.

Credit…Daniel Roland/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The European Central Bank on Thursday maintained a stimulus program intended to counteract the economic effects of the pandemic, as expected, while promising to make sure that eurozone businesses and consumers have an ample supply of credit.

Following a monetary policy meeting, the bank’s Governing Council said in a statement that it would continue buying government and corporate bonds to prevent “a tightening of financing conditions that is inconsistent with countering the downward impact of the pandemic.”

At its last meeting, in March, the bank stepped up the pace of the bond purchases, a form of printing money that helps keep market interest rates low. The bank has also been funneling money directly to commercial banks at negative interest rates, provided they lend the money to customers.

The central bank said Thursday that it had seen “a high takeup” of the money, which is essentially free to lenders.

Credit…Apple, via Reuters

Tile said Apple boxed out its products and then copied them. Spotify said Apple blocked it from telling customers that they could find cheaper prices outside its iPhone app. And Match Group testified that it now paid nearly $500 million a year to Apple and Google in app store fees, the dating company’s single largest expense.

That testimony came Wednesday at a Senate hearing on Apple’s and Google’s control over their app stores, held by the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. The hearing was the latest example of the growing scrutiny of Big Tech and the increasing agreement among Democrats, Republicans and smaller companies that the world’s biggest tech companies have become too powerful.

At the hearing, representatives from Apple and Google defended their companies’ practices, saying that they don’t copy competitors, that few apps pay their commissions and that they charge the commissions to fund the security of their app stores.

Both Democratic and Republican senators were skeptical of those explanations. “Google and Apple are here to defend the patently indefensible,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. “If you presented this fact pattern in a law school antitrust exam, the students would laugh the professor out of the classroom, because it is such an obvious violation of our antitrust laws.”

Apple and Google have long had a stranglehold on the business of mobile apps. But that position, which has earned them hundreds of billions of dollars, has increasingly led to regulatory, legal and public-relations headaches.

Federal and state lawmakers are holding hearings and considering legislation to weaken the companies’ app-store controls. The Justice Department is investigating the issue. And in a trial next month, Apple is set to face off against Epic Games, the Fortnite maker, which is suing Apple for forcing it to use Apple’s payment system in its iPhone app.

Jared Sine, the chief legal officer at Match Group, said on Wednesday that Google had called his company the previous night when his planned testimony became public. He said Google wondered why his testimony appeared to be tougher than what Match had said on a recent earnings call.

Mr. Blumenthal called that intimidation, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who is the subcommittee’s chairwoman, suggested that the senators would investigate.

Wilson White, a government affairs official at Google, said that Match was an important partner and that Google would never aim to intimidate the company.

“There are many, many ways they could hurt our business,” Mr. Sine said. “We’re all afraid, is the reality, Senator. We’re fortunate you’re listening to us today.”

“Well,” Ms. Klobuchar replied, “I hope the Justice Department is, too.”

Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

The market may already be dictating some of the agenda for Gary Gensler, who started as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Saturday.

Mr. Gensler already has a lot on his plate, Matthew Goldstein reports for The New York Times:

One of the first things he will probably have to weigh in on is whether to assert more control over the red-hot market for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, those speculative businesses that have raised well over $100 billion from investors.
He must also decide whether the S.E.C. should do more to protect small investors, who have recently become a major force in the stock markets.
Then there’s Archegos Capital Management, the $10 billion fund whose implosion last month spotlighted the loosely regulated world of family offices.

“Gensler is going to be confronted with a range of enforcement issues, and he is going to have to determine what his priorities are,” said Daniel Hawke, a former chief of the S.E.C.’s market abuse unit and now a partner with the law firm Arnold & Porter.

Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit organization, said he expected Mr. Gensler to focus on reforming the rules around corporate disclosures — including seeking more transparency from companies and big investors on their risks from climate change and contributions to it, as well as diversity on company boards — because it affected much of his agenda.

“Disclosure writ large will be a common thread through all the issues,” Mr. Kelleher said. “The S.E.C. is fundamentally a disclosure agency, and through better disclosure, you are supposed to be able to empower investors and enable enforcement.”

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Arrival, a small electric vehicle company, is creating highly automated “microfactories” where its delivery vans and buses will be assembled by multitasking robots, breaking from the approach pioneered by Henry Ford and used by most of the world’s automakers.

The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its microfactories will cost about $50 million rather than the $1 billion or more required to build a traditional factory, Neal E. Boudette reports for The New York Times.

“The assembly line approach is very capital-intensive, and you have to get to very high production levels to make any margin,” said Avinash Rugoobur, Arrival’s president and a former General Motors executive. “The microfactory allows us to build vehicles profitably at really any volume.”

The company is also replacing most steel parts used in vehicles with components made from advanced composites, a mix of polypropylene, a polymer used to make plastics, and fiberglass. These parts are to be held together by structural adhesives instead of metal welds.

The use of composites, which can be produced in any color, would eliminate three of the most expensive parts of an auto plant — the paint shop, the giant printing presses that stamp out fenders and other parts, and the robots that weld metal parts into larger underbody components. Each typically costs several hundred million dollars.

The company, which is based in London and is setting up factories in England and the United States, says this method should yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.

Credit…Phil Noble/Reuters

Shares in renewable energy companies rose as President Biden’s two-day climate summit began on Thursday, designated as Earth Day. Mr. Biden is expected to announce that the United States will intend to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by the end of the decade.

Ahead of the virtual summit with dozens of world leaders, Britain has also sped up its own climate change targets. On Tuesday, it set a new target of cutting emissions by nearly 80 percent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels. On Wednesday, the European Union agreed to a new target to reduce net emissions at least 55 percent by the end of the decade.

“As governments around the world look to kick-start their recoveries as well as reach climate goals, green spending has become one avenue for doing so,” strategists at UBS Global Wealth Management wrote in a note. “We think the sustainable investment universe will continue to expand rapidly.”

Shares in Orsted, a Danish wind energy company, rose 3.4 percent on Thursday, ending a eight-day streak of losses. Shares in Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy jumped nearly 6 percent. First Solar shares rose in premarket trading, extending a gain of 5.4 percent from Wednesday. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange-traded fund, which has $5.6 billion in assets, rose 2 percent on Wednesday and kept climbing in premarket trading.

Elsewhere in markets

U.S. stock futures were little changed. The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 0.5 percent.
Credit Suisse shares plunged 6 percent on Thursday after the Swiss bank said it suffered a loss in the first quarter after billions of francs were lost because of loans made to investment fund Archegos Capital Management
The euro rose 0.2 percent against the dollar before the European Central Bank announces its latest monetary policy decisions. Economists are not expecting a change after the bank ramped up the pace of its bond buying program at its previous meeting in March.

Tags Claims, evidence, fall, fresh, jobless, Live, Offering, recovery, Updates

World News

Putin, Navalny Protests Information: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 21, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

VideoPresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said in an address on Wednesday that the country’s response would be “asymmetrical, quick and tough” against nations that threatened its security interests.CreditCredit…Photo by Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday delivered an annual address replete with threats against the West but, despite intense tensions with Ukraine, stopped short of announcing new military or foreign policy moves.

Russia’s response will be “asymmetric, fast and tough” if it is forced to defend its interests, Mr. Putin said, pointing to what he claimed were Western efforts at regime change in neighboring Belarus as another threat to Russia’s security.

He pledged that Russia “wants to have good relations with all participants of international society,” even as he noted that Russia’s modernized nuclear weapons systems were at the ready.

“The organizers of any provocations threatening the fundamental interests of our security will regret their deeds more than they have regretted anything in a long time,” Mr. Putin told a hall of governors and members of Parliament. “I hope no one gets the idea to cross the so-called red line with Russia — and we will be the ones to decide where it runs in every concrete case.”

Mr. Putin’s speech had been widely anticipated, with about 100,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border and Ukraine’s president warning openly of the possibility of war. Some analysts had speculated that Mr. Putin might use his annual state of the nation address to announce a pretext for sending troops into Ukraine.

But that possible outcome did not come to pass, even as Russia’s enormous military presence near Ukraine’s borders showed no sign of receding. Mr. Putin also made no reference to the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, whose supporters were holding protests across the country on Wednesday.

Instead, Mr. Putin spent most of his speech on domestic issues, acknowledging Russians’ discontent with the hardships of the pandemic. He outlined programs to subsidize summer camp for children, smooth the system for child-support payments to single mothers and move more social services online.

Still, it was too early to tell whether Mr. Putin, 68, was pulling back from the brink. Now in his third decade in power, he appears more convinced than ever of his special, historic role as the father of a reborn Russian nation, fighting at home and abroad against a craven, hypocritical, morally decaying West.

“This sense of superiority mixed with arrogance gives him a feeling of power, and this is dangerous,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian analyst who has studied Mr. Putin for years. “When you think you are more powerful and more wise than everyone else around you, you think you have a certain historical mandate for more wide-ranging action.”

Mr. Putin has made moves in recent weeks that, even by his standards, signal an escalation in his conflict with those he perceives as enemies, foreign and domestic. Russian prosecutors last week filed suit to outlaw Mr. Navalny’s organization, a step that could result in the most intense wave of political repression in post-Soviet Russia. And in Russia’s southwest, Mr. Putin has built up a military force, the Kremlin has indicated, that could be prepared to move into neighboring Ukraine.

In Washington, the Biden administration reacted mildly to Mr. Putin’s tough words.

“We don’t take anything President Putin says personally,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said when asked for a response. “We have tough skin.”

Asked if the sharpened rhetoric from Mr. Putin would affect the prospects for a possible meeting with President Biden later this year, Ms. Psaki said discussions were ongoing. “Obviously,” she said, “it requires all parties having an agreement that we’re going to have a meeting and we issued that invitation.”

VideoPresident Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned of a possible war with Russia in an address to citizens on Tuesday evening. He directed comments to President Vladimir V. Putin and called for international support.CreditCredit…Ukrainian Presidential Press Service, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed his nation on Tuesday evening, warning citizens of the possibility of war. He addressed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directly, urging him to step back from the brink and proposing that the two meet.

The unusual videotaped appearance by Mr. Zelensky — a former comedian elected in 2019 on a promise to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine — was the clearest signal yet that Ukraine is girding for the possibility of a full-fledged war with Russia. Moscow’s buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border, he said, had created “all the preconditions for escalation.”

“Does Ukraine want war? No. Is it ready for it? Yes,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Our principle is simple: Ukraine does not start a war first, but Ukraine always stands to the last man.”

It appeared to be no coincidence that Mr. Zelensky’s address came on the eve of Mr. Putin’s annual state of the nation address on Wednesday. At the end of his video, Mr. Zelensky switched from Ukrainian to Russian, speaking to Mr. Putin directly. He pushed back at Mr. Putin’s contention that Russian forces would be used in Ukraine only if the Russian-speaking population in the east was threatened, and proposed a summit in the war-torn eastern region known as Donbas.

“It is impossible to bring peace on a tank,” Mr. Zelensky said.

“I am ready,” he continued, “to invite you to meet anywhere in the Ukrainian Donbas where there is war.”

There was no immediate response from the Kremlin to Mr. Zelensky’s invitation.

Credit…Pavel Korolyov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Protesters in Vladivostok, a major port on the eastern tip of Russia, had no need to hear President Vladimir V. Putin’s annual keynote address on Wednesday, filled with promises of a better future for Russians. They knew what they see as the main issues facing the country would not get mentioned.

“Freedom to political prisoners,” they chanted as they marched through the city center, according to videos posted on social media. “Freedom to Navalny!” they screamed, referring to Aleksei A. Navalny, the Kremlin critic, who is now on a hunger strike in a Russian prison. “Down with the Czar!” they chanted. The police warned protesters through loudspeakers that they could be arrested. “We will not stay silent,” was their response.

Mr. Putin was still speaking when people started gathering on main squares in the country’s Far East — where protests started before rallies extended across the vast nation of 11 time zones.

By the time Mr. Putin had finished, eight people were already detained in the remote city of Magadan, according to Vesma, a local news website. About 40 people came out to protest in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the capital of the Kamchatka region, with no arrests reported.

In Irkutsk, a major city further west toward Moscow, hundreds of people marched through the city chanting “Freedom to Navalny!” and “Irkutsk, come out!” The police in Irkutsk detained 11 people.

By later in the day, at least 1,226 people had been detained across the country, according to OVD-Info, a rights group that tracks arrests.

About 10,000 people were arrested nationwide in two days of pro-Navalny rallies in January, according to the same group, suggesting that Wednesday’s turnout was lighter.

In Moscow near the Kremlin, several thousand protesters turned out in the gathering dusk. They included Mr. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who was greeted with chants of “Yulia!”

The Moscow police used loudspeakers warning the protesters to disperse, but there was no sign of heavy-handed tactics to crush the demonstrations. By the end of the day the OVD-Info group said only 23 arrests had been reported in Russia’s capital.

Вот как выглядит шествие в Иркутске сверху (и на фоне красивых деревянных домов в центре города)

Видео: Зоя Кузнецова pic.twitter.com/CJYpQggBUx

— Дождь (@tvrain) April 21, 2021

The last wave of protests were sparked by Mr. Navalny’s return to Russia in January from Germany, where he had been treated after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent. Since Mr. Navalny’s return, the Russian government has undertaken an aggressive crackdown on dissent, raising the risks for anyone sympathetic to the protest movement.

Dozens of opposition activists were arrested in 20 cities across Russia ahead of the Wednesday rallies. Some of the activists were beaten and sentenced to administrative arrests, according to OVD Info. Many were members of Mr. Navalny’s political organization, but some were arrested simply for having shared social media posts about the rallies.

Among those detained were two prominent associates of Mr. Navalny: his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh; and Lyubov Sobol.

In recent weeks, the Russian authorities have conducted raids on Mr. Navalny’s offices across the country, looking for leaflets and other materials calling for protests. Those items would presumably be used in the Kremlin’s drive to have his organization labeled “extremist,” which would expose its members to potentially lengthy prison terms.

In Kurgan, a city in central Russia, an unidentified person sneaked into Mr. Navalny’s office on Monday morning and destroyed a radiator, flooding the premises.

Under various pretexts, the authorities in cities across Russia blocked central squares and streets. In Yekaterinburg, they rescheduled a Victory Day parade rehearsal to ensure that it overlapped with a scheduled protest. In Kostroma, the central square was closed down, ostensibly for pest control measures.

In universities across the country, students were ordered to sit for unscheduled tests and other gatherings with mandatory attendance, TV Rain, an independent news station reported on Tuesday.

The authorities in Moscow denied Mr. Navalny’s allies a permit for the rally they have planned for Wednesday evening, citing coronavirus concerns. The Prosecutor General’s office warned parents that they would be subject to fines and arrest if their underage children are detained at a rally.

More than 450,000 people nationwide registered online to declare their intent to take part in demonstrations against Mr. Navalny’s incarceration and treatment in prison. More than 100,000 people did so in Moscow, and more than 50,000 in St. Petersburg.

Correction: April 21, 2021

An earlier version of this item misstated Irkutsk’s location relative to the Kamchatka region of Russia. It is further west toward Moscow, not further east.

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

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Credit…Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Russia is moving ahead with efforts to outlaw the organization led by the opposition figure Aleksei A. Navalny, a step that could result in the most intense wave of political repression in the post-Soviet era. But supporters of the jailed opposition leader say they are determined to take to the streets.

Opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin have called for protests across Russia on Wednesday in support of Mr. Navalny, whose allies say he is on a hunger strike and near death in a Russian prison. The police were expected to intervene forcefully to break up the protests, which started in the country’s Far East even before Mr. Putin had finished delivering his state of the nation speech.

Mr. Putin has rarely mentioned Mr. Navalny by name and did not do so in his speech. He did not refer to him in any way.

Mr. Navalny is insisting that he be allowed to be seen by doctors of his choosing. A lawyer who visited him, Vadim Kobzev, said on Tuesday that Mr. Navalny’s arms were punctured and bruised after three nurses had unsuccessfully tried six times to hook him up to an intravenous drip.

“If you saw me now, you would laugh,” Mr. Navalny said in a letter that his team posted to social media. “A skeleton walking, swaying, in its cell.”

United Nations human rights investigators added their voices Wednesday to the demand that Mr. Navalny receive better medical treatment. Independent experts appointed by the world body’s Human Rights Council in Geneva said in a statement that they believed “Mr. Navalny’s life is in serious danger,” and called on the Russian authorities to allow his “urgent medical evacuation from Russia.”

The Kremlin depicts Mr. Navalny as an agent of American influence, and Russian prosecutors filed a lawsuit on Friday to declare his organization “extremist” and illegal.

The extremism designation, which a Moscow court will consider in a secret trial starting next week, would effectively force Russia’s most potent opposition movement underground and could result in yearslong prison terms for pro-Navalny activists.

The White House has warned the Russian government that it “will be held accountable” if Mr. Navalny dies in prison. Western officials — and Mr. Navalny’s supporters and allies — reject the idea that he is acting on another country’s behalf.

But in the Kremlin’s logic, Mr. Navalny is a threat to Russian statehood, doing the West’s bidding by undermining Mr. Putin. It is Mr. Putin who is keeping Russia stable by maintaining a balance between competing factions in Russia’s ruling elite, said Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

“If Putin leaves, a battle between different groups breaks out, and Russia withdraws into itself, has no time for the rest of the world and no longer gets in anyone’s way,” Mr. Trenin said. “The West is, of course, using Navalny, and will use him to create problems for Putin and, in the longer term, help Putin become history in one way or another.”

Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Several thousand protesters crowded the broad sidewalks near the Kremlin on Wednesday, at one point holding up their cellphones in a symbol of antigovernment defiance.

They called for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to be freed, but it was a sense of widespread injustice that brought many of them out into the streets despite the threat of arrest.

“I didn’t come out concretely because of Aleksei Navalny — I came out more for myself,” said Svetlana Kosatkina, a 64-year-old real estate agent. “I can’t stand this whole situation of lawlessness and just total humiliation.”

Protesters took up the sidewalks across the street from the exhibition hall next to the Kremlin where President Vladimir V. Putin had given his annual state of the nation speech earlier in the day. They chanted “Go away!” — referring to Mr. Putin; and “Release him!” — referring to Mr. Navalny.

Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s wife, joined the protesters on the boulevard ring in Central Moscow, and was greeted with chants of “Yulia!”

Riot police officers were out in force and blared warnings to disperse through loudspeakers, but they avoided scenes of brutality that could have cast a shadow over Mr. Putin’s speech.

They also effectively kept parts of the city blocked off so that sporadic groups of protesters could never unite into a large crowd.

The outcome, in Moscow at least: The authorities managed to weaken the overall impression the protest made without arresting hundreds of people, as had been done in previous demonstrations.

Only 23 people were arrested in Moscow, according to OVD Info, an independent monitoring group. In earlier demonstrations, the police would typically detain more than 1,000 people.

A 33-year-old advertising professional among the protesters on Wednesday — who gave only his first name, Denis, fearing retribution — blamed Mr. Putin for his current unemployment. It was Mr. Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, he said, that drove away foreign investment and limited young Russians’ hopes for the future.

He had come to the protest with a book, in case he had to spend the night at a police station.

“We are isolated now,” he said. “I don’t see a future for this system. I don’t want to be an enemy to the outside world.”

Credit…Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In a speech filled with bluster and bromides against the West, President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday lingered on a grievance that has not gained much traction outside the Russian state news media: an unfounded accusation that the C.I.A. has been plotting to assassinate the leader of Belarus.

Even as he raised the subject, Mr. Putin acknowledged that it was not being taken seriously outside Russia.

“Characteristically, even such lamentable actions are not discussed in the so-called collective West,” Mr. Putin said. “They pretend nothing happened.”

Over the weekend, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, arrested two men who it said were plotting to murder President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus and to seize television and radio stations.

It said the men had coordinated with U.S. and Polish intelligence agencies and come to Russia to meet Belarusian generals sympathetic to the opposition. The Russian authorities released video that showed the men casually discussing their improbable plot over a meal at a Moscow restaurant.

One of the men, Aleksandr Feduta, is a former spokesman for Mr. Lukashenko. The other, Yuras Zyankovich, has dual U.S. and Belarusian citizenship. The United States and Polish governments denied any role in a murder and coup plot in Belarus.

The arrests aligned with Mr. Putin’s casting of Russia in his state of the nation speech on Wednesday as victimized and pressured by a hypocritical and aggressive Western world that poses imminent threats.

The encroaching West, Mr. Putin said, has “crossed all the boundaries.”

Policies to pressure Russia that were previously limited to economic sanctions “have been reborn as something more dangerous,” he said. “I have in mind the recent facts that came to light of a direct attempt to organize a coup in Belarus and the murder of the leader of that country.”

Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president of the United States, despite his promise to be tough on Russia, initially gave the Kremlin hope, analysts say.

He was seen as more professional, reliable and pragmatic than President Donald J. Trump, with a worldview shaped by a Cold War era of diplomacy in which Washington and Moscow engaged as equal superpowers with a responsibility for global security. In their first phone call in January, Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin agreed to extend the New Start arms-control treaty, a Russian foreign policy goal that the Kremlin had not been able to achieve with Mr. Trump.

Then came the television interview in March in which Mr. Biden assented when asked whether Mr. Putin was a “killer.” A month later, that moment — to which Russian officials and commentators responded with a squall of prime-time-televised, anti-American fury — looks like a turning point. It was followed by last week’s raft of American sanctions against Russia, combined with Mr. Biden’s call for a summit meeting with Mr. Putin, which to many Russians looked like a crude American attempt to negotiate from a position of strength.

“This is seen as an unacceptable situation — you won’t chase us into the stall with sanctions,” said Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank.

How far Mr. Putin will go in striking back against the West’s real or imagined hostility is an open question. In the state news media, the mood music is dire. On the flagship weekly news show on the Rossiya 1 channel on Sunday, the host Dmitri Kiselyov closed a segment on Mr. Putin’s showdown with Mr. Biden by reminding viewers of Poseidon — a weapon in Russia’s nuclear arsenal that Mr. Putin revealed three years ago.

“Russia’s armed forces are ready to test-fire a nuclear torpedo that would cause radioactive tsunamis capable of flooding enemy cities and making them uninhabitable for decades,” a translation of a Danish newspaper report intoned.

Still, there are signs that Mr. Putin does not want tensions with the West to spiral out of control.

As Europe and the United States scrambled to assess the Russian troop buildup in late March, Russia’s top military officer, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, spoke on the phone with his American counterpart, Gen. Mark A. Milley. On Monday, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Mr. Putin’s Security Council, discussed the prospect of a presidential summit with Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. And the Kremlin said this week that Mr. Putin would speak at Mr. Biden’s online climate change meeting on Thursday.

Ms. Stanovaya, the analyst, says she was convinced that Mr. Putin is more interested than his hawkish advisers in looking for ways to work with the United States. She pointed to Mr. Putin’s determination to return Russia to the ranks of great powers.

“Putin very much believes in his mission as a great historic figure with responsibility not only for Russia, but also for global security,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “He doesn’t understand how it is that the American president doesn’t feel the same way.”

Credit…Maxar Technologies, via Associated Press

The Russian authorities closed airspace to commercial traffic near the Ukrainian border starting on Tuesday in another sign of rising military tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The warning to commercial pilots covers parts of the Crimean Peninsula — annexed by Russia seven years ago — and international airspace over the Black Sea. It formalized what had already become obvious: The region is in the grips of an increasingly ominous military crisis.

Ukraine objected last week to Russia’s closing of areas in the Black Sea to shipping, a ban that the U.S. State Department spokesman, Ned Price, on Monday called an “unprovoked escalation in Moscow’s ongoing campaign to undermine and destabilize Ukraine.”

Over the past month, Russia has massed the largest military force along Ukraine’s eastern border and in Crimea since the outset of war in 2014, according to Western governments. Analysts say that the deliberately high visibility of the buildup indicates that its purpose is more a warning to the West than a prelude to invasion.

“They are deploying in a very visible way,” said Michael Kofman, a senior researcher at CNA, a policy research group in Arlington, Va. “They are doing it overtly, so we can see it. It is intentional.”

The Russian military says it is conducting exercises in response to Ukrainian threats to two Russian-backed separatist regions and to what it calls heightened NATO military activity in the Black Sea area.

Military tensions have also risen elsewhere. On Tuesday, Russia’s Air Force flew two nuclear-capable Tu-160 strategic bombers over the Baltic Sea for eight hours. In the Arctic Ocean, the Northern Fleet has been conducting a huge naval drill, the Defense Ministry said.

Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has often sought to bolster domestic support through rally-around-the-flag, aggressive foreign policy moves. But on Wednesday he opened his annual address to the nation by focusing on the bread-and-butter economic issues that polls show most worry Russians.

He rattled off a laundry list of social subsidies that he said his government would begin to provide to new mothers, single parents and low-income families.

“For our entire history, our people triumphed, overcoming challenges thanks to their singular cohesion, their spiritual and moral values that in a number of countries are forgotten, but we on the contrary have strengthened,” Mr. Putin said.

He outlined programs to subsidize summer camp for children, smooth the system for child-support payments to single mothers and move more social services online.

While Russia is still in the throes of a coronavirus wave, Mr. Putin minimized the threat and said Russia would swivel to “healing the wounds” and shoring up the economy. He also laid out a requirement that Russian laboratories be ready to prepare tests for potential new infectious diseases within four days of their discovery.

Mr. Putin traditionally starts his yearly address with a focus on economic issues, and despite rising tensions with the West, this year was no different.

The Russian leader is aware that empty wallets can add fuel to protest movements and that the stagnating economy is taking a toll on support for his government. Russians’ average take-home wages adjusted for inflation have been declining since the Ukraine crisis in 2014, dropping 10 percent since then.

Analysts say it is no coincidence that protests have seeped out of the wealthy cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg to Russia’s far-flung provinces, which are feeling the economic pain more acutely.

The Russian budget fell into deficit during the pandemic last year, but in the first quarter of 2021 was again in surplus, buoyed by rising oil prices. This has provided Mr. Putin room for maneuver on populist policies before parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall.

Over the years, he has padded his speeches with populist announcements that are often repetitions or minor updates on long-running policies.

Russia, for example, has for years paid a bonus of around $10,000 to women for the birth of a child, a policy intended to help reverse Russia’s long demographic decline.

Credit…Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

United Nations human rights experts, expressing fears for the life of the opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, called on Russia to allow his urgent evacuation for medical treatment abroad.

“We believe Mr. Navalny’s life is in serious danger,” the group of four U.N. experts said in a statement on Wednesday. They cited the attack with a nerve agent last year that nearly killed him, which Western governments believe was ordered by the Kremlin, and his incarceration in conditions that in their view could amount to torture.

These “are all part of a deliberate pattern of retaliation against him for his criticism of the Russian government and a gross violation of his human rights,” according to the experts, including specialists on freedom of speech, torture, extrajudicial killings and the right to health.

“There is no valid legal basis for Mr. Navalny’s arrest, trial and imprisonment,” the experts said. Mr. Navalny has been detained since last month after being convicted of breaching bail conditions while receiving medical treatment in Germany for the Novichok nerve agent attack on him.

Their statement called for his “urgent medical evacuation from Russia.”

Although Mr. Navalny had been transferred to a prison hospital, authorities have not allowed him access to doctors of his own choosing, the rights experts noted.

The Russian authorities’ “apparent violations of the prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment, his right to counsel, and most notably his right to prompt and effective medical care while in detention only deepen our already profound concerns about Mr. Navalny’s life and safety,” the experts said.

Under international law, they said, the Russian government “must take all necessary measures to protect Mr. Navalny’s physical and mental health and well-being.”

Tags Live, Navalny, News, Protests, Putin, Updates

Business

7 Republicans Swear Off Marketing campaign Cash From Large Tech: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date April 21, 2021

Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said last month that he would not accept money from the tech giants’ political action committees.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Joe Skipper/Reuters

A group of seven House Republicans said on Wednesday that they would no longer take donations from major tech companies or their top executives, a sign of the growing distance between some conservatives and big business.

The lawmakers said in a letter that the companies limited the reach of conservative voices, citing bans on the chat app Parler after it was used by participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and abused their market power.

“These monopolies have shown that personal liberty can be threatened by corporate tyranny just as much as by government tyranny,” they said in the letter. All but one of the lawmakers are members of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the antitrust questions confronting the tech companies.

The pledge was led by Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. Mr. Buck said last month that he would not accept money from the tech giants’ political action committees.

For years, lawmakers on the right have attacked Google, Twitter and Facebook, accusing the companies of unfairly removing content posted by conservatives. The lawmakers have also accused Amazon and Apple of stifling competition. In recent weeks, some conservatives have turned on other major businesses — traditionally their allies in efforts to deregulate the economy — that have opposed their positions on voting rights and other issues.

Five of the lawmakers received donations from the corporate political action committees of Google, Facebook and Amazon in the last election cycle. Representatives Chip Roy of Texas, Gregory Steube of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who signed the pledge, all received a combined $3,500 in donations. Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina (not Oklahoma, as previously reported here) received $1,000 from Amazon’s political committee.

But it is also possible that some of the lawmakers who signed the pledge will not have to turn any donations down in the near future. Amazon and Google froze donations to lawmakers who voted against certifying the election results after the Jan. 6 attack. Facebook paused all of its political donations.

Mr. Steube and Mr. Norman, as well as Representatives Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Burgess Owens of Utah, all objected to the results of the presidential election.

Mr. Bishop and Mr. Owens both signed the pledge even though they did not receive money from the firms’ political committees last election cycle.

Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

On Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase’s co-heads of investment banking, Jim Casey and Viswas Raghavan, announced policies aimed at improving working conditions amid record deal volume and an industrywide debate about banker burnout, especially in the junior ranks.

The country’s largest bank has tried similar moves before. Mr. Casey spoke with the DealBook newsletter about the company’s latest plan — and whether this one will stick.

Burnout became the buzz on Wall Street after a group of 13 anonymous first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs described how frequent 100-hour weeks were taking a toll on their mental and physical health.

To help alleviate that level of exhaustion among its own ranks, JPMorgan is bringing on more workers to help cope with heavy deal volume, which generated $3 billion in investment banking fees in the first quarter, up nearly 60 percent from the previous year. It has already hired 65 analysts and 22 associates this year and plans to add another 100 junior bankers and support staff, “if we can find them, as quickly as we can,” Mr. Casey said.

It’s also focused on managing its bankers’ hours better. JPMorgan will tell associates not to do marketing work on weekends. It will encourage all bankers to go home by 7 p.m. on weekdays and add more flexibility for personal time. It will force bankers to take at least three weeks’ vacation a year. It will require group heads to call two to three junior bankers every day to find out what’s working.

Some of these actions are similar to what JPMorgan rolled out in 2016, but “it wasn’t stringently enforced,” Mr. Casey said. Why not? “Laziness.”

This time, junior bankers’ hours and feedback will figure in senior managers’ performance evaluations and — crucially — compensation.

One thing the bank won’t be doing: offering one-time checks or free Peloton exercise bikes to staff after a big rush, like at some other banks. “It’s not a money problem,” Mr. Casey said. “If we just cut the junior bankers a check now,” he said, “then that would be the excuse that everybody says, ‘Well, OK, the problem is fixed.’ No, it’s not.”

And some other things won’t change. Banking is a client-service job, so managers sometimes have limited control over workloads and hours. “You might do 100 deals a year, but that client only does one deal every three years,” Mr. Casey said.

As to how the bank will measure the success of these policies, “ask me what our turnover ratio has gone to and I will tell you,” Mr. Casey said. What’s the target? “Lower.”

Credit…Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

American Airlines plans to bring back all of its pilots by the end of summer and start hiring new ones this fall, reflecting optimism across the industry that widespread vaccinations will encourage more people to book flights.

The airline expects to hire about 300 pilots this year and twice as many next year, Chip Long, American’s vice president of flight operations, said in a note to pilots on Wednesday. He added the airline planned to honor offers it made to new pilots but didn’t fulfill last year when the pandemic crushed demand for tickets.

United Airlines also said this month that it would restart pilot hiring and expected to make about 300 offers this year.

“The return to flying of so many of our pilots and the addition of hundreds more, the resumption of many old routes and the introduction of new destinations are hopeful signs, opportunities to look beyond the immediate and into a brighter future,” Mr. Long said.

A spokesman for the union that represents American’s pilots, the Allied Pilots Association, welcomed the news but said it should come with more scheduling certainty for its members.

“We have faith that we can get it done, but we have to have the tools to do it,” said the spokesman, Dennis Tajer, who is also a pilot at American.

Airlines have been heartened by the increase in bookings over the past month and are optimistic that even more people will fly this summer. American has said it expects this summer to offer more than 90 percent of the seats on domestic flights as it did in 2019 and 80 percent of the seats on international flights.

Still, the airline is expected to report a large loss for the first three months of the year when it announces quarterly results on Thursday morning.

Credit…Gili Benita for The New York Times

The past year has crushed independent restaurants across the country and brought a reality to their doors: Many were unprepared for a digital world.

Unlike other small retailers, restaurateurs could keep the tech low, with basic websites and maybe Instagram accounts with tantalizing, well-lit photos of their food. It meant businesses like BentoBox, which aims to help restaurants build more robust websites with e-commerce abilities, were a hard sell, Amy Haimerl reports for The New York Times.

For many, BentoBox’s services were a “nice to have,” not a necessity, the company’s founder, Krystle Mobayeni, said.

But the pandemic sent chefs and owners flocking to the firm as they suddenly needed to add to-go ordering, delivery scheduling, gift card sales and more to their websites. Before the pandemic the company, based in New York City, had about 4,800 clients, including the high-profile Manhattan restaurant Gramercy Tavern; today it has more than 7,000 restaurants on board and recently received a $28.8 million investment led by Goldman Sachs.

The moment opened a well of opportunity for other companies like it. Dozens of firms have either started or scaled up sharply as they found their services in urgent demand. Meanwhile, investors and venture capitalists have been sourcing deals in the “restaurant tech” sector — particularly seeking companies that bring the big chains’ advantages to independent restaurants.

Credit…Yves Herman/Reuters

The European Union on Wednesday unveiled strict regulations to govern the use of artificial intelligence. The rules have far-reaching implications for major technology companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft that have poured resources into developing artificial intelligence. “With these landmark rules, the E.U. is spearheading the development of new global norms to make sure A.I. can be trusted,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president who oversees digital policy for the 27-nation bloc, said in a statement.
Netflix reported the addition of four million new customers in the first quarter, below the six million it had forecast. The company expects to add only one million new customers for this current quarter ending in June. Netflix shares plummeted about 10 percent in after-hours trading.
Apple unveiled new products on Tuesday that showed how it continued to center its marketing pitch on consumer privacy, at the potential expense of other companies, while muscling into markets pioneered by much smaller competitors. Apple showed off a new high-end iPad and an iMac desktop computer based on new processors that Apple now makes itself. The company said it was redesigning its podcast app, which competes with companies like Spotify, to enable creators to charge for their shows. It revealed the AirTag, a $29 disc that attaches to key rings or wallets so they can be found if lost. And after its product show, Apple said that it planned to release iPhone software next week with a privacy feature that worries digital-advertising companies, most notably Facebook.

U.S. stocks rose on Wednesday, reversing some of the previous day’s drop. The sentiment in stock markets this week has shifted from the optimism that recently set record highs amid growing concerns about coronavirus variants that are leading to new outbreaks.

The S&P 500 ticked up 0.4 percent after falling 0.7 percent on Tuesday.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose about 0.5 percent after plunging 1.9 percent on Tuesday. That was the biggest one-day decline since December.

Oil prices fell, with futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, declining 1.2 percent to just below $62 a barrel.

Stocks

Netflix shares dropped nearly 8 percent after its latest earnings report. For the first quarter of 2021, Netflix said after markets closed on Tuesday that it added four million new customers, less than the six million it had forecast. It’s another sign that, although Netflix still dominates streaming, its rivals are starting to catch up.
As plans for a European Super League for soccer rapidly fell apart on Tuesday, shares in publicly traded football clubs that had joined the group dropped. Manchester United shares fell in New York, extending a 6 percent drop from the previous day. Shares in Juventus, an Italian club, tumbled more than 10 percent.

Economic data

Inflation in Britain rose less in March than economists predicted. The annual rate of price increases was 0.7 percent, data published Wednesday showed, up from 0.4 percent in February. The jump is notable, but it is less than the 0.8 percent analysts had predicted. As in the United States, policymakers and economists expect some of the increase to be temporary and explained by transitionary factors such as the steep drop in oil prices this time last year. Therefore, bets are that the central bank won’t reduce its monetary stimulus yet.

A growing number of retirees and those approaching retirement are in debt.

The share of households headed by someone 55 or older with debt — from credit cards, mortgages, medical bills and student loans — increased to 68.4 percent in 2019, from 53.8 percent in 1992, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. A survey at the end of 2020 by Clever, an online real estate service, found that on average, retirees had doubled their nonmortgage debt in 2020 — to $19,200.

Susan B. Garland reports for The New York Times on what to do if you’re in this position:

Consult a nonprofit credit counseling agency, which will review a client’s expenses and income sources and create a custom action plan. The initial budgeting session is often free, said Bruce McClary, senior vice president for communications at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. An action plan could include cutting unnecessary spending, such as selling a rarely used car and banking some proceeds for taxi fare.
Tap into senior-oriented government benefits, such as property tax relief, utility assistance and Medicare premium subsidies. The National Council on Aging operates a clearinghouse website for them, BenefitsCheckUp.org. “The average individual 65-plus on a fixed income is leaving $7,000 annually on the table” in unused benefits, said Ramsey Alwin, the council’s president.
Avoid using high-interest credit cards to fill income gaps. Medical bills typically charge little or no interest but turn into high-interest costs if placed on credit cards, said Melinda Opperman, president of Credit.org. Instead, she said, patients should call hospitals or other providers directly to work out an arrangement.
Avoid taking out home-equity loans or lines of credit to pay off credit cards or medical bills, said Rose Perkins, quality assurance manager for CCCSMD, a credit counseling service. Though tapping home equity carries a lower interest rate than a credit card, a homeowner could put a home at risk if a job loss, the death of a spouse or illness made it difficult to pay off the lender, she said.

Tags Big, Campaign, Live, Money, Republicans, Swear, Tech, Updates

Business

Canadian Rivals in Bidding Struggle for U.S. Railroad: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 20, 2021

Canadian National Railway proposed a $33.7 billion deal to acquire Kansas City Southern, challenging an offer from Canadian Pacific.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Christinne Muschi/Reuters

The railroad barons are at it again.

Canadian National Railway on Tuesday offered to buy Kansas City Southern for $33.7 billion, topping a $29 billion bid put forward last month by a rival railroad operator, Canadian Pacific.

The competing offers underline the riches expected to come from trade flows after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was passed into law last year. A merger with either suitor would create a railroad line that stretches from Canada to Mexico. In the already consolidated railroad industry, few lines are left to bid on — let alone deals that will be approved by regulators.

Canadian National said in a letter to Kansas City board that the company had spent “considerable time and resources analyzing a potential combination of our two companies.” It argues its offer represents “an unparalleled opportunity to create a premier railway for the 21st century.”

The offer gives Kansas City Southern a valuation 21 percent higher than Canadian Pacific’s bid, which had been agreed on by the companies’ boards.

For Canadian National, the proposal would be a chance to stop its smaller domestic competitor from gaining significant scale. Unlike Canadian Pacific, Canadian National already has track agreements extending to the Gulf of Mexico.

The rival bid is one further challenge to Canadian Pacific’s offer, which was already facing regulatory scrutiny. The U.S. Department of Justice has urged the Surface Transportation Board — which must approve the offer — to examine the deal under tough industry guidelines put in place in 2001 and expressed concern over its use of a voting trust that would it allow it close the deal even before getting regulatory approval.

Canadian Pacific has argued that there should be no regulatory trouble, given the two railroads have no overlap and in some cases create new markets. It said its smaller size compared with other major North American railroads should exempt it from the guidelines.

Credit…Charles Platiau/Reuters

Three rival names in the European luxury sector have established a new blockchain consortium that will allow shoppers to track the provenance of their purchases and authenticate goods.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which first unveiled plans for a global blockchain-based system in 2019, will be joined by Prada Group and Compagnie Financière Richemont in the Aura Blockchain Consortium, a nonprofit group that will promote the use of a single blockchain solution open to all luxury brands worldwide.

Many sectors are looking at the possibility of using blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Because blockchains are unchangeable and decentralized, the data stored on them is trustworthy and secure.

In this case, each product will be given a unique digital code during the manufacturing process that will be recorded on the Aura ledger. When customers make a purchase, they will be given login details to a platform that will provide the history of the product, including its origin, components, environmental and ethical information, proof of ownership, a warranty and care instructions.

Bulgari, Cartier, Hublot, Louis Vuitton and Prada are already using the system, with “advanced conversations” being held with a number of other luxury brands, according to a statement released Tuesday. Participating luxury brands pay an annual licensing fee and a volume fee. Aura, based in Geneva, was developed in partnership with Microsoft and ConsenSys, a blockchain software technology company in New York.

“The Aura Consortium represents an unprecedented cooperation in the luxury industry,” said Cartier’s chief executive, Cyrille Vigneron, adding that he invited “the entire profession” to join the consortium.

“The luxury industry creates timeless pieces and must ensure that these rigorous standards will endure and remain in trustworthy hands,” he said.

Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, called for cooperation and openness to an audience of business and financial leaders on Tuesday. He also had some warnings, presumably for the United States.

Speaking electronically to a largely virtual audience at China’s annual Boao Forum, Mr. Xi warned that the world should not allow “unilateralism pursued by certain countries to set the pace for the whole world.”

The audience included American business leaders including Tim Cook of Apple and Elon Musk of Tesla, as well as two Wall Street financiers, Ray Dalio and Stephen Schwarzman. Long a platform for China to show off its economic prowess and leadership, the Boao Forum is held annually on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. (Last year’s was canceled amid the pandemic.)

In recent years, Mr. Xi has used the forum to portray himself as an advocate of free trade and globalization, calling for openness even as many in the global business community have become increasingly vocal about growing restrictions in China’s own domestic market.

On Tuesday, he also reiterated his earlier message opposing efforts by countries to weaken their economic interdependence with China.

“Attempts to ‘erect walls’ or ‘decouple’” would “hurt others’ interests without benefiting oneself,” Mr. Xi said, in what appeared to be a reference to the United States and the Biden administration’s plans to support domestic high-tech manufacturing in the United States.

The White House held a meeting with business executives last week to discuss a global chip shortage and plan for semiconductor “supply chain resilience.” Speaking to executives from Google, Intel and Samsung, Mr. Biden said “China and the rest of the world is not waiting, and there’s no reason why Americans should wait.”

China is pursuing its own program for self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing.

Mr. Xi also pledged to continue to open the Chinese economy for foreign businesses, a promise that big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have clung to even as foreign executives complain that the broader business landscape has become more challenging.

Credit…Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency started as a joke, now has a market value that can’t be laughed at: more than $50 billion. On Tuesday, traders of Dogecoin were trying to push up the price to coincide with 4/20, or April 20, a date associated with smoking cannabis.

On Twitter, the hashtags #DogeDay and #Doge420 were trending. Dogecoin’s price, which has surged lately, fluctuated between gains and losses on Tuesday, trading at about 40 cents, according to Coindesk. A month ago, it was about 5 cents.

The ripple effects of the boom in crypto markets are being felt far and wide. Coinbase, the cryptocurrencies exchange that went public last week and is helping the industry move into the mainstream, has a market value of $66 billion. Central banks have ramped up plans to explore digital currencies to offer people a secure alternative to cryptocurrencies, which are out of their control. On Monday, the Bank of England was the latest to announce it was looking into a central bank digital currency.

On Tuesday morning, prices of cryptocurrencies and related stocks slipped. Bitcoin fell 1 percent, trading just above $55,000. Shares in Coinbase and Riot Blockchain were slightly lower in premarket trading.

Elsewhere in markets

U.S. stocks followed European and Asian stock indexes lower. The S&P 500 index dropped 0.3 percent in early trading, but it’s still less than a percentage point away from the record high reached on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 index dropped 1.1 percent.
Oil prices rose. Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose slightly to about $63.55 a barrel.
Shares in British American Tobacco dropped 8 percent on Tuesday, the worst performance in the FTSE 100, after The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the Biden administration is considering making tobacco companies cut the nicotine in cigarettes so they aren’t addictive. American tobacco companies saw their shares fall on Monday

Credit…Nick Carey/Reuters

Last year’s pandemic-induced production delays, combined with a continued shortage of computer chips and other automotive components, have tightened the supply of new models — especially popular sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.

That means it may be challenging to find a new ride with the colors and features you want at a price you can afford, Ann Carrns reports for The New York Times. “It’s harder to get exactly what you want,” said Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at Edmunds. “Don’t expect heavy discounts.”

So if new cars are too expensive, you can just buy a used car, right?

Yes, but deals may be elusive there as well. Fewer people bought new cars last year, so fewer used cars were traded in. And the short supply of new cars is pushing more buyers to consider used cars, raising those prices, analysts say. The average price paid for a used car is well above $20,000, Edmunds says.

On the plus side, if you have a car to trade in, its value is probably higher, especially if it’s a popular model. The average value for trade-ins, including leased cars turned in early, was about $17,000 in March, up from about $14,000 a year earlier, according to Edmunds. The average age of trade-ins was five and a half years.

Various online services, like Kelly Blue Book, TrueCar and Carvana, will supply a trade-in estimate based on your location and your car’s age, mileage and general condition, and offer more tailored appraisals if you provide details like the vehicle identification number. Some even offer to buy your car outright.

Lululemon said on Tuesday that it would introduce an apparel trade-in program in Texas and California in May, as clothing chains pay more attention to secondhand clothing. It will accept “gently used” Lululemon garments from customers at more than 80 stores and through the mail in exchange for gift cards to the retailer. The cards will range in value from $5 to $25, and a typical pair of leggings would fetch $10. The effort is part of a sustainability initiative called “Lululemon Like New,” and will expand to include a resale business in the same markets in June.
United Airlines said Monday that it lost nearly $1.4 billion in the first three months of the year, but added that a turnaround was close as bookings picked up. The airline said it had stopped spending more money than it collected in March from operations, investing and financing activities — losses known as its “cash burn.” United also said it expected to turn a profit sometime this year.
JPMorgan Chase’s role as the financial backer of the so-called Super League, a breakaway soccer league made up of top clubs from England, Italy and Spain, has made it a target for a storm of criticism. Soccer’s organizing bodies and domestic leagues, European heads of state, former players and supporter groups of the clubs involved were among those speaking out against the plan.
Tribune Publishing said Monday that it had ended talks to sell itself to Newslight, the company set up last month by the Maryland hotel executive Stewart W. Bainum Jr. and the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, after Mr. Wyss withdrew from a planned offer on Friday. Tribune Publishing’s special committee, which evaluates the bids, said in a news release on Monday that the Newslight bid could no longer “reasonably be expected to lead to a ‘superior proposal’” than the nonbinding agreement the company had reached in February with Alden Global Capital.

Credit…Bronte Wittpenn for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Under growing pressure from investors to address climate change, Exxon Mobil on Monday proposed a $100 billion project to capture the carbon emissions of big industrial plants in the Houston area and bury them deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, wants to create a profit-making business out of the capture of carbon emitted by petrochemical plants and other industries. But its plan would require significant government support and intervention, including the introduction of a price or tax on carbon dioxide emissions, an idea that has failed to attract enough support in Congress in the past.

The company already captures carbon, which it injects into older fields to produce more oil. Exxon now wants to use its expertise to store the carbon dioxide generated by other industries. But without a price on emitting carbon, many businesses would have little financial incentive to pay Exxon to capture and store their carbon.

The Obama administration failed to enact a cap-and-trade system, which raises costs for polluting companies by forcing them to buy tradable permits to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. California, the European Union and 11 states in the Northeast use versions of cap-and-trade. Other governments, including British Columbia and Britain, have imposed a per-ton tax on emissions.

Exxon wants to capture carbon from industrial plants along the Houston Ship Channel and pipe it offshore where it would stored up to 6,000 feet below the Gulf of Mexico. The effort would be paid for by industry and the government, and would eventually store 100 million tons of carbon annually — equivalent to the emissions of 20 million cars, according to Exxon.

The company has discussed its idea with national and Texas policymakers and Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, said in an interview. “They see the opportunity and appeal of this idea,” he said. “The question is, how do you translate the concept into practice?”

Exxon said its proposal complements President Biden’s climate efforts, but it would require the administration to embrace a price on carbon, something it has not done.

“The concept of a price on carbon is critical,” Mr. Woods said. “There has to be a way to incentivize the investment.”

Offshore storage has already gained traction in Europe, where governments have put carbon prices in place and lawmakers are more willing to spend taxpayer money to address climate change.

Mr. Woods said that, given the right policies, carbon capture projects could be a major business for Exxon around the world. “The potential for these markets is very, very large to the extent that demand continues to increase to decarbonize society,” he said.

Credit…Pool photo by Olivier Hoslet

Around the world, governments are moving simultaneously to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before.

Their motivation varies. In the United States and Europe, it is concern that tech companies are stifling competition, spreading misinformation and eroding privacy; in Russia and elsewhere, it is to silence protest movements and tighten political control; in China, it is some of both.

Nations and tech firms have jockeyed for primacy for years, but the latest actions have pushed the industry to a tipping point that could reshape how the global internet works and change the flows of digital data, Paul Mozur, Cecilia Kang, Adam Satariano and David McCabe report for The New York Times.

“It is unprecedented to see this kind of parallel struggle globally,” said Daniel Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan and an antitrust expert. Now, Mr. Crane said, “the same fundamental question is being asked globally: Are we comfortable with companies like Google having this much power?”

Underlying all of the disputes is a common thread: power. The 10 largest tech firms, which have become gatekeepers in commerce, finance, entertainment and communications, now have a combined market capitalization of more than $10 trillion. In gross domestic product terms, that would rank them as the world’s third-largest economy.

Governments agree that tech clout has grown too expansive, but there has been little coordination on solutions. Competing policies have led to geopolitical friction. Last month, the Biden administration said it could put tariffs on countries that imposed new taxes on American tech companies.

Tech companies are fighting back. Amazon and Facebook have created their own entities to adjudicate conflicts over speech and to police their sites. In the United States and in the European Union, the companies have spent heavily on lobbying.

Tags Bidding, Canadian, Live, Railroad, rivals, Updates, War

Business

Company Income Anticipated to Rally because the Economic system Recovers: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 19, 2021

Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Netflix, AT&T and American Express are expected to issue earnings results this week.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images

First-quarter earnings season picks up steam this week, with analysts expecting that profits for S&P 500 companies rose roughly 27 percent in the three months through March, compared with a year earlier when the pandemic sent corporate earnings into a tailspin.

Companies such as Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Netflix, AT&T and American Express all slated to issue results this week, offering a relatively well-rounded look at the state of corporate America in the early days of what could be a powerful year for the U.S. economy. It might also help set expectations for the stock market, after a big rally already this year.

The consensus among 76 economists polled by Bloomberg is that gross domestic product will expand by 6.2 percent in 2021, which would make it the best year for economic growth since 1984. And sentiment among analysts covering the stock market is almost universally bullish, given that strong economic tailwind.

“You’d almost have to be self-deceiving to expect U.S. companies overall to underperform consensus, given how the macro backdrop is driving revenues so well,” wrote John Vail, chief global strategist at Nikko Asset Management.

The expectations for profit growth are even more elevated for the current quarter: Analysts expect that the three months ending in June will see companies in the S&P 500 notch a 54-percent rise in profits, compared with the prior year.

That increase, of course, reflects a rebound from the worst of the pandemic-bred downturn. But it also is a result of “economic re-acceleration, and a rebound in commodity prices,” said Jonathan Golub, a stock market analyst at Credit Suisse.

Of course, if everyone is expecting such a surge in profits, the good news could already be fully incorporated into stock prices — and that means anything short of perfect results would make for a difficult stretch for stocks.

That has certainly been the case with some of the banks that reported earnings last week. Shares of Morgan Stanley, for example, dropped 2.8 percent on Friday even though the bank reported record revenue and profit.

The S&P 500 is already up more than 11 percent in 2021, and hit yet another record high on Friday.

That could mean the market is due for a pullback anyway. The index is relatively expensive by metrics such as the price-to-earnings ratio, which compares stock prices as a share of expected corporate profits over the next 12 months.

The S&P 500 is trading at nearly 23 times expected earnings. That’s roughly the valuation the index has held for most of the past year, but it’s very high by historical standards.

Over the last 20 years, the S&P 500 has traded at an average of 16 times expected earnings.

By comparison, a valuation of 23 times expected earnings is closer to where stock market valuations stood at the tail-end of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. When that ended, the S&P 500 fell roughly 50 percent before it hit bottom.

Credit…Peter Dejong/Associated Press

The Dutch bank ABN Amro said Monday that it would pay a $580 million fine to settle money laundering charges, prompting a former ABN manager to resign his new job as chief executive of Danske Bank after acknowledging he was a target in a related criminal investigation.

The resignation of Chris Vogelzang is an embarrassment for Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest bank, which hired him in 2019 to rebuild trust following a money laundering scandal there. Before becoming chief executive of Danske, Mr. Vogelzang had been a member of the management board of ABN Amro responsible for retail and private banking services.

Mr. Vogelzang acknowledged that Dutch authorities considered him a suspect in the investigation that led ABN Amro to agree to pay 480 million euros to settle money laundering charges. In numerous cases, according to a report by Dutch authorities, ABN Amro ignored warning signs that some clients were criminals using it as a conduit for dirty money.

Mr. Vogelzang said in a statement that he was “surprised” to learn that Dutch authorities consider him a suspect. During his time at ABN Amro, he said, “I managed my management responsibilities with integrity and dedication.”

Noting that Danske Bank remains under “intense scrutiny” because of money laundering at its former unit in Estonia, Mr. Vogelzang said he did “not want speculations about my person to get in the way of the continued development of Danske Bank.”

Danske named Carsten Egeriis, previously the bank’s chief risk officer, to succeed Mr. Vogelzang.

Gerrit Zalm, a member of Danske’s board who was chief executive of ABN Amro from 2009 to 2017, will also resign, the bank said. It did not give a reason.

Danske Bank admitted in 2018 that its headquarters and its Estonian branch, which it has since closed, failed for years to prevent suspected money laundering involving thousands of customers.

In the ABN Amro case, Dutch authorities found that the bank failed to act on obvious signs of illicit activity, including large cash transactions. In several cases, authorities said, the bank continued to serve clients whose criminal activities had been reported by the media, or who had a known history of fraud.

“As a bank we do not merely have a legal, but also a moral duty to do our utmost to protect the financial system against abuse by criminals,” Robert Swaak, the ABN Amro chief executive, said in a statement. “Regretfully, I have to acknowledge that in the past we have been insufficiently successful in properly fulfilling our important role as gatekeeper.”

More people are flying every day, as Covid restrictions ease and vaccinations accelerate. But dangerous variants have led to new outbreaks, raising fears of a deadly prolonging of the pandemic.

To understand how safe it is to fly now, The Times enlisted researchers to simulate how air particles flow within the cabin of an airplane, and how potential viral elements may pose a risk.

For instance, when a passenger sneezes, air blown from the sides pushes particles toward the aisle, where they combine with air from the opposite row. Not all particles are the same size, and most don’t contain infectious viral matter. But if passengers nearby weren’t wearing masks, even briefly to eat a snack, the sneezed air could increase their chances of inhaling viral particles.

How air flows in planes is not the only part of the safety equation, according to infectious-disease experts. The potential for exposure may be just as high, if not higher, when people are in the terminal, sitting in airport restaurants and bars or going through the security line.

“The challenge isn’t just on a plane,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist specializing in infection prevention. “Consider the airport and the whole journey.”

Credit…Robert Neubecker

Members of the National Association of Realtors — the nation’s largest industry group, numbering 1.4 million real estate professionals — are challenging a moratorium on evictions put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Both the Alabama and the Georgia Associations of Realtors sued the federal government over the matter, and the national association is paying for all of the legal costs. A hearing is scheduled for April 29, Ron Lieber reports for The New York Times.

The N.A.R. spends more money on federal lobbying than any other entity, according to the Center for Responsive for Politics. To puzzle out its actions and advocacy, let’s first be crystal clear about what the N.A.R. is and whose interests it serves. As its own chief executive boasted to members in 2017, it’s really the National Association for Realtors, not of them.

And of those million-plus members, according to the association, about 38 percent own at least one rental property. The N.A.R. isn’t shy about this, stating on the lobbying section of its website that it wants to “protect property interests.”

Why would it do this? The N.A.R. expert on the topic was unable to schedule a phone call, according to a spokesman.

But if you’re selecting a listing agent for your house from among their members, ask that person about this issue if you’re curious or concerned. Many of them have no idea what the N.A.R. is advocating on their behalf.

Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Photo by Alexander Drago/Reuters

Here come the lobbyists.

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, the asset manager Fidelity, the payments company Square and the investment firm Paradigm have established a new trade group in Washington: The Crypto Council for Innovation. The group hopes to influence policies that will be critical for expanding the use of cryptocurrencies in conjunction with traditional finance, Ephrat Livni reports in the DealBook newsletter.

Cryptocurrencies are still mostly held as speculative assets, but some experts believe Bitcoin and related blockchain technologies will become fundamental parts of the financial system, and the success of businesses built around the technology may also invite more attention from regulators.

“We’re going to increasingly be having scrutiny about what we’re doing,” Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s chief executive, said on CNBC. “We’re very excited and happy to play by the rules,” he added, but regulation of crypto should be on a “level playing field with traditional financial services.”

Here are four of the issues that will keep crypto lobbyists busy:

The Crypto Council’s first commissioned publication is an analysis of Bitcoin’s illicit use, and it concludes that concerns are “significantly overstated” and that blockchain technology could be better used by law enforcement to stop crime and collect intelligence.
New anti-money-laundering rules passed this year will significantly expand disclosures for digital currencies. The Treasury Department has also proposed rules that would require detailed reporting for transactions over $3,000 involving “unhosted wallets,” or digital wallets that are not associated with a third-party financial institution, and require institutions handling cryptocurrencies to process more data.
When is a digital asset a security and when is it a commodity? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that are released via a decentralized network generally qualify as commodities and are less heavily regulated than securities, which represent a stake in a venture. Tokens released by people and companies are more likely to be characterized as securities because they more often represent a stake in the issuer’s project.
The Chinese government is already experimenting with a central bank digital currency, a digital yuan. China would be the first country to create a virtual currency, but many are considering it. Some crypto advocates worry that China’s alacrity in the space threatens the dollar, national security and American competitiveness.

Credit…Roger Kisby for The New York Times

European stocks were mixed on Monday, and U.S. stock futures drifted lower, at the beginning of a week when hundreds of public companies will report earnings, including Coca-Cola, Netflix and United Airlines.

The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.1 percent, pushing further into record territory. The European index has climbed for the past seven weeks. On Wall Street, the S&P 500 hit a record on Friday after a string of strong economic reports and company earnings. On Monday, futures indicated it would open about 0.4 percent weaker.

European government bond yields climbed higher on Monday as investors awaited the European Central Bank’s latest monetary policy decisions, which will be announced on Thursday. Last month, the central bank said it would quicken the pace of its asset purchases to tamp down an increase in bond yields.

Elsewhere in markets

Peloton shares dropped nearly 6 percent in premarket trading after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an “urgent warning” about the exercise equipment company’s treadmill. The agency said users with small children at home should stop using the machine after reports of injuries and one fatality.
Coinbase shares slipped nearly 4 percent in premarket trading with other crypto-related stocks. Over the weekend, the price of Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, plummeted by more than $7,000, or about 9 percent.
GameStop shares rose 6 percent in premarket trading as the video game retailer announced that its chief executive would be stepping down by the end of July. The company, which was at the center of a retail trading frenzy earlier this year, has been shaken up by the incoming chairman, Ryan Cohen, who is an activist investor in the company pushing for a digital turnaround.
Oil prices were slightly lower. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, fell 0.3 percent to just below $63 a barrel.
The U.S. dollar fell against other major currencies, including a 0.4 percent drop against both the euro and the British pound. It was also 0.6 percent weaker against the Japanese yen.

Tags Corporate, Economy, Expected, Live, profits, rally, Recovers, Updates

Business

Retail Gross sales Soar and Jobless Claims Drop in New Indicators of Restoration: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date April 15, 2021

Shoppers in New York City on Tuesday. Retail sales surged last month, and the latest jobless claims report also provided fresh signs of economic revival.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Jobless claims fell last week to their lowest level of the pandemic and the latest data on retail sales blew past expectations, renewing confidence in a dynamic economic revival.

About 613,000 people filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, a decrease of 153,000 from the previous week.

In addition, 132,000 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 20,000 from the previous week.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 576,000.

“We’re gaining momentum here, which is just unquestionable,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton. But she cautioned that the jobless claims levels, while good news, were still extraordinarily high compared to what they were before the pandemic.

“You’re still not popping champagne corks,” she said. “I will breath again — and breath easy again — once we get these number back down in the 200,000 range.”

In another sign of the recovery underway, retail sales surged in March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, as Americans spent their latest round of government stimulus checks and the continued roll out of coronavirus vaccines lured more people back into stores.

The 9.8 percent increase last month was a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February.

With the pandemic’s end seemingly in sight, the economy is poised for a robust comeback. But weekly applications for unemployment claims have remained stubbornly high for months, frustrating the recovery even as businesses reopen and vaccination rates increase. They have also been a volatile economic indicator, temporarily dipping to their lowest level of the pandemic in mid-March before rising again in recent weeks.

“The job market conditions for job seekers have really improved extremely quickly between January and now,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the job site ZipRecruiter. “But there are still huge barriers to returning to work.”

Jobless claims for the next few months could remain significantly elevated as the labor market adjusts to a new normal.

Concerns about workplace safety persist, especially for workers on the younger end of the spectrum who have only just become eligible for vaccinations. Many children are still attending schools remotely, complicating the full-time work prospects for their caregivers.

But there is hope on the horizon as those barriers begin to fall. President Biden moved up the deadline for states to make all adults eligible for vaccination to April 19, and every state has complied. Students who have been learning remotely will begin to return to the classroom in earnest.

“This was the deepest, swiftest recession ever, but it’s also turning into the fastest recovery,” Ms. Pollak said. “And I don’t think we should lose sight of that just because some of the measures are a little stubborn.”

Retail sales surged in March, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, as Americans spent their latest round of government stimulus checks and the continued roll out of coronavirus vaccines lured more people back into stores.

The 9.8 percent increase last month was a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February, when previous stimulus money had dissipated and a series of winter storms made travel difficult across much of the United States.

The rebound in March sales shows how, a year after the nation’s economy locked down to prevent the spread of the virus, consumer spending remains highly dependent on government support. It also reflects that many areas of consumption frozen by the pandemic have bounced back. Sales of clothing and accessories rose 18 percent, while restaurants and bars saw a 13 percent increase.

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law last month, provides direct payments of $1,400 to lower-income Americans. Many of these checks began arriving in households toward the end of last month, when economists saw signs that spending was ramping up again, such as increased hotel occupancy and travel through airports.

Economists at Morgan Stanley had predicted that core retail sales would jump 6.5 percent in March, driven by the stimulus checks that started arriving in people’s bank accounts around March 17. The investment bank said 30 percent of consumers tend to spend their checks within the first 10 days, suggesting that many other consumers have yet to spend their checks, which could strengthen April sales.

More broadly, American consumers are also feeling increasingly optimistic as more people become vaccinated and venture out more frequently. One measure of consumer confidence, tabulated by the Conference Board, said confidence increased about 20 points in March from February, fueled by increased income and stronger business and employment expectations.

Credit…Elsa/Getty Images

Heavy trading volume greeted the highly anticipated market debut of Coinbase on Wednesday, which ended the day worth some $86 billion. The cryptocurrency company’s coming-out party made some insiders very rich, opened up new possibilities for cementing its position in the blockchain economy and blazed a trail for other crypto companies to follow its lead onto the public markets, the DealBook newsletter writes.

The stake held by Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s co-founder and chief executive, is now worth roughly $13 billion. Shares held by its other co-founder, Fred Ehrsam, are worth about $6.7 billion. (Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is worth $11.2 billion, while Union Square Ventures’ holding is worth $5.3 billion.) Other investors who stand to collect big paper profits — if they held on to their shares — include the National Basketball Association star Kevin Durant, the rapper Nas and Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit.

The market listing makes it easier for Coinbase to negotiate mergers and acquisitions. “We want to be able to have a public mark on our stock price because it helps us do more and more M.&A.,” Emilie Choi, the company’s chief operating officer, told the technology site Protocol. “There’s so much innovation happening in the crypto ecosystem, and we can’t possibly do it all in-house.” But the listing also brings more scrutiny of the company’s internal culture, which has included accusations of unfair treatment of Black and female employees and poor customer service.

Coinbase could lead the way for others. The tech investor Ron Conway called Coinbase “the Google for the crypto economy.” As crypto goes mainstream, others with similarly big ambitions may follow Coinbase onto the public markets, including rival markets like Binance, the biggest crypto exchange, and Gemini, the company founded by the Winklevoss twins. Exchange-traded funds that hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly also haven’t yet been approved by the S.E.C., but proponents believe that could happen soon.

Coinbase has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Here’s Mr. Armstrong’s original Hacker News post from March 2012 looking for a co-founder for his crypto venture, which drew dismissive comments like, “Because bitcoin worked out so well. Have fun with that, dude.” Bitcoin was worth about $5 then; it’s more than $60,000 now.

Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Profit at both Bank of America and Citigroup jumped for the first three months of this year, bouncing back from the lows of the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, as they reduced their loss cushions to reflect an improving economy.

Citigroup more than tripled its profit from a year ago, reporting earnings of $7.9 billion even as its sales fell 7 percent, to $19.3 billion. Bank of America doubled its profit to $8.1 billion from $4 billion. Its revenue of $22 billion was flat.

Like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, which reported first-quarter results on Wednesday, both banks were aided by the release of the cash cushions they had set aside during the economic downturn last year to absorb potential losses. Citi released $3.9 billion of the reserve it had built up to absorb loan losses, whereas Bank of America’s provision for losses decreased $6.6 billion.

“It’s been a better than expected start to the year, and we are optimistic about the macro environment,” said Jane Fraser, who became Citi’s chief executive last month. “This is the healthiest we have seen the consumer emerge from a crisis in recent history.” Similarly, Bank of America’s chief, Brian Moynihan, noted that “progress in the health crisis and the economy point to an accelerating recovery.”

During a call Thursday morning with analysts and investors, Mr. Moynihan noted that March had been a record month for consumer spending by Bank of America customers.

Low interest rates, which have been a central feature of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to shore up the economy, dogged both companies. At Citi, investment banking and stock trading were areas of strength, rising 46 percent and 26 percent from the prior year.

At Bank of America, investment-banking fees for advising corporations on deals hit a record $2.2 billion, a 62 percent rise, thanks partly to a doubling of activity in stock underwriting deals, including initial public offerings. Global markets revenue rose 17 percent, which was primarily attributable to gains in the sales and trading of bonds and related products.

As part of its earnings release, Citi announced that would exit the consumer market in 13 countries in Asia and Europe, including Australia, China, India, and Russia, reflecting a desire to focus on the bank’s more profitable geographies. In those areas, “we don’t have the scale we need to compete,” Ms. Fraser said.

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

Stocks on Wall Street climbed on Thursday, with shares lifted by a new round of earnings reports and as economic data from the United States added to signs of a budding economic recovery.

The S&P 500 climbed about 0.7 percent, putting it on track for a record, while the Nasdaq composite rose by more than 1 percent. European stock indexes also rose. The Stoxx Europe 600 index increased about 0.3 percent, for a third straight day of gains in record territory.

The gains came after the U.S. government reported that jobless claims fell last week to their lowest level of the pandemic, and the latest data on retail sales blew past expectations.
About 613,000 people filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, a decrease of 153,000 from the previous week.

Separately, the Commerce Department said that retail sales surged 9.8 percent in March, a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February, when previous stimulus money had dissipated and a series of winter storms made travel difficult across much of the United States.

Other signs of recovery came as companies reported earnings. Executives at Bank of America and Citigroup both joined their counterparts at other large financial firms in sounding an optimistic tone about the outlook for the economy. Shares of Citigroup rose more than 1.5 percent after its earnings report, while Bank of America’s stock fell slightly.

“It’s been a better-than-expected start to the year, and we are optimistic about the macro environment,” said Jane Fraser, who became Citi’s chief executive last month. “This is the healthiest we have seen the consumer emerge from a crisis in recent history.”

And Delta reported that it has stemmed daily operating losses, a sign that its planes are fuller and fares are returning to more normal levels. Its shares were lower, however, after the company said that in the first three months of the year, it lost $1.2 billion as revenue plunged from a year earlier.

After a bumper market debut, Coinbase shares rose 3 percent in early trading. On Wednesday, the cryptocurrency exchange ended its first day of trading at $328.28 a share, valuing the company at nearly $86 billion — more than 10 times its last valuation as a private company.

Despite the economic optimism, yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes dropped sharply to 1.58 percent. On Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, reiterated the central bank’s intention of keeping monetary policy accommodative for a long time. He said the bank would probably slow its bond-buying program “well before” it lifts its policy interest rate.

Credit…Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Airlines are still racking up big losses even as ticket sales begin to recover.

Delta Air Lines said on Thursday that it lost $1.2 billion in the first three months of the year and its revenue fell about 60 percent, to $4.2 billion, from the first quarter of 2019.

But the airline said it was optimistic that business would soon improve.

“A year after the onset of the pandemic, travelers are gaining confidence and beginning to reclaim their lives,” Ed Bastian, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Delta is accelerating into the recovery with our brand stronger and more trusted than ever before.”

The airline said it stemmed daily operating losses last month, a sign that its planes are fuller and fares are returning to more normal levels. Well over one million travelers have been screened at airport security checkpoints each day for more than a month, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

“If recovery trends hold, we expect positive cash generation for the June quarter and see a path to return to profitability in the September quarter as the demand recovery progresses,” Mr. Bastian said.

The airline said it expected revenue in the current quarter to be down about 50 to 55 percent compared with the same period in 2019. It expects to fly about 68 percent as many people in the quarter as it did in 2019.

The airline said ticket sales for domestic flights had recovered to 85 percent of 2019 levels, though lucrative corporate and international travelers have yet to come back in meaningful numbers. Delta will officially lift its ban on the sales of middle seats next month, allowing it to earn more from each flight.

“In the June quarter, we expect significant sequential improvement in revenue as leisure demand accelerates into the peak summer period and we add capacity,” Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s president, said in the statement.

Delta is the first major U.S. airline to report first-quarter results. United Airlines and American Airlines are scheduled to do so next week.

Credit…Jenny Kane/Associated Press

An international coalition of 35 children’s and consumer groups called on Instagram on Thursday to scrap its plans to develop a version of the popular photo-sharing app for users under age 13.

Instagram’s push for a separate children’s app comes after years of complaints from legislators and parents that the platform has been slow to identify underage users and protect them from sexual predators and bullying.

But in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook — the company that owns the photo-sharing service — the nonprofit groups warned that a children’s version of Instagram would not mitigate such problems. While 10- to 12-year-olds with Instagram accounts would be unlikely to switch to a “babyish version” of the app, the groups said, it could hook even younger users on endless routines of photo-scrolling and body-image shame.

“While collecting valuable family data and cultivating a new generation of Instagram users may be good for Facebook’s bottom line,” the groups, led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood in Boston, said in the letter to Mr. Zuckerberg, “it will likely increase the use of Instagram by young children who are particularly vulnerable to the platform’s manipulative and exploitative features.”

The coalition of nonprofit groups also includes the Africa Digital Rights’ Hub in Ghana; the Australian Council on Children and the Media; the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington; Common Sense Media in San Francisco; the Consumer Federation of America; and the 5Rights Foundation in Britain.

Stephanie Otway, a Facebook spokeswoman, said that Instagram was in the early stages of developing a service for children as part of an effort to keep those under 13 off its main platform. Although Instagram requires users to be at least 13, many younger children have lied about their age to set up accounts.

Ms. Otway said that company would not show ads in any Instagram product developed for children younger than 13, and that it planned to consult with experts on children’s health and safety on the project. Instagram is also working on new age-verification methods to catch younger users trying to lie about their age, she said.

“The reality is that kids are online,” Ms. Otway said. “They want to connect with their family and friends, have fun and learn, and we want to help them do that in a way that is safe and age-appropriate.”

Credit…Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Reuters will begin charging for access to its website as it tries to capture a slice of the digital subscription business.

The company, one of the largest news organizations in the world, announced the new paywall on Thursday, as well as a redesigned website aimed at a “professional” audience wanting business, financial and general news.

After registration and a free preview period, a subscription to Reuters.com will cost $34.99 a month, the same as Bloomberg’s digital subscription. The Wall Street Journal’s digital subscription costs $38.99 a month, while The New York Times costs $18.42 monthly.

Reuters.com attracts 41 million unique visitors a month. Months of audience research showed that those readers were divided in two separate groups: those wanting breaking news and professionals looking for context and analysis about how news affected their industry, Josh London, chief marketing officer at Reuters, said in an interview.

Reuters will roll out new sections on its website for subscribers in coming weeks that include coverage of legal news, sustainable business, energy, health care and the auto industry. It also plans to introduce industry-specific newsletters.

Mr. London described the new website as “the largest digital transformation at Reuters in a decade.” He declined to provide specifics on digital subscription goals but said that it represented “a major opportunity for us.”

Arlyn Gajilan, the digital news director at Reuters, said she expected to expand the digital team working on the revamped website.

On Monday, Reuters announced that Alessandra Galloni, a global managing editor, would become its next editor in chief. Ms. Galloni, who will be the first woman to helm the news agency in its history, starts her new role on Monday. She takes over from Stephen J. Adler, who retired after running Reuters for a decade.

Ms. Gajilan said that Ms. Galloni had been closely involved in the new direction of Reuters.com.

“She’s a very strong advocate for all things digital at Reuters,” Ms. Gajilan said.

Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

Shortages of semiconductors, fueled by pandemic interruptions and production issues at multibillion-dollar chip factories, have sent shock waves through the economy. Questions about chips are reverberating among both businesses and policymakers trying to navigate the world’s dependence on the small components.

Most attention has focused on temporary closings of big U.S. car plants. But the chips are in everything from cash registers and kitchen appliances, and the problem is affecting many other sectors, particularly the server systems and PCs used to deliver and consume internet services that became crucial during the pandemic, Don Clark reports for The New York Times.

“Every aspect of human existence is going online, and every aspect of that is running on semiconductors,” said Pat Gelsinger, the new chief executive of the chip maker Intel who attended the meeting with the president on Monday. “People are begging us for more.”

The chip shortage potentially affects just about any company adding communications or computing features to products. Many examples were described in 90 comments filed by companies and trade groups to a supply chain review by President Biden, including a laundry list of needs from industry giants like Amazon and Boeing.

Dan Rozycki is the president of a small engineering firm, that sells small sensors used to monitor construction sites to ensure concrete is hardening properly. His firm is for now among the lucky chip users. It planned ahead and has enough chips to keep making the roughly 50,000 sensors it supplies each year to construction sites. But his distributor has warned him it might not be able to deliver more of them until late 2022, he said.

“Is that going to halt those projects?” Mr. Rozycki asked. He is scouring the market for other distributors that might have the two needed chips in stock. Other possibilities include redesigning the sensors to use different chips.

A former editor at Vanity Fair has been working to create a new digital publication, in which writers will share in subscription revenue — Vanity Fair meets Substack. The new company behind the publication, Heat Media, hopes to unveil it in the coming months, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The start-up is partly the brainchild of Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair. One of the backers is the private equity firm TPG, which would take three seats on the Heat Media board, the people said. Another investor is 40 North, a related investment arm of Standard Industries, a global industrials company, the people said. Heat Media has raised around $7 million so far, according to the people.
Kimberly Godwin, a veteran CBS News executive, was named the next president of ABC News on Wednesday, making her the first Black woman to lead a major broadcast network’s news division. Ms. Godwin succeeds James Goldston, who announced his departure from ABC in January. She will begin in her job in early May. Ms. Godwin most recently served as CBS’s executive vice president of news.

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The Johnson & Johnson Vaccine: Dwell Updates on States, Blood Clotting and Europe

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Post date April 13, 2021

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

Injections of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine came to a sudden halt in much of the United States on Tuesday after federal health agencies called for a pause in the vaccine’s use following the emergence of a rare blood clotting in six recipients.

All six were women between the ages of 18 and 48 and all developed the illness within one to three weeks of vaccination. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition.

“We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said in a joint statement. “Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”

At a news conference later on Tuesday morning, Dr. Marks said that “on an individual basis, a provider and patient can make a determination whether or not to receive the vaccine” manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.

While the move was framed as a recommendation to health practitioners in the states, the federal government is expected to pause administration of the vaccine at all federally run vaccination sites. Federal officials expect that state health officials will take that as a strong signal to do the same. Within two hours of the announcement, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, advised all health providers in his state to temporarily stop giving Johnson & Johnson shots. In New York, the health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, said the state would halt the use of the vaccine statewide while federal officials evaluate the safety risks. Appointments for Johnson & Johnson’s shot on Tuesday at state mass sites would be honored with Pfizer doses, Dr. Zucker said.

Several other states quickly followed the call from federal health agencies on Tuesday to pause the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine after six women in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination.

The other states include: Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Nebraska, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

CVS and Walgreens, the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains, also said that they would immediately stop Johnson & Johnson vaccinations. Both companies said they were emailing customers whose appointments would be canceled and would reschedule appointments when able.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the F.D.A., said at the news conference Tuesday that the pause was only expected to last “a matter of days,” although she said the time frame depends on “what we learn in the next few days.” Dr. Schuchat said at the same briefing that the pause was enacted in part to “prepare the health care system to recognize and treat patients appropriately.”

Scientists with the F.D.A. and C.D.C. will jointly examine possible links between the vaccine and the disorder and determine whether the F.D.A. should continue to authorize use of the vaccine for all adults or limit the authorization.

“For people who recently got the vaccine within the last couple of weeks, they should be aware, to look for any symptoms. If you receive the vaccine and develop severe headaches, abdominal pain, leg pain or shortness of breath, you should contact your health care provider and seek medical treatment,”Dr. Schuchatsaid. She emphasized that an emergency meeting of the C.D.C.’s outside advisory committee, which has been scheduled for Wednesday, to discuss how to handle the vaccine in the future is made up of independent experts. Officials also stressed that no serious safety problems have emerged with either of the other two federally authorized vaccines, developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The move could substantially complicate the nation’s vaccination efforts at a time when many states are confronting a surge in new cases and seeking to address vaccine hesitancy. Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about a similar issue with another coronavirus vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University researchers. That concern has driven up some resistance to all vaccines, even though the AstraZeneca version has not been authorized for emergency use in the United States.

The vast majority of the nation’s vaccine supply comes from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which together deliver more than 23 million doses a week of their two-shot vaccines.

But while shipments of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been much more limited, the Biden administration had still been counting on using hundreds of thousands of doses every week. In addition to requiring only a single dose, the vaccine is easier to ship and store than the other two, which must be stored at extremely low temperatures.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said Tuesday the pause “will not have a significant impact” the Biden administration’s plans to deliver enough vaccine to be able to inoculate all 260 million adults in the United States by the end of May. With the Johnson & Johnson setback, federal officials expect there will only be enough to cover fewer than 230 million adults. But a certain percentage of the population is expected to refuse shots, so the supply may cover all the demand.

Mr. Zients said the administration will still “reach every adult who wants to be vaccinated” by the May 31 target.

Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to look for the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it. The federal health agencies said Tuesday morning that “treatment of this specific type of blood clot is different from the treatment that might typically be administered” for blood clots.

“Usually, an anticoagulant drug called heparin is used to treat blood clots. In this setting, administration of heparin may be dangerous, and alternative treatments need to be given,” the statement said.

In a news release, Johnson & Johnson said: “We are aware that thromboembolic events including those with thrombocytopenia have been reported with Covid-19 vaccines. At present, no clear causal relationship has been established between these rare events and the Janssen Covid-19 vaccine.” Janssen is the name of Johnson & Johnson’s division that developed the vaccine.

In the United States alone, 300,000 to 600,000 people a year develop blood clots, according to C.D.C. data. But the particular blood clotting disorder that the vaccine recipients developed, known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, is extremely rare.

All of the women developed the condition within about two weeks of vaccination, and government experts are concerned that an immune system response triggered by the vaccine was the cause. Federal officials said there was broad agreement about the need to pause use of the vaccine while the cases are investigated.

The decision is a fresh blow to Johnson & Johnson. Late last month, the company discovered that workers at a Baltimore plant run by its subcontractor had accidentally contaminated a batch of vaccine, forcing the firm to throw out the equivalent of 13 million to 15 million doses. That plant was supposed to take over supply of the vaccine to the United States from Johnson & Johnson’s Dutch plants, which were certified by federal regulators earlier this year.

The Baltimore plant’s certification by the F.D.A. has now been delayed while inspectors investigate quality control issues, sharply reducing the supply of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The sudden drop in available doses led to widespread complaints from governors and state health officials who had been expecting much bigger shipments of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine this week than they got.

United States ›	United StatesOn Apr. 12	14-day change
New cases	72,286	+6%
New deaths	476	–27%

World ›	WorldOn Apr. 12	14-day change
New cases	617,202	+22%
New deaths	9,253	+25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Phil Long/Associated Press

Several states quickly followed the call from federal health agencies on Tuesday to pause the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine after six women in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within one to three weeks of vaccination.

The states include: Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio and the state’s chief health official said they were advising all state vaccine providers to temporarily halt use of the single-dose vaccine. Connecticut health officials said they told vaccine providers to delay planned appointments or give an alternative option if they had the supply. New York’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, said the state would stop using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine while the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluate the safety risks.

The C.D.C.’s outside advisory committee of independent experts has scheduled an emergency meeting for Wednesday.

The White House on Tuesday said that the pause will not have a significant effect on the country’s vaccination campaign, which has accelerated in recent weeks as a rise in new virus cases threatens a fourth possible surge. Many states have already opened vaccination eligibility to all adults and others plan to by next week.

“Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna each week, and in fact this week we will make available 28 million doses of these vaccines,” Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Tuesday. “This is more than enough supply to continue the current pace of vaccinations of 3 million shots per day.”

As of Monday, 36 percent of the country’s total population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, and 22 percent are fully vaccinated, according to data from the C.D.C.

Even though the reaction to the Johnson & Johnson shot is rare, any questions about the safety of the shots could bolster vaccine hesitancy.

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and roughly nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the C.D.C. The six women who developed blood clots were between the ages of 18 and 48. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition.

“I know there are people who have gotten the vaccine, who are probably very concerned. For people who got the vaccine more than a month ago, the risk to them is very low at this time,” Dr. Schuchat said. “For people who recently got the vaccine within the last couple of weeks, they should be aware to look for any symptoms.”

Like many states, New York had already prepared for a significant drop in its supply of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after federal officials said that supplies would be limited because of a production issue at a Baltimore manufacturing plant. On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that New York expected to receive 34,900 Johnson & Johnson shots, a decrease of 88 percent from the previous week.

Dr. Zucker, New York’s health commissioner, said that the state would honor appointments made at state-run mass vaccination sites for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by giving people the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine instead. That vaccine requires two doses, and it was not immediately clear how the state would handle the additional strain on its supply.

New Jersey health officials said the state would work with its vaccination sites to help people get appointments for the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine instead. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said that the city would do the same, rescheduling appointments at city-run vaccine sites.

“Every site has been told this morning to stop giving the J&J shots,” he said at a news conference.

The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi, said that around 234,000 residents have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and none had reported any blood clots so far. The city had been relying on the vaccine to inoculate hard-to-reach New Yorkers, including people who are homebound.

Both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at separate appearances last month, which they framed as an effort to boost confidence in that vaccine’s efficacy rate and to address vaccine hesitancy.

Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about a similar issue with another coronavirus vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University researchers. That vaccine has not been authorized for emergency use in the United States.

Rebecca Robbins contributed reporting.

Credit…Szilard Koszticsak/EPA, via Shutterstock

Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday said it would delay the rollout of its vaccine in Europe amid concerns over rare blood clots, in another blow to the continent’s ambition to ramp up inoculation campaigns that have lagged behind other countries in the West.

Several countries of the bloc were poised to start administering the vaccine later this week, in what would have been a boost to efforts by the European Union to vaccinate 70 percent of adults by September.

“The safety and well-being of the people who use our products is our number one priority,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement, adding that it had been reviewing the cases of blood clots detected in the United States with European health authorities.

The first signs of concern in Europe came last week. The European Medicines Agency, the bloc’s drug regulator, said it was investigating reports of four cases of blood clots in people who had received a shot of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine in the United States, one of them being fatal. The regulator said it wasn’t clear if there was a link between the vaccine and the clots, adding that it treated the reports as “safety signal” that required further assessment.

Johnson & Johnson started delivering its one-shot vaccine to the bloc on Monday, with some member countries like Spain and Belgium already having received modest quantities of the shot, and preparing for the rollout later in the week. Fifty-five million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine are expected to be delivered to the European Union by the end of June, and another 120 million later in the year, according to Thierry Breton, the bloc’s top industry official.

On Tuesday, injections of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine came to a sudden halt in much of the United States on Tuesday after federal health agencies called for a pause in the vaccine’s use following the emergence of a rare blood clotting in six recipients.

All six were women between the ages of 18 and 48 and all developed symptoms within about two weeks of vaccination. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition.

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and about nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Johnson & Johnson’s announcement comes as Europe has been embroiled in a regulatory back-and-forth over another vaccine, AstraZeneca’s. Several countries have restricted the use of the vaccine in younger people, after the European Medicines Agency said there was “a possible link” between blood clots and the vaccine earlier this month, and said it should be listed as a rare side effect.

Both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca use the same technology, prompting concerns that the blood clots reported in recipients of both vaccines could be the same rare, yet sometimes fatal side effect.

The agency stopped short of advising to curb the use of the vaccine in 27 member countries, saying that it was up to the national authorities to decide who should receive which vaccine, which resulted in a patchwork of different national regulations.

France and Belgium have restricted its use for those older than 55, and Germany, Italy and Spain, for those over 60. Some other countries, such as Poland, which rely heavily on AstraZeneca in their national rollouts, decided to go ahead with AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

Credit…Emily Elconin for The New York Times

The virus is again surging in parts of the United States, but it’s a picture with dividing lines: ominous figures in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but largely not in the South.

Experts are unsure what explains the split, which doesn’t correspond to vaccination levels. Some point to warmer weather in the Sun Belt, while others suspect that decreased testing is muddying the virus’s true footprint.

The contours of where the virus is resurgent can be drawn around one figure: states that are averaging about 15 new cases a day for every 100,000 people. The 23 states — including Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas — that have averaged that or fewer over the past week seem to be keeping cases relatively low, according to a New York Times database. Nationally, the country is averaging 21 new cases per 100,000 people.

In the 27 states above that line, though, things have been trending for the worse. Michigan has the highest surge of all, reporting the most drastic increase in cases and hospitalizations in recent weeks. Illinois, Minnesota and others have also reported worrisome increases.

Nationally, reported cases in the United States are growing again after a steep fall from the post-holiday peak in January. In the past two weeks, new confirmed cases have jumped about 11 percent, even though vaccinations picked up considerably, with an average of 3.2 million doses given daily.

Some Southern states, like Alabama and Mississippi, are lagging in vaccinations. Only about 28 percent of people in each state have received at least one shot, according to a New York Times vaccine tracker. Still, case counts continue to drop in both states.

Health experts say cases are rising in the Northeast and Upper Midwest for several reasons, including pandemic fatigue, the reopening of schools and the resumption of youth sports.

Hospitalizations tend to follow the trend line in cases by a few weeks, and have been rising in some states, most notably in Michigan.

Officials are also concerned about the spread of more contagious virus variants, especially B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain. The variant is now the leading source of new coronavirus infections in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week.

Just why those factors might affect some states more than others is hard to pinpoint, experts say.

Dr. David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said warmer weather in Southern states and California was probably playing a role, because it allows people to gather outdoors, with less risk of transmission.

New case reports have fallen by about 11 percent in Georgia over the past two weeks. And in Alabama, new cases are down roughly 29 percent, with a 17 percent decline in hospitalizations.

Some experts say, though, that reduced testing in some states could be obscuring the true picture. Testing in Alabama, for instance, has started to dip, but the share of tests that come back positive has remained high, at 11.1 percent, compared with a nationwide average of 5.1 percent, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

“People who are symptomatic and go to their provider are going to get a test,” said Dr. Michael Saag, the associate dean for global health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, but “the desire for people to go get tested just because they want to know what their status is has dropped off dramatically.”

Still, Dr. Saag said, there is probably not a hidden spike in cases in Alabama right now, since hospitalizations in the state remain low.

Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Millions of Muslims on Tuesday began celebrating a second Ramadan in the middle of the pandemic, although in many countries the first day of the holy month offered the promise of a Ramadan with fewer restrictions than last year.

Mosques across the Middle East and other parts of the world were closed for prayer last year, and lockdowns prevented festive gatherings with friends and family. In Jerusalem, for instance, the Old City was largely empty and the Aqsa Mosque compound was closed to the public, as coronavirus cases were surging.

But a large degree of normalcy was back on Tuesday: The Old City’s narrow alleys were crowded, sweet shops were preparing Ramadan desserts, clothing stores were open and the Aqsa compound was welcoming worshipers.

“Last year, I felt depressed and I didn’t know how long the pandemic would last,” said Riyad Deis, a co-owner of a spice and dried fruit shop in the Old City, while selling whole pieces of turmeric and Medjool dates to a customer. “Now, I’m relaxed, I have enough money to provide for my family and people are purchasing goods from my shop — it’s a totally different reality.”

The enthusiasm of some didn’t mean the Ramadan would go as normal. Across several countries in the Middle East, the authorities imposed limitations on customs and festivities, requiring that mosques enforce social distancing and telling worshipers to bring their own prayer rugs and to wear face masks.

In Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, taraweeh, the optional extra prayers that worshipers can observe at night, were capped at half an hour. No one will also be allowed to spend the night in a mosque, as is common during the last 10 days of Ramadan.

Mosques around the region were also prohibited from serving the fast-breaking meal of iftar or the predawn meal of suhoor. Though Muslims could still gather for those meals with friends and family, the authorities asked them to limit those gatherings this year.

In Jerusalem, Omar Kiswani, the director of Al Aqsa Mosque, said he was overjoyed that the compound was open to worshipers, but still urged caution.

“These are times of great happiness — we hope the blessed Aqsa Mosque will return to its pre-pandemic glory — but these are also times of caution because the virus is still out there,” Mr. Kiswani said.

In Egypt, government officials and prominent television hosts linked to the authorities warned Egyptians of a third wave of infections as Ramadan approached, hinting that another curfew or other lockdown restrictions could be imposed if cases rose.

“If you want the houses of God to remain open,” Nouh Elesawy, an official who oversees mosques at the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, said earlier this month, “adhere to the precautionary procedures and regulations.”

The Ramadan restrictions may hit the hardest in poor neighborhoods, where residents depend on iftar banquets usually sponsored by wealthy individuals or organizations. For those people, feasting and Ramadan gifts are likely to be rarer, with tourism still at a trickle and many small businesses still suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic.

In Lebanon and Syria, the pandemic has worsened economic crisis that will likely squeeze people’s ability to enjoy the holy month, more than the governments’ limited restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.

In Syria, where experts say the official infection and death numbers for Covid-19 are far below the reality, the government has few restrictions in place. Worshipers will even be allowed to stand in line inside of mosques to pray together after breaking their fast, the Syrian Ministry of Religious Affairs said.

In Lebanon, which emerged recently from a strict lockdown, shops and restaurants can operate regularly during the day but must offer only delivery service during a nighttime curfew from 9:30 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Global Roundup

Credit…Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

India said on Tuesday that it would fast-track the approval of vaccines in use in other countries, a move aimed at rapidly increasing the country’s vaccine supply as it battles what is currently the world’s biggest coronavirus outbreak.

The Indian government said that it would grant emergency authorization to any foreign-made vaccine that had been approved for use by regulators in the United States, the European Union, Britain or Japan, or by the World Health Organization. The move had been recommended by a panel of Indian scientists and eliminates a requirement for drug companies to conduct local clinical trials.

“The decision will facilitate quicker access to such foreign vaccines” and encourage imports of materials that would boost India’s vaccine manufacturing capacity, the government said in a statement.

Earlier on Tuesday, India’s top drug regulator granted emergency approval to Sputnik V, the Russian-made vaccine, adding a third vaccine to the country’s arsenal on the same day that health officials recorded 161,736 new coronavirus infections in 24 hours.

It was the seventh straight day that India has added more than 100,000 cases, according to a New York Times database. Only the United States has seen a faster rise in infections during the pandemic.

India has administered about 105 million domestically produced vaccine doses for a population of 1.3 billion, but it is widely believed that the country needs to scale up inoculations rapidly because other measures have failed to control the virus. Many states have reimposed partial lockdowns and weekend curfews. In the country’s financial hub, Mumbai, health officials are racing to erect field hospitals as facilities report shortages of oxygen, ventilators and coronavirus testing kits.

And there is the risk of a superspreading event with the gathering of millions of Hindu pilgrims for the annual Kumbh Mela festival on the banks of the Ganges River, where the authorities say they are powerless to enforce social distancing.

India’s outbreak is reverberating worldwide as its pharmaceutical industry — which was supposed to manufacture and export hundreds of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — is keeping most supplies at home. The approval of the Sputnik vaccine, whose first doses are expected to be available for use in weeks, offers hope that India could speed up its inoculation drive.

But it is unclear at this stage whether India will be able to procure significant quantities of other vaccines, including the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson shots in use in the United States. Major Western nations have accumulated much of the global supply of those vaccines and manufacturers are struggling to meet the surging demand.

India will import millions of Sputnik doses from Russia and then begin manufacturing the vaccine domestically, officials said. More than 850 million doses will be made, with some intended for export, Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that has financed the vaccine’s development, said in an interview with India’s NDTV channel.

“India is a vaccine-manufacturing hub and our strategic partner for production of Sputnik V,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

India has more than 13.6 million confirmed coronavirus cases, the second most after the United States, and 171,058 deaths, the fourth highest toll.

In other news around the world:

Japan has begun vaccinating 36 million people over age 65, the first time shots have been made available to the public during the country’s slow vaccine rollout. Officials said that 1,139 people nationwide had received doses on Monday, and that doses to cover all Japanese above the age threshold would reach municipal health facilities by the end of June. Although Japan has weathered the pandemic better than most countries, the pace of its vaccination effort, which until now had only covered 1.1 million frontline medical workers, has sparked public criticism and raised questions about readiness for the Tokyo Summer Olympics in just over three months.
Scotland on Tuesday moved forward plans to loosen its coronavirus lockdown, a day after the British government eased many restrictions in England. New rules beginning Friday will permit Scots to meet outdoors in groups of up to six adults from six households. The current rules restrict travel and set the maximum group size at four, from two households. Restrictions on shops and outdoor service in pubs, now relaxed in England, are scheduled to remain in Scotland until April 26.
Austria’s health minister resigned on Tuesday, citing personal health problems that he said have been exacerbated by the grueling job of helping lead the country’s response to the pandemic. “It feels like it has not been 15 months, but 15 years,” the minister, Rudolf Anschober, said in a statement. Mr. Anschober, 60, was appointed in January last year, as a Green party minister in a Conservative-led coalition, and has been one of the main faces of Austria’s coronavirus response. “In the worst health crisis in decades, the republic needs a health minister who is 100 percent fit. That is not currently me,” he said.
France will suspend all flights to and from Brazil, because of growing worries about the virus variant spreading there. “We see that the situation is getting worse” in Brazil, Prime Minister Jean Castex told lawmakers. The country previously permitted essential travel from Brazil, subject to testing and isolation requirements.
The World Health Organization on Monday evening called on governments to suspend the sale of live wild mammals in food markets to help prevent the emergence of new diseases. “Traditional markets, where live animals are held, slaughtered and dressed, pose a particular risk for pathogen transmission to workers and customers alike,” the agency said in a statement. Animals are the source of more than 70 percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans, it said. Early in the pandemic, Chinese officials suggested that the coronavirus outbreak might have started at a market. But W.H.O. experts said in a report last year that the role of animal markets in the story of the pandemic was still unclear.

Credit…Pool photo by Andreas Gora

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government moved a step closer on Tuesday to securing the right to force restrictions on areas where the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, overriding state leaders reluctant to take action.

Ms. Merkel and her ministers approved a legislative proposal that would make it easier for the national government to enforce lockdowns and other limits on movement in regions where infection levels pass a set threshold. At current levels, it could lock down more than half of the country.

Under Germany’s decentralized leadership structures, the 16 state leaders have been meeting regularly with the chancellor to agree on nationwide coronavirus response policies. But with different regions experiencing different rates of infection, some state leaders have been reluctant to enforce the agreed limitations, leading to confusion and frustration among many Germans.

“I believe this amendment is as important as it is an urgent decision about how to proceed in the coronavirus pandemic,” the chancellor told reporters after meeting with her ministers.

Parliament still has to debate and approve the proposal, which would take the form of an amendment to the Protection Against Infection Act, and that process is expected to begin this week.

“We are in a situation where an emergency mechanism is necessary,” Ralph Brinkhaus, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union in Parliament, told reporters, before a meeting of his party lawmakers to discuss the amendment.

Under the proposed amendment, the federal government could force stores and cultural institutions to close and enforce limits on the number of people allowed to meet up in any region where infections surpass 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over a period of seven days.

More controversially, the law would also allow Ms. Merkel’s government to order that schools and day care centers close if the number of new infections reaches more than 200 per 100,000 inhabitants. Schools fall under the jurisdiction of the states, and local leaders are reluctant to relinquish that control.

Germany has registered more than three million infections and more than 78,700 deaths from Covid-19 since the virus began moving through the country last spring. It recorded 10,810 new cases of infection on Tuesday, bringing the national rate of infection to more than 140 per 100,000.

The number of patients in intensive care is expected to hit a record this month, as the country struggles to vaccinate enough people to get ahead of the spread of the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Britain has now offered vaccinations to everyone in the country age 50 and older, the government announced late on Monday, and is extending its program to another age group, the latest sign that the national rollout is continuing at pace.

On Tuesday, the authorities opened vaccinations to anyone 45 or older, yet the announcement came with a small hiccup: The website for the country’s National Health Service crashed for a short time after the younger cohort was invited to book appointments online.

The new step in the country’s vaccine rollout comes as the authorities eased several restrictions in England on Monday after months of stringent lockdowns, with pubs and restaurants opened for drinks and dining outside, and nonessential shops once again opening their doors.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the moment a “hugely significant milestone” and in a statement thanked those involved with the vaccine rollout. Mr. Johnson said the country was on track to offer all adults a vaccination by the end of July. More than 32 million people across Britain have received their first dose of one of the vaccines, according to government data.

The government said it had also already offered vaccinations to every health or care worker, and to everyone with a high-risk medical condition.

England has also began rolling out the Moderna vaccine, which will be offered as an alternative alongside the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for those under 30, instead of AstraZeneca’s, which has been the mainstay of Britain’s program so far.

There have been concerns about a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and very rare blood clots, and last week British regulators said an alternative should be provided for younger people. Potential infection still poses much greater risks than any vaccine side effect for all those over 30, they said, and could do so for younger people if cases surged again.

“The Moderna rollout marks another milestone in the vaccination program,” Stephen Powis, the medical director of the National Health Service, said in a statement. “We now have a third jab in our armory.”

The vaccination program, he added, “is our hope at the end of a year like no other” as he encouraged people to book their appointments.

But despite the hopeful vaccine news and the return to public life, the country is still battling new cases of the virus, and a cluster in two London neighborhoods of a worrisome variant first discovered in South Africa has prompted mass testing. Health workers have gone door to door to urge residents to get tested, even if they are not showing symptoms, as dozens of cases have emerged. Similar measures were carried out elsewhere in the city earlier this month.

Studies have shown that the variant contains a mutation that diminishes the vaccines’ effectiveness against it. Dr. Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser for the country’s test and trace campaign, said the cluster of cases in parts of South London was “significant.”

“It’s really important people in the local area play their part in stopping any further spread within the local community,” she said in a statement.

Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

More than a year after the coronavirus first swept through New York, the streets of Sunset Park in southern Brooklyn reflect the pandemic’s deep and unhealed wounds intertwined with signs of a neighborhood trying to edge back to life.

The sidewalks are filling with shoppers and vendors. More businesses are welcoming customers. But owners still struggle to pay rent and keep their enterprises afloat, while many workers laid off after the city locked down last year remain without jobs.

And while the rate of vaccination in New York has increased significantly, the coronavirus still percolates through this densely packed neighborhood. The ZIP code that includes Sunset Park had the highest rate of positive cases in Brooklyn in early April, nearly double the citywide rate. Some residents have expressed skepticism about the vaccines, spooked by false information circulated over TikTok and other social media.

Adding to the stress is a spate of hate crimes and violence against people of Asian descent in New York and around the country, fed in some cases by racist claims that Asian-Americans are responsible for spreading the virus.

About a third of the residents in Sunset Park have received at least one dose of the vaccine, roughly the same level as the city overall, according to the city health data. But local leaders say they want to push that number much higher.

Kuan Neng, 49, the Buddhist monk who founded Xi Fang Temple on Eighth Avenue, said that people had come to him in recent weeks to express concerns over vaccines.

“Why do I need to do that?” is a common refrain, according to Mr. Kuan, followed by: “I’m healthy now. The hard times are over, more or less.”

“Many people want to delay and see,” Mr. Kuan said, himself included.

Credit…Kate Warren for The New York Times

ArcLight Cinemas, a beloved chain of movie theaters based in Los Angeles, including the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, will permanently close all its locations, Pacific Theaters announced on Monday, after the pandemic decimated the cinema business.

ArcLight’s locations in and around Hollywood have played host to many a movie premiere, in addition to being favorite spots for moviegoers seeking out blockbusters and prestige titles. They are operated by Pacific Theaters, which also manages a handful of theaters under the Pacific name, and are owned by Decurion.

“After shutting our doors more than a year ago, today we must share the difficult and sad news that Pacific will not be reopening its ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters locations,” the company said in a statement.

“This was not the outcome anyone wanted,” it added, “but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward.”

Between the Pacific and ArcLight brands, the company owned 16 theaters and more than 300 screens.

The movie theater business has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. But in recent weeks, the majority of the country’s largest theater chains, including AMC and Regal Cinemas, have reopened in anticipation of the slate of Hollywood films that have been put back on the calendar, many after repeated delays because of pandemic restrictions. A touch of optimism is even in the air as a result of the Warner Bros. movie “Godzilla vs. Kong,” which has generated some $70 million in box office receipts since opening over Easter weekend.

Still, the industry’s trade organization, the National Association of Theater Owners, has long warned that the punishing closures were most likely to affect smaller regional players like ArcLight and Pacific. In March, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, which operates about 40 locations across the country, announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but would keep most of its locations operational while it restructured.

That does not seem to be the case for Pacific Theaters, which, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, fired its entire staff on Monday.

The reaction to ArcLight’s closing around Hollywood has been emotional, including an outpouring on Twitter.

Devastating. Too many losses to process. It’s just too much… At some point when I’m less upset, I’ll tell you guys a funny story about my first time meeting Quentin Tarantino in the lobby of Hollywood Arclight. https://t.co/cFypJxEk4L

— Lulu Wang (@thumbelulu) April 13, 2021
Credit…Robert Ghement/EPA, via Shutterstock

Three people infected with the coronavirus died at a hospital in Bucharest on Monday evening after the oxygen supply stopped functioning, according to the authorities, the latest incident involving oxygen failure, which in many countries has driven up the virus death toll.

It was also another fatal setback for Romania’s ageing and overwhelmed health care system, which has suffered two fires in Covid-19 wards in recent months, killing at least 15 people.

Ventilators shut down at a mobile intensive care unit set up at the Victor Babes hospital in Bucharest after oxygen pressure reached too high a level, the country’s health authorities said in a statement, depriving patients of a vital supply. In addition to the three patients who died, five others were evacuated and moved to other facilities in the city.

Romania has recorded its highest rate of Covid-19 patients in intensive care units since the pandemic began, and on Sunday Prime Minister Florin Citu said that there were just six intensive care beds available across Romania, out of nearly 1,600.

Intensive care units in Hungary and Poland have also been at risk of being overwhelmed, as much of Eastern Europe has struggled to cope with a third wave of infections across the continent. Some Hungarian hospitals have sought medical students and volunteers to assist in Covid-19 wards, giving training to those without previous medical experience.

The mobile unit struck by the oxygen problem on Monday had only been in operation since Saturday, and it has epitomized long-running concerns over the country’s fragile health care system. In January, five patients died and a further 102 were evacuated from a different hospital in Bucharest after a fire broke out. In November, 10 patients hospitalized with the coronavirus died after a fire broke out in a hospital in the northeastern city of Piatra Neamt.

Romania’s spending on health care is among the lowest in the European Union, with just over five percent of gross domestic product allocated toward it, compared with 10 percent on average among other countries of the bloc.

More than 25,000 people who tested positive for the virus have died in Romania, and the authorities have closed schools and kindergartens throughout April as part of an extended Easter holiday.

The authorities have so far administered more than 3.5 million vaccine doses, in a population of about 19 million.

Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Studies have found that women in academia have published fewer papers, led fewer clinical trials and received less recognition for their expertise during the pandemic.

Add to that the emotional upheaval of the pandemic, the protests over structural racism, worry about children’s mental health and education, and the lack of time to think or work, and an already unsustainable situation becomes unbearable.

Michelle Cardel, an obesity researcher at the University of Florida, worries that this confluence of factors could push some women to leave the sciences.

“My big fear is that we are going to have a secondary epidemic of loss, particularly of early career women in STEM,” she said.

Female scientists were struggling even before the pandemic. It was not unusual for them to hear that women were not as smart as men, or that a woman who was successful must have received a handout along the way, said Daniela Witten, a biostatistician at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Women in academia often have little recourse when confronted with discrimination. Their institutions sometimes lack the human resources structures common in the business world.

Compounding the frustration are outdated notions about how to help women in science. But social media has allowed women to share some of those concerns and find allies to organize and call out injustice when they see it, said Jessica Hamerman, an immunologist at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle.

In November, for example, a study on female scientists was published in the influential journal Nature Communications suggesting that having female mentors would hinder the career of young scientists and recommending that young women seek out male help.

The response was intense and unforgiving: Nearly 7,600 scientists signed a petition calling on the journal to retract the paper — which it did on Dec. 21.

The study arrived at a time when many female scientists were already worried about the pandemic’s effect on their careers, and already on edge and angry with a system that offered them little support.

Alisa Stephens found working from home to be a series of wearying challenges. Dr. Stephens is a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, and carving out the time and mental space for that work with two young children at home was impossible.

Things eased once the family could safely bring in a nanny, but there was still little time for the deep thought Dr. Stephens had relied on each morning for her work.

Over time, she has adjusted her expectations of herself. “Maybe I’m at 80 percent as opposed to 100 percent,” she said, “but I can get things done at 80 percent to some extent.”

Tags Blood, Clotting, Europe, Johnson, Live, states, Updates, Vaccine

Business

Inflation Fee Rises because the Economic system Reawakens: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 13, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Consumer prices rose in March at their fastest pace in nearly nine years, an increase that may fuel inflation fears but that likely overstates the extent of the acceleration.

The Consumer Price Index, a closely watched inflation measure, rose 0.6 percent in March from February, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That was up from February’s 0.4 percent increase, and a bit faster than economists’ expectations.

Prices at the pump drove the increase: Gasoline prices rose 9.1 percent in March.

Core inflation, which ignores volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3 percent, up from 0.1 percent in February.

Prices were up 2.6 percent from a year ago. But that measure — usually closely watched by economists — was skewed by the comparison to March 2020, when prices fell as consumers pulled back spending in the face of the pandemic.

Inflation rose substantially above 2 percent in March.

PERCENT CHANGE

IN CONSUMER

PRICE INDEX

FROM A YEAR AGO

However, some of the jump can be explained

through what’s known as base effects — prices fell

significantly last spring, so the increase now from the

year prior is larger, even if prices are not rising as

dramatically.

2021 Consumer price index

Inflation rose substantially above 2 percent in March.

PERCENT CHANGE IN CONSUMER

PRICE INDEX FROM A YEAR AGO

However, some of the jump can be explained through what’s known as base effects —

prices fell significantly last spring, so the increase now from the year prior is larger, even

if prices are not rising as dramatically.

2021 Consumer price index

Inflation rose substantially above 2 percent in March.

PERCENT CHANGE IN

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX

FROM A YEAR AGO

However, some of the jump can be explained through what’s known as base effects — prices fell significantly last spring, so the increase now from the year prior is larger, even if prices are not rising as dramatically.

2021 Consumer price index

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected an increase of 0.5 percent in overall C.P.I. from February, and 2.5 percent from March 2020.

Inflation data matters because it gives an up-to-date snapshot of how much it costs Americans to buy the goods and services they regularly consume. And because the Federal Reserve is charged in part with keeping increases in prices contained, the data can influence its decisions — and those affect financial markets.

Consumer inflation is measured by statisticians who take a bundle of goods and services Americans buy — everything from fresh fruit to rent — and aggregate it into a price index. The inflation rate that is reported each month shows how much that index changed.

Why the annual rate may overstate the situation.

For a quarter century, most measures of inflation have held at low levels. The C.P.I. moves around a bit because of volatile food and fuel prices, but a “core” index that strips out those factors has mostly increased at a year-over-year rate of less than 2 percent.

But the data reported for March reflects a drop in prices last year, as the country went into lockdown and airlines slashed ticket costs, clothing stores discounted sweaters, and hotels saw occupancy plunge.

That means inflation measures are lapping low readings, and as that low base falls out, it will cause the year-over-year percent changes to jump — a little bit in March, and then a lot in April.

To be sure, climbing prices could last for a while as businesses reopen, consumers spend down big pandemic savings and producers scramble to keep up with demand. Economists and Federal Reserve officials do not expect those increases to persist for more than a few months, but if they did, it would matter to consumers and investors alike.

Credit…Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Americans pay $17 billion in overdraft fees every year. PNC Bank announced on Tuesday its plans to help customers reduce that burden, which often falls on those who can least afford it.

The bank is introducing measures that it said would cut customers’ overdraft fees about 60 percent, and its own annual revenue by $125 million to $150 million, the DealBook newsletter reports. It comes as PNC prepares to close its deal with BBVA, which would make it the country’s fifth-largest retail bank.

Eight percent of account holders generate three-quarters of overdraft fees, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Lawmakers have worried that banks obfuscate these fees as they become a reliable source of revenue. The fees are expected to come under scrutiny by the Biden administration, particularly if Rohit Chopra, a consumer advocate, is confirmed take over the C.F.P.B.

“Overdraft is an expensive fee they charge only on those people who run out of money that goes straight to short-term profits,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

PNC is hoping to change that with a new feature in its app. “We weren’t doing the best we could do by our clients,” PNC’s chief executive, William Demchak, said in an interview. In the PNC app’s new “low cash mode,” when an account goes negative, the customer has at least 24 hours to fix it, including by reviewing pending payments and deciding which to prioritize.

For the largest banks to adopt a similar approach is a matter of technology — and desire. On a scale of which banks earn the most from the fees, overdraft fees generate $35.61 per account for JPMorgan Chase on the high end and $4.90 per account for Citi on the low end, according to Mr. Klein. PNC fell in the middle, with $14.96 per account.

PNC already assumed a short-term revenue drop into projections as part of its deal with BBVA, but over the long term, it expects the move will help it gain market share. “We’re in a consolidated industry where we want to be one of the consolidators,” Mr. Demchak said. “In the short run, if it costs us 100 million bucks or something — so what?”

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

China has ordered 34 of its most prominent internet companies to ensure their compliance with antimonopoly rules within the next month and to submit to official inspections thereafter — with “severe punishment” promised for any illegal practices that are uncovered.

The demand, which China’s market regulator announced on Tuesday, represents the government’s latest cracking of the whip in its campaign to tighten supervision over giant internet platforms.

For years, Beijing gave internet companies wide berth to grow rich and innovate. But in China, as in the West, concerns have been growing about the ways the companies use their clout to edge out rivals, their use and abuse of algorithms and big data and their acquisitions of smaller peers. In recent months, China has begun using both regulatory enforcement actions and public shaming to keep tech companies in check.

The country’s market regulator imposed a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine on Alibaba, the e-commerce titan, on Saturday. And on Monday, Alibaba’s fintech sister company, Ant Group, unveiled a revamp of its business in response to government demands.

Officials from China’s market watchdog, internet regulator and tax authority met with the companies on Tuesday, according to the government’s statement. At the meeting, the officials “affirmed the positive role of the platform economy” but also told the companies to “give full play to the cautionary example of the Alibaba case.”

The nearly three dozen companies included almost all of the top names in the Chinese internet industry, from established titans like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu to newer powerhouses such as TikTok’s parent, ByteDance; the food delivery giant Meituan; the e-commerce site Pinduoduo; and the video platform Kuaishou.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the companies were told to strengthen their “sense of responsibility” and to “put the nation’s interests first,” the regulator’s statement said.

Credit…Wallace Woon/EPA, via Shutterstock

Grab — a ride-hailing company, bank and food delivery business all rolled into one — is set to make its debut in the largest offering by a Southeast Asian company on a U.S. stock exchange.

The company, which is based in Singapore, announced a deal on Tuesday with Altimeter Growth, a company listed for the sole purpose of buying a business. These special purpose acquisition vehicles, or SPACs, have snapped up companies over the past year at a rapid-fire pace. But this deal, which values Grab at roughly $39.6 billion, is expected to the largest such deal to date. Grab shares will trade on the Nasdaq stock exchange

The deal also includes an investment of more than $4 billion from a group that includes BlackRock, T. Rowe Price Associates and Temasek. Altimeter Capital Management, the investment firm backing the vehicle acquiring Grab, has agreed to hold certain shares in the company for at least three years.

Grab offers a “super app” that allows users to order food, pay bills and hail a car. It’s a model already popular in China, where WeChat offers a range of services, but is growing in Southeast Asia, particularly as the region builds its digital businesses. The pandemic helped propel the trend forward, with Southeast Asian consumers spending more than $10 billion online last year.

Grab acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia operations in 2018 and a digital banking license as part of a consortium in 2020. It has attracted investors including Booking Holdings, Hyundai, Microsoft, SoftBank and Toyota.

The company is going public as deal-making is flourishing in Southeast Asia. Bain, the consulting firm, said in 2018 it expected that the region would have had at least 10 unicorns, or start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, by 2024. One of those, the e-commerce company Sea, went public in the United States in 2017. Shares of the company have risen more than 400 percent over the past year, giving it a market capitalization of $125 billion.

“It gives us immense pride to represent Southeast Asia in the global public markets,” Grab’s chief executive, Anthony Tan, said in a statement. “This is a milestone in our journey to open up access for everyone to benefit from the digital economy.”

Credit…Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Credit Suisse said it would be able to pay back additional money to investors in funds whose troubles were among a series of disasters that have battered the Swiss bank’s reputation and finances.

The bank said it would pay an additional $1.7 billion to investors in funds linked to Greensill Capital, which collapsed last month. The latest payment means that investors will get back close to half of their money, with the prospect for more payments as Credit Suisse liquidates the funds.

Credit Suisse’s asset management unit oversaw $10 billion in funds put together by Greensill based on financing it provided to companies, many of which had low credit ratings or were not rated at all.

“There is potential for recovery in these cases although clearly there is a considerable degree of uncertainty as to the amounts that ultimately will be distributed to investors,” Credit Suisse said in a statement.

The more money that Credit Suisse can salvage from the funds, the better its chances of repairing its reputation and its ability to attract new customers. The bank has been in crisis following a series of debacles, including its disclosure last week that it will lose almost $5 billion because of money it lent to Archegos Capital Management, which crumbled this month after a high-risk stock market play went sour.

Including the $1.7 billion payment announced Tuesday, Credit Suisse has paid $4.8 billion to investors in the Greensill funds. The bank said it would take legal action to recover more money and “is engaging directly with potentially delinquent obligors and other creditors.” Some losses may be covered by insurance.

“We remain acutely aware of the uncertainty that the wind-down process creates for those of our clients who are invested in the funds,” Credit Suisse said. “We are doing everything that we can to provide them with clarity, to work through issues as they arise and, ultimately, to return cash to them.”

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Tech workers at The New York Times announced on Tuesday that they had formed a union and would ask the company to recognize it.

The group of more than 650 employees includes software engineers, designers, data analysts and product managers. It will be represented by the NewsGuild of New York. NewsGuild membership already includes more than 1,300 newsroom workers and business staff members at The Times, as well as workers at other media outlets.

As part of the Times Tech Guild, the tech workers would be in a separate bargaining unit from other Times employees represented by the NewsGuild.

In recent years, The Times has ramped up its hiring of tech workers as part of its strategy to reach 10 million paid digital subscribers by 2025. In 2020, digital-only subscriptions neared seven million and became the company’s largest revenue stream.

Kathy Zhang, a senior analytics manager and a member of the organizing committee, said in an interview that The Times felt like “an emerging company” in some ways, although it is a 170-year-old institution.

“There’s a lot of stuff we’re trying out,” she said. “There’s a lot of starting and stopping of different projects. It’s been really exciting, but it’s also been pretty exhausting.”

The tech workers were concerned about pay equity, health care costs, job security and career advancement, Ms. Zhang added. The union also hoped to improve diversity and inclusion in the department.

A spokeswoman for The New York Times Company said in a statement that the company had received the request for voluntary recognition from the union on Tuesday morning.

“At The New York Times, we have a long history of positive and productive relationships with unions, and we respect the right of all employees to decide whether or not joining a union is right for them,” the spokeswoman said. “We will take time to review this request and discuss it soon with representatives of the NewsGuild.”

The organizing of The Times’s tech workers came months after more than 400 Google engineers and other workers formed a union, a rarity in Silicon Valley. An organizing drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama was voted down last week.

Media companies have had a surge in such efforts. Workers at publications like BuzzFeed News, Vice, The New Yorker, Slate and Vox Media have all formed unions in recent years.

Stock trading on Wall Street was quiet for a second day on Tuesday, even as investors worried about a new setback in the fight to control the coronavirus and also considered updated inflation data.

The S&P 500 was essentially unchanged in early trading, after recovering from an early swoon that came in response to federal health agencies recommending an immediate pause to the use of the Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that six women who received the vaccine had developed rare blood clots. “We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” the agencies said.

Shares of Johnson & Johnson fell about 3 percent in early trading, weighing on the Dow Jones industrial average.

News of the vaccine setback had sent stock futures lower earlier Tuesday, but the market regained its footing as investors seemed to read the latest consumer price inflation report as less worrisome than they might have expected.

Investors have been focused on rising prices lately, worried that fast economic growth might fuel a jump that prompts the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates or otherwise remove its support for the economy.

Consumer prices did increase in March at their fastest pace in nearly nine years, and a rate slightly higher than economists had expected. But the increase wasn’t enough to spook investors. Government bond yields, which have jumped sharply this year over concerns about inflation, held steady after the report.

The Stoxx Europe 600 reversed earlier gains and was little changed by early afternoon in Europe.

Oil prices rose. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, gained 1 percent to just above $60 a barrel.

The stock market’s rally during the pandemic has been nothing short of amazing. But rising interest rates are raising the question of how long this bull market can last.

In the 12 months through March, the average general stock mutual fund tracked by Morningstar returned nearly 66 percent — a remarkable rebound after a three-month loss of nearly 22 percent at the start of last year.

The turnaround came after the Federal Reserve stepped in with support for financial markets and the economy, fueling much of the stock market’s exuberance with low interest rates.

But with the economy taking off, rates have begun to rise. At the start of a new quarter, it is a good moment to ask, how long can these strangely prosperous times last?

My crystal ball is no clearer now than it has ever been, alas, and I can’t time the market’s movements any better than anyone else. But this certainly is a good time to assess whether you are well positioned for a possible downward shift.

As always, the best approach for long-term investors is to set up a portfolio with a reasonable, diversified asset allocation of stocks and bonds and then live with it, come what may.

Our quarterly report on investing is intended to help. If you haven’t been an investor before, we’ve included tips on how to get started. Here you will find broad coverage of recent trends, guidance for the future and reflections on personal finance in a challenging era.

An Uneasy Exuberance in the Stock Market

It’s been a long, fine run for the stock market, but a great deal of the upswing has depended on low interest rates, and in the bond market rates have been rising. Investment strategists are taking a wide array of approaches to deal with this difficult problem. For now, the bull market rides on.

Finding Safety Through Global Diversity

Bonds provide ballast in diversified portfolios, damping the swings of the stock market and sometimes providing solid returns. Because bond yields have been rising — and yields and prices move in opposite directions — bond returns have been suffering lately. But adding a diversified selection of international bonds to domestic holdings can reduce the risk in the bond side of your investments.

It’s Not Really All That Complicated

Yes, the markets and the economy are complicated. That often puts people off, and stops them from taking action that can help them and their families immeasurably: investing. But investing need not be complicated. A succinct article gives pointers on how to get started, and on how to navigate the markets for the long haul.

NFTs Are Great, but the Real Money Is in Dollars

After a piece of virtual art known as a nonfungible token — an NFT — sold at auction for $70 million recently, NFTs have suddenly became an asset that you can invest in. Our columnist prefers real dollars.

Fossil Fuel Prices Recovered, but for How Long?

Short-term demand for oil and gas is rising, but if climate change is to be reversed, consumption of fossil fuels will have to diminish. This leaves investors in a tough spot.

Credit…Kate Warren for The New York Times

“This was not the outcome anyone wanted,” it added, “but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward.”

Between the Pacific and ArcLight brands, the company owned 16 theaters and more than 300 screens.

That does not seem to be the case for Pacific Theaters, which, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, fired its entire staff on Monday.

The reaction to ArcLight’s closing around Hollywood has been emotional, including an outpouring on Twitter.

— Lulu Wang (@thumbelulu) April 13, 2021

Tags Economy, inflation, Live, Rate, Reawakens, rises, Updates

World News

Covid-19 Information: Dwell Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date April 13, 2021

People crowding for outdoor dining at a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mich., last week.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Emily Elconin/Reuters

The Biden administration and Michigan’s Democratic governor are locked in an increasingly tense standoff over the state’s worst-in-the-nation coronavirus outbreak, with a top federal health official on Monday urging the governor to lock down her state.

As the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, publicly called again for a surge of vaccine supply, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at a White House news conference that securing extra doses was not the most immediate or practical solution to the outbreak. She said that Michigan — whose metro areas include 16 of the 17 worst outbreaks in the nation — needed to enact shutdown measures to stamp out the crush of infections.

“The answer is not necessarily to give vaccine,” said the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down.”

Michigan’s outbreak — driven by a highly infectious virus variant, loosened restrictions, travel, youth sporting events and uneven compliance with the remaining rules — is by far the worst in the country. The state is averaging seven times as many cases each day as it was in late February, and hospitalizations have roughly doubled in the past two weeks. Nonetheless, Ms. Whitmer has stopped well short of the far-reaching shutdowns that made her a political lightning rod last summer, with armed protesters storming the Statehouse to demand an end to coronavirus restrictions.

The Biden administration, however, has held fast to distributing vaccines by state population, not by triage, shying away from anything that could look like inequitable distribution or political favoritism at a time when vaccine supply remains tight in many places.

“It’s important to understand how we’ve approached vaccine distribution from the beginning: It’s done with equity in mind. It’s done with the adult population in mind,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Monday. “We don’t pick by our friends. We don’t pick through a political prism.”

Michigan’s renewed fight with the virus was a warning for other states seeing new increases in cases and could have far-reaching consequences. Reports of new cases have increased by 45 percent in Illinois over the past two weeks, with especially high infection rates around Peoria. And as new, more contagious variants spread, caseloads are rising in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and several other states.

In an interview on Sunday with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, said the American economy had “brightened substantially” as more people have been vaccinated and businesses have reopened. But he cautioned that “there really are risks out there,” specifically coronavirus flare-ups, if Americans return to normal life too quickly.

“The principal risk to our economy right now really is that the disease would spread again more quickly,” Mr. Powell said.

In recent days, Ms. Whitmer, an ally of President Biden’s, has diverged repeatedly from the president, asking him in a private call last week for extra vaccines, and, after being turned down, continuing to press her case in public that vaccination is the answer.

Bobby Leddy, a spokesman for Ms. Whitmer, said the state was suffering not from a failure of policymaking, but from the new variants that are more contagious and from Michiganders who are not complying with the governor’s orders. “Which is why it’s important for us to ramp up vaccinations as quickly as possible,” he said.

Ms. Whitmer was joined in the call for more vaccines by Representatives Fred Upton, a Republican, and Debbie Dingell, a Democrat, who sent a letter last week to Mr. Biden pleading for extra doses for their state.

Ms. Whitmer, who called last week for voluntary pauses to indoor dining, youth sports and in-person high school, said on Monday that she planned to extend existing restrictions on in-person officework for six more months. She has also appealed to Michigan residents to take more “personal responsibility,” language that echoed Republican governors and contrasted sharply with her own response to earlier surges.

United States ›	United StatesOn Apr. 11	14-day change
New cases	48,271	+11%
New deaths	300	–26%

World ›	WorldOn Apr. 11	14-day change
New cases	711,671	+21%
New deaths	8,750	+23%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Anna Watts for The New York Times

Starting later this month, about 51,000 New York City public school students who have been learning remotely for the past year will be able to return to classrooms, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday, including middle and high school students.

The announcement marks one of the most significant changes prompted by last month’s guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that schools could reduce social distancing between students in classrooms to three feet from six. For now, only elementary schools will switch to three feet.

Students in all grades who signed up for in-person classes over the last several weeks will be able to return starting April 26, Mr. de Blasio said. Previously, the city had committed only to bringing back elementary school students who wanted to switch to in-person classes.

Though a large number of families are eager for their children to return to classrooms, the families of about 650,000 of the city’s roughly 1 million students have decided to have them continue learning from home through the end of the school year in June. The families have made that choice even though the city schools have had very low transmission, and tens of thousands of educators are fully vaccinated. Last week, the city also eased a school closure rule that had led to frequent temporary closures, which frustrated many parents.

It is difficult to generalize why hundreds of thousands of families have kept their children home. Some parents may prefer to keep a remote schedule for the next few months for the sake of consistency. Other families have expressed concern about relatively high test positivity rates in New York City’s wider population. Some parents of high school students in particular are concerned that their students would be learning from their laptops even in classrooms.

Mr. de Blasio has said he expects most schools to offer full-time in-person instruction for all or most students for the final months of the school year. The mayor said the school system would be operating at full capacity come September, with all students able to attend school full-time.

Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters

New York City health officials said on Monday that infections with the coronavirus variant that first emerged in Britain, B.1.1.7, have been increasing in every borough, but slightly more in southern Brooklyn, eastern Queens, and Staten Island. Genetic analysis shows that B.1.1.7 now accounts for about 30 percent of cases sequenced citywide.

The data, which was included in new maps and a report released by the city, represents the first time officials have offered a ZIP-code level look at how worrisome variants have been spreading in New York, overtaking original versions of virus and clustering in some parts of the city more than others.

The report and maps, which were published Monday afternoon on the city’s health department website, also show that a variant first emerged in New York City, B.1.526, has been increasing at even a faster clip, and now represents some 45 percent of cases genetically sequenced in the city. The maps released Monday show that while B.1.526 is found in all five boroughs, it is slightly more common in the Bronx and parts of Queens.

Overall, more than 70 percent of genetically sequenced coronavirus cases now circulating in the city represent worrisome variants. The data, which spans January 1 to March 27, represents less than 5 percent of all positive test results in the city, as sequencing capabilities remain limited. As a result, it only provides a glimpse of the full picture of how the variants are impacting each community.

New York City has remained at a high plateau of coronavirus cases since February, with some 3,000 to 4,000 new cases reported per day, according to city data. The spread of these variants is likely a key reason that cases have not fallen more even as vaccinations rise, the city’s health department said in the report.

Hospitalizations have been falling, but very gradually, as the most vulnerable get vaccinated. Deaths have also been declining, but at a slower than desired pace, and have been averaging about 50 per day.

The United States has seen an exponential rise of B.1.1.7, which is now the most dominant variant across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That variant is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the coronavirus, according to the most recent estimates.

It has slammed Europe and helped fuel the worst-in-the-nation outbreak in Michigan. Until recently, the variant’s rise in the United States was somewhat camouflaged by falling infection rates overall, leading some political leaders to relax restrictions on indoor dining, social distancing and other measures. The C.D.C.’s efforts to track down the variants have greatly improved in recent weeks and will continue to grow, though Britain, which has a more centralized health care system, began a highly promoted sequencing program last year that allowed it to track the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant.

Vaccines do appear to be effective against the variant.

Less is known about the B.1.526 variant, which was first documented by researchers in the Upper Manhattan area of New York City last November and has since spread widely through the city and beyond. City officials have said that the variant may be more transmissible, and is outpacing even B.1.1.7 in some neighborhoods.

But it is still unknown whether the variant has an impact on disease severity, re-infection, or vaccine effectiveness. The city said it has no evidence that it does, but that it is studying those possibilities.

The city also warned on Monday that the P.1 variant, which was first identified in Brazil, is increasing its presence, though its incidence as a percentage of total cases remains very low.

The city did not release data or a map showing where P.1 cases have been identified. It has previously said that the variant accounted for 1.3 percent of sequenced samples as of late March — just 24 total cases of P.1. The variant maps released on Monday also excluded all ZIP codes where the total number of sequenced cases was fewer than three.

P.1 is also more transmissible than original versions of the virus, and there is some evidence of immunity evasion among both people who previously had Covid-19 and fully vaccinated people. It is spreading widely in South America and has appeared in many states.

The city’s report did not mention the B.1.351 variant, first found in South Africa, which can partially dodge the body’s immune system response. The city had previously reported sequencing 6 total cases of B.1.351.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

On Monday, Britain’s lockdown — one of the longest and most stringent in the world — finally began drawing to an end.

For people across Europe, struggling with yet another wave of the pandemic and demoralized by a vaccine rollout that, outside of Britain, has been deeply troubled, this is hardly a time to rejoice.

And Britons — who have lost more than 150,000 people to the pandemic — know better than anyone that they are facing a wily adversary, a shape-shifter of a virus that spins off variants that can threaten medical advances with a few mutations.

But just past the stroke of midnight on Monday, a few select establishments in England served their first drinks since being forced to close in December and January, and more than a year after the first of three national lockdowns was imposed to limit the spread of the virus.

Later in the morning, thousands of gyms, salons and retail stores opened their doors for the first time in months, bringing a frisson of life to streets long frozen in a state of suspended animation. Friends reunited, and families shared a meal at outdoor cafes for the first time in months.

The weather may have been chilly — there were even some snow flurries — and pubs were limited to outdoor service. But the moment was embraced with an enthusiasm born of more than a year of on-and-off deprivation and uncertainty, one in which a once-unimaginable level of government decree became a way of life.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it “a major step forward in our road map to freedom.”

Monday was the start of a phased reopening that is scheduled to culminate on June 21, when the government says it hopes to lift almost all restrictions in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are following separate but similar timetables, which means that some of the restrictions eased on Monday in England will remain in place a while longer in those places.

Lockdowns of one form or another have become so commonplace around the world that it can be hard to recall a time when they did not exist. The word began entering the popular lexicon in the weeks and months after the virus first emerged in China and the authorities there moved aggressively to restrict the movement of its citizens.

While no country matched China’s draconian measures, liberal democracies have been engaged in a yearlong effort to balance economic, political and public health concerns. Last spring, that meant about four billion people — half of humanity — living under some form of stay-at-home order.

Britain, which held out longer than many of its European neighbors, entered its first national lockdown on March 26, 2020.

At the height of the epidemic in January, Britain was averaging almost 60,000 new coronavirus infections and more than 1,200 Covid-19 deaths each day. In the past week, the daily averages were about 2,500 cases and 36 fatalities.

On Monday, as Britons flocked to stores and restaurants, there was widespread hope that after so many false dawns, there will be no going back.

Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty Images

New York will no longer require international travelers arriving in the state to quarantine though it continues to recommend they do so, according to new guidance released by the Health Department.

The change was intended to bring the state in line with travel recommendations issued earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In that guidance for international and domestic travel, the C.D.C. said that people fully vaccinated against the coronavirus could travel safely “at low risk to themselves” but should still follow health precautions in public such as wearing masks. Federal health officials also said that they preferred all people avoid travel while the threat of the virus remained so high in the United States. The C.D.C. also cited a lack of vaccine coverage in other countries, and concern about the potential introduction and spread of new variants of the virus that are more prevalent overseas.

The C.D.C. requires all international travelers arriving in the United States to show proof of a recent negative test result before boarding their flights. When fully vaccinated Americans travel abroad, they only need to get a coronavirus test or quarantine if the country they are going to requires it. However, the guidance says they must have a negative coronavirus test before boarding a flight back to the United States, and they should get tested again three to five days after their return.

New York State health officials said in their guidance, released Saturday, that they still recommend all international travelers get tested three to five days after arriving in the state.

They also suggested that unvaccinated travelers should self-quarantine for as many as 10 days and avoid people at risk of serious illness from the virus for two weeks.

The new international guidance came after the state also ended its requirement that domestic travelers to New York quarantine upon arrival. At the time, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo traced the decision to the pace of vaccinations and a decline in virus figures across the state, though the state was adding new cases at a higher rate than the country as a whole.

As of Sunday, the state’s average daily positivity test rate over the previous week was at 3.27 percent. Virus-related hospitalizations were at 4,083, their lowest number since Dec. 2, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office.

According to a New York Times database, New York State is adding new virus cases at the fifth-highest rate in the country. As of Sunday, the state was reporting an average of 37 new virus cases a day for every 100,000 residents over the last week. The nation as a whole was averaging 21 new cases per 100,000 people.

Credit…Emily Matthews/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Associated Press

The state of Pennsylvania and the city of Los Angeles are accelerating plans for wider Covid-19 vaccine eligibility this week, as the United States approaches universal eligibility for adults.

Most states and U.S. territories have already expanded access to include anyone over 16. Others, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington State, have plans in place for universal adult access to start in the next few days. All states are expected to get there by Monday, a deadline set by President Biden.

Some states have local variations in eligibility, including Illinois, where Chicago did not join a statewide expansion that began Monday.

California as a whole has set Thursday as its date, but Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles said on Sunday that all residents age 16 or older in his city, the nation’s second largest, would become eligible two days earlier. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf said on Monday that all adults there would be eligible on Tuesday, six days earlier than previously planned.

“We need to maintain acceleration of the vaccine rollout, especially as case counts and hospitalization rates have increased,” Mr. Wolf said in a statement.

Expanded eligibility has not always brought immediate access. Demand for vaccination continues to outstrip supply in much of the nation, with people scrambling to book scarce appointments as they become available. And supplies of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine will be extremely limited until federal regulators approve production at a Baltimore manufacturing plant with a pattern of quality-control lapses, the White House’s pandemic response coordinator said on Friday.

“We urge patience as we continue to ramp up our operations, obtain more doses, and enter this new phase of our campaign to end the pandemic,” Mr. Garcetti said.

More than 120 million people — or more than one-third of the U.S. population — have now received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The nation is administering about 3.2 million doses a day on average.

Two of the three vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. — those made by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are authorized for use in adults. The third, from Pfizer-BioNTech, is authorized for anyone 16 or older, and the company is seeking to expand that range to include youths 12 to 15. No vaccine has yet been authorized for use in younger children.

Global Roundup

Credit…Karma Sonam/Associated Press

Even as India hit a record for daily coronavirus infections, and its total caseload rose to second in the world behind the United States, the images that dominated Indian news media on Monday were of a crowded religious festival along the banks of the Ganges River.

The dissonance was a clear manifestation of the confusing messages sent by the authorities just as India’s coronavirus epidemic is spiraling, with a daily high of 168,000 cases and 900 deaths reported on Monday.

Yet millions of devotees have thronged the holy city of Haridwar for the monthlong Kumbh Mela, or pitcher festival, when Hindu pilgrims seek absolution by bathing in the Ganges. Officials have said that about one million people will participate every day, and as many as five million during the most auspicious days, all crowded into a narrow stretch along the river and searching for the holiest spot to take a dip.

Already, fears are running high that one of the most sacred pilgrimages in Hinduism could turn into a superspreading event.

Dr. S. K. Jha, a local health officer, said that an average of about 250 new cases had been registered each day recently. Experts have warned that many more infections are going unrecorded, and that devotees could unwittingly carry the virus with them as they return to their homes across the country.

India is in the grip of the world’s fastest growing outbreak, with more and more jurisdictions going back into varying stages of lockdown. Infections are spreading particularly fast in Mumbai, the country’s financial hub, and the surrounding state of Maharashtra, where the government has announced a partial weekday lockdown and near-total closure over the weekends.

The situation is also worsening in the capital, New Delhi, which reported more than 10,000 new cases on Sunday, surpassing the previous daily high of nearly 8,500. The state government has imposed a curfew and ordered restaurants and public transport systems to run at half capacity. Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s top official, has said more restrictions may follow.

Hospitals in several states are reporting shortages of oxygen, ventilators and coronavirus testing kits, and some are also running low on remdesivir, a drug used in serious Covid-19 cases. India has halted the export of remdesivir until the situation improves.

India is also trying to ramp up its vaccination drive, with about three million people being inoculated daily and 104 million doses administered so far. But with many vaccination centers nationwide expressing concern over possible shortages, India’s large pharmaceutical industry has sharply reduced its exports of the AstraZeneca vaccine in order to keep more doses at home, creating serious challenges for other countries that had been relying on those shipments.

On Monday, Indian experts recommended the use of Russia’s Sputnik-V coronavirus vaccine, which would become the third available in the country if approved by the authorities.

After months of lower-than-expected infections and deaths from the virus, critics say Indian officials have sent dissonant messages about the seriousness of the crisis. Police officers are enforcing curfew and mask rules, sometimes resorting to beatings captured on videos shared across social media. But senior political leaders, including the prime minister, Narendra Modi, have been holding large rallies for local elections.

Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has also allowed the religious festival to proceed — in contrast to what happened last spring, at the start of the pandemic, when India’s health ministry blamed an Islamic seminary for fanning a far smaller outbreak. Critics say rhetoric from members of Mr. Modi’s party contributed to a spate of attacks against Muslims, a minority of about 200 million people in a Hindu-dominated country of 1.3 billion.

In other news around the world:

Bangladesh has announced a weeklong lockdown, closing offices, factories and transport services starting Wednesday, and banning domestic and international flights. The country is facing its severest coronavirus outbreak so far, averaging nearly 7,000 daily new infections, according to a New York Times database, as the virus sweeps across South Asia.
In France, all people over 55 are eligible to receive the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines starting Monday, as the authorities try to ramp up their vaccination campaign after a sluggish start. Health Minister Olivier Véran said on Sunday that France would also extend the period between the first and second shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to six weeks from four, echoing Britain’s strategy. Over 14 million people have received a first injection.
High schools reopened in Greece on Monday after five months closed. The reopening only applies to senior high-school classes, and pupils and teachers will have to take a virus test twice a week before returning to classrooms. Thousands did so at home on Sunday, with just 613 positives out of some 380,000, a rate of 0.16 percent, according to state television. Stores in the country reopened last week.
The world’s wealthy nations should commit $30 billion to a global mass vaccination campaign, Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of Britain, said on Monday. Lower-income countries’ inoculation efforts are trailing far behind richer nations’ and the divide has led to allegations of a “vaccine apartheid,” Mr. Brown warned in an op-ed for The Guardian. “The costs may still be in billions, but the benefit will be in trillions,” he wrote.

Anna Schaverien, Constant Méheut and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Schools and colleges across New York State will be allowed to hold graduation ceremonies for students this spring, with restrictions depending on type of venue or its capacity, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday.

Outdoor ceremonies with more than 500 people, for example, must not exceed 20 percent of the venue’s capacity, and attendees must have proof of vaccination or a recent negative coronavirus test result. Indoor ceremonies with fewer than 100 people cannot exceed 50 percent of the venue’s capacity, though the vaccination or test requirement in that case will be optional, Mr. Cuomo said.

After the pandemic hit last spring, officials in New York and across the nation warned that graduation ceremonies could fuel the virus’s spread, and many such events were canceled.

Colleges and universities began experiencing major outbreaks after students returned in the fall, and more than 120,000 cases have been linked to U.S. colleges and universities since Jan. 1. As they’ve been shuttled back and forth to campuses, depending on whether they’ve been open or closed, scientists have feared students were spreading the virus.

This spring, vaccinations have tracked upward, but dangerous virus variants are spreading and case counts remain high in many places. That has left colleges struggling to find a consensus on how best to mark commencement.

Mr. Cuomo said that New York State’s new rules on graduation will take effect on May 1. But he said officials are still encouraging drive-through or virtual graduation ceremonies as safer options, and he warned that the pandemic was far from over.

Credit…Regeneron, via Associated Press

A monoclonal antibody cocktail developed by the drug maker Regeneron offered strong protection against Covid-19 when given to people living with someone infected with the coronavirus, according to clinical trial results announced on Monday. The drug, if authorized, could offer another line of defense against the disease for people who are not protected by vaccination.

The findings are the latest evidence that such lab-made drugs not only prevent the worst outcomes of the disease when given early enough, but also help prevent people from getting sick in the first place.

Using the cumbersome drugs preventively on a large scale won’t be necessary: Vaccines are sufficient for the vast majority of people and are increasingly available.

Still, antibody drugs like Regeneron’s could give doctors a new way to protect high-risk people who haven’t been inoculated or who may not respond well to vaccination, such as those taking drugs that weaken their immune system. That could be an important tool as rising coronavirus cases and dangerous virus variants threaten to outpace vaccinations.

Regeneron said in a news release that it would ask the Food and Drug Administration to expand the drug’s emergency authorization — currently for high-risk people who already have Covid but are not hospitalized — to allow it to be given for preventive purposes in “appropriate populations.”

There’s “a very substantial number of people” in the United States and globally who could be a good fit to receive these drugs for preventive purposes, said Dr. Myron Cohen, a University of North Carolina researcher who leads monoclonal antibody efforts for the Covid Prevention Network, a National Institutes of Health-sponsored initiative that helped to oversee the trial.

“Not everyone’s going to take a vaccine, no matter what we do, and not everyone’s going to respond to a vaccine,” Dr. Cohen said.

Regeneron’s new data come from a clinical trial that enrolled more than 1,500 people who lived in the same household as someone who had tested positive for the virus within four days. Those who got an injection of Regeneron’s drug were 81 percent less likely to get sick with Covid compared to volunteers who got a placebo.

Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who was an investigator for the study, said the data were “promising” for people who have not yet been vaccinated. (An earlier version of this item incorrectly said that Dr. Gandhi was not involved in the study.)

Even so, he said, the study did not enroll the type of patients that would be needed to assess whether the drug should be used preventively for immunocompromised patients. “I would say we don’t yet know that,” Dr. Gandhi said.

Regeneron’s cocktail, a combination of two drugs designed to mimic the antibodies generated naturally when the immune system fends off the virus, got a publicity boost last fall when it was given to President Donald J. Trump after he got sick with Covid.

The treatment received emergency authorization in November. Doctors are using it, as well as another antibody cocktail from Eli Lilly, for high-risk Covid patients.

But use of the antibody drugs has been slowed not by a shortage of doses, but by other challenges, though access has improved in recent months. Many patients don’t know to ask for the drugs or where to find them.

Many hospitals and clinics have not made the treatments a priority because they have been time-consuming and difficult to administer, in large part because they must be given via intravenous infusion. Regeneron plans to ask the F.D.A. to allow its drug to be given via an injection, as it was administered in the results of the study announced on Monday, which would allow it to be given more quickly and easily.

Credit…Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Severe and critical cases of Covid-19 have hit record highs this week in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a development that health experts attributed to the proliferation of the highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in Britain.

Medical officials in the Hamas-run Health Ministry estimated that the variant now accounts for four out of five new cases in Gaza. They detected it in the densely populated territory for the first time in late March.

“We are in a dangerous place,” said Dr. Majdi Dhair, the director of the ministry’s preventive medicine department. “We expect more people to become infected and more people to enter hospitals. We ask God to pull us out of this situation.”

Over the past three weeks, severe cases — typically when a patient’s oxygen level falls to 94 percent or less — have risen to 219 from 58, according to ministry data. Critical cases, which can involve respiratory failure, septic shock or multiple organ dysfunction, jumped to 58 from 17.

On top of that, the ministry said on Monday that about 38 percent of the 4,700 virus test results it had received over the preceding 24 hours were positive — one of the highest rates in the past month.

Dr. Dhair said he believed that hospitals in Gaza were prepared to handle more severe and critical cases, but that they would probably have to postpone some surgical procedures to free up intensive care beds.

Devastated by years of conflict, Gaza’s hospitals were already dealing with challenging circumstances before the first cases of community transmission of the virus were discovered in the territory in August.

Gaza’s population is overwhelmingly young, and less than 1 percent of residents have been vaccinated so far.

The sharp rise in severe and critical cases has come just before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Tuesday. Traditionally during Ramadan, many Palestinians in Gaza would gather for large meals after sunset, pack streets in popular commercial districts and crowd into mosques for special evening prayers. But a number of those traditions will be prohibited this year because of the pandemic, the authorities said.

Credit…Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

An update to the contact tracing app used in England and Wales has been blocked from release by Apple and Google because of privacy concerns, renewing a feud between the British government and the two tech giants about how smartphones can be used to track Covid-19 cases.

In an attempt to trace possible infections, the update to the app would have allowed a person who tests positive for the virus to upload a list of restaurants, shops and other venues they recently visited, data that would be used by health officials for contact tracing. But collecting such location information violates the terms of service that Google and Apple forced governments to agree to in exchange for making contact tracing apps available on their app stores.

The dispute, first reported by the BBC, highlights the supernational role that Apple and Google have played responding to the virus. The companies, which control the software of nearly every smartphone in the world, have forced governments to design contact tracing apps to their privacy specifications, or risk not having the tracking apps made available to the public. The gatekeeper role has frustrated policymakers in Britain, France and elsewhere, who have argued those public health decisions are for governments, not private companies to make.

The release of the app update was to coincide with England’s relaxation of lockdown rules. On Monday, the country began loosening months of Covid-related restrictions, allowing nonessential shops to reopen, and pubs and restaurants to serve customers outdoors.

An older version of the contact tracing app continues to work, but the data is stored on a person’s device, rather than being kept in a centralized database.

To use the app, visitors to a store or restaurant take a photo of a poster with a QR code displayed in the business, and the software keeps a record of the visit in case someone at the same location later tests positive.

Apple and Google are blocking the update that would let people upload the history of the locations they have checked into directly to health authorities.

The Department of Health and Social Care said it is in discussions with Apple and Google to “provide beneficial updates to the app which protect the public.”

Apple and Google declined to comment.

Credit…James Ross/EPA, via Shutterstock

Australia has given up on the goal of vaccinating its entire population against Covid-19 by the end of the year, following updated advice from health officials that younger people should not receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as delays in the delivery of doses.

The Australian government said last week that it had accepted a recommendation by a panel of health experts that people under 50 receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine instead of the one developed by AstraZeneca, which had been the centerpiece of Australia’s vaccination program. The change in guidance came after European regulators found links between the AstraZeneca vaccine and rare blood clots, prompting several countries to restrict use of the shot.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday that the government had ordered another 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, doubling what it had already purchased. But they are not expected to be available until the fourth quarter of this year, dealing a blow to the government’s previously stated goal of inoculating all of its 25 million people by then.

Mr. Morrison appeared to acknowledge the change in timeline in a Facebook post on Sunday.

“The government has also not set, nor has any plans to set any new targets for completing first doses,” Mr. Morrison said. “While we would like to see these doses completed before the end of the year, it is not possible to set such targets given the many uncertainties involved.”

Public health experts have criticized Mr. Morrison’s government for relying too heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine, a relatively cheap and easy-to-use shot but one whose troubles have jeopardized inoculation efforts in multiple countries. They said the setback to Australia’s vaccination program risked undermining the country’s success in containing the spread of the coronavirus since recording its first case in January 2020.

“We’re in a position a year later where that hard-won success is jeopardized by a completely incompetent approach to a vaccine rollout,” said Bill Bowtell, a public health policy expert and adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Australia has made four separate agreements for the supply of Covid-19 vaccines that would give it a total of 170 million doses, enough to inoculate its population more than three times over. Plans to manufacture almost all of its 54 million AstraZeneca doses domestically were approved last month.

But the Australian government has been under fire for weeks over the sluggish pace of its vaccination rollout, which began in late February. By the end of March, when the government had aimed to vaccinate four million people, only about 600,000 had actually been inoculated. As of Sunday, Australia had administered fewer than 1.2 million doses.

Australian officials have attributed the slow rollout to delays in the delivery of millions of vaccine doses manufactured in the European Union, which has curbed exports amid its own supply shortages. The export restrictions mainly affect the AstraZeneca vaccine.

After enduring strict lockdowns for much of the past year, Australians are now enjoying relatively normal life in a country that has all but stamped out the virus. But public health experts warn that until more of the population is vaccinated, those freedoms are precarious.

“Having eliminated Covid, they thought a mass vaccination campaign would lock that in,” Mr. Bowtell said of the Australian public. “Now they are being deeply disillusioned.”

Credit…Adam Dean for The New York Times

Thailand is facing its worst coronavirus outbreak just as millions of people head to their home provinces during the country’s biggest travel holiday.

The latest wave of infections, which has sent at least eight cabinet members into isolation, is centered in a Bangkok nightlife district said to be popular with government officials and wealthy partygoers. The country, which until now has largely kept the virus under control, set a record Monday for new daily cases with 985.

One top health official warned that Thailand could soon face as many as 28,000 new cases a day in the worst-case scenario. The government announced it would set up field hospitals as Covid-19 wards at existing facilities begin to fill up.

Officials ordered the closure of hundreds of bars and nightclubs, but critics say the government has been inconsistent in its efforts to bring the outbreak under control. The prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, stopped short of banning travel between provinces for the Songkran holiday, which begins on Tuesday and marks the beginning of the Thai New Year.

“Whatever will be, will be,” he said last week in explaining his decision. “The reason is it’s a matter that involves a huge number of people. The government will have to try to cope with that later.”

Dozens of provinces have imposed their own restrictions on travelers coming from Bangkok and other affected areas, prompting many Thais to cancel their trips. But many others set off over the weekend.

During earlier outbreaks, the government often acted quickly to require face masks, ban foreign tourists, impose quarantine restrictions and lock down hard-hit areas. It has reported fewer than 34,000 cases — mostly from a January surge traced to a seafood market near Bangkok — and just 97 deaths.

But it has been lax in testing and slow to vaccinate. So far, it has procured about 2.2 million doses and given at least one to about 500,000 people. Thailand’s population is 70 million.

Vaccine production is not expected to begin in earnest until June, when a manufacturer in Thailand is scheduled to begin producing 10 million doses a month of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Health officials were alarmed by the recent discovery of dozens of cases of the highly infectious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain. The finding highlighted the inadequacy of Thailand’s virus testing and suggested that its quarantine procedures have not been as effective as officials believed.

Tourism operators have been especially angered by the government’s lackadaisical approach to obtaining vaccine supplies. The tourism industry, which normally accounts for about 20 percent of the nation’s economy, is highly dependent on foreign visitors and has been calling for widespread vaccinations to speed its recovery.

The outbreak in Bangkok has also prompted questions about the activities of some top officials and their aides.

The transportation minister, Saksayam Chidchob, who was hospitalized with Covid-19, was criticized for not being forthcoming about his whereabouts during times when he may have been exposed to the virus. He denied visiting the gentlemen’s club at the center of the outbreak and said he believed he had contracted the virus from an aide.

Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

Parents with school-age children have struggled to combine their usual work and family responsibilities this past year with at least some degree of home-schooling.

But mothers and fathers of middle-schoolers — the parenting cohort long known to researchers as the most angst-ridden and unhappy — are connecting now in a specific sort of common misery: the pressing fear that their children, at a vital point in their academic and social lives, have tripped over some key developmental milestones and may never quite find their footing.

Experts say some of their worries are justified — up to a point. The pandemic has taken a major toll on many adolescents’ emotional well-being.

Yet as the nation begins to pivot from trauma to recovery, many mental-health experts and educators are trying to spread the message that parents, too, need a reset. If adults want to guide their children toward resilience, these experts say, then they need to get their own minds out of crisis mode.

Early adolescence is considered a critical period, a time of brain changes so rapid and far-reaching that they rival the plasticity and growth that take place in the newborn to 3-year-old phase.

These changes make children more capable of higher-level thinking and reasoning. They also make them crave social contact, attention and approval.

Remote learning and social distancing are in many ways the opposite of what children in this age group want and need.

“It’s been hardest on middle schoolers,” said Phyllis Fagell, a therapist and school counselor who wrote the 2019 book “Middle School Matters.” “It is their job to pull away from parents, to use these years to really focus on figuring out where they are in the pecking order. And all of that hard work that has to happen in these years was just put on hold.”

Yet Ms. Fagell and many other experts in adolescent development were adamant that parents should not panic — and that the spread of the “lost year” narrative needed to stop.

Getting a full picture of what’s going on with middle schoolers, they agreed, requires holding two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind: The past year has been terrible. And most middle schoolers will be fine.

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Business

Company Leaders Urged to Wade Into Debate Over Voting Legal guidelines: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date April 12, 2021

Ken Frazier, the Merck chief executive, has called on corporate executives to publicly state their support for broader ballot access.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mike Cohen for The New York Times

More than 100 corporate leaders attended a Zoom meeting on Saturday afternoon to discuss what they should do, if anything, to shape the debate around restrictive voting laws under discussion across the United States.

On the call, which was organized by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor who regularly gathers executives to discuss politics, several senior business leaders spoke forcefully about the need for companies to use their clout to oppose new state legislation that would make it harder to vote.

The call began with Ken Chenault, the former American Express chief, and Ken Frazier, the Merck chief executive, urging the executives to publicly state their support for broader ballot access, according to several people who attended the meeting. Earlier this month, the two gathered 70 fellow Black leaders to sign a letter last month calling on companies to fight bills that restrict voting rights, like the one that recently passed in Georgia.

Mr. Chenault and Mr. Frazier have prepared a new statement that broadly supports voting rights, and they are asking big companies to sign it this week.

Later on the call, several other chief executives shared their views on the wave of restrictive new voting laws being advanced by Republicans, according to the people who attended the meeting.

Chip Bergh, the chief executive of Levi’s, called the movement a threat to democracy, while Mia Mends, a Black executive at Sodexo who is based in Houston, spoke about restrictive voting legislation that was making its way through the Texas state legislature.

Toward the end of the call, Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, discussed the importance of having corporate leaders affirm that the last election was secure, and James Murdoch, the former chief executive of 21st Century Fox, talked about the importance of a healthy democracy.

The voting-rights debate is fraught for companies, putting them at the center of an increasingly heated partisan battle.

“C.E.O.s are grappling right now with what to do and how to respond,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of Leadership Now, who helped organize the call. “There is a lot of confusion.”

But beyond making statements, business leaders are at a loss over what they can do to influence the policy decisions made by Republican lawmakers who have embraced overhauling voting rights as a priority.

Companies like Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola lobbied behind the scenes before the Georgia law was passed last month, and the companies say their efforts had a hand in removing some of the most restrictive provisions, such as eliminating Sunday voting.

But after Delta and Coca-Cola came out in opposition to the final law, and other corporations began sounding the alarm about the voting legislation being advanced in nearly every state, Republican leaders lashed out.

“My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, said last week. “It’s not what you’re designed for. And don’t be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of America’s greatest political debates.”

Yet the business community appears to be emboldened, with more companies and business groups preparing to get involved.

Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss, who attended the meeting on Saturday but did not speak at it, said he was organizing the legal community in an effort to support voting rights, and potentially challenge new laws.

“We plan to challenge any election law that would impose unnecessary barriers on the right to vote and the would disenfranchise underrepresented groups in our country,” Mr. Karp said.

So far, however, there is little indication that the growing outcry from big business is changing Republicans’ priorities, with legislation in Texas and other states still moving ahead.

“Texas is the next one up,” said one chief executive who attended the meeting but asked to remain anonymous. “Whether the business commitments will have a meaningful impact there, we’ll see.”

Credit…Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

The dispute, first reported by the BBC, highlights the supernational role that Apple and Google have played responding to the virus. The companies, which control the software of nearly every smartphone in the world, have forced governments to design contact tracing apps to their privacy specifications, or risk not have the tracking apps made available to the public. The gatekeeper role has frustrated policymakers in Britain, France and elsewhere, who have argued those public health decisions are for governments, not private companies to make.

An older version of the contact tracing app continues to work, but the data is stored on a person’s device, rather than being kept in a centralized database.

Apple and Google are blocking the update that would let people upload the history of the locations they have checked into directly to health authorities.

The Department of Health and Social Care said it is in discussions with Apple and Google to “provide beneficial updates to the app which protect the public.”

Apple and Google declined to comment.

Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

A year into the pandemic, there are signs that the American economy is stirring back to life, with a falling unemployment rate and a growing number of people back at work. Even mothers — who left their jobs in droves in the last year in large part because of increased caregiving duties — are slowly re-entering the work force.

But young Americans — particularly women between the ages of 16 and 24 — are living an altogether different reality, with higher rates of unemployment than older adults. And many thousands, possibly even millions, are postponing their education, which can delay their entry into the work force.

New research suggests that the number of “disconnected” young people — defined as those who are in neither school nor the work force — is growing. For young women, experts said, the caregiving crisis may be a major reason many have delayed their education or careers.

Last year, unemployment among young adults jumped to 27.4 percent in April from 7.8 percent in February. The rate was almost double the 14 percent overall unemployment rate in April and was the highest for that age group in the last two decades, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At its peak in April, the unemployment rate for young women over all hit 30 percent — with a 22 percent rate for white women in that age group, 30 percent for Black women and 31 percent for Latina women.

Those numbers are starting to improve as many female-dominated industries that shed jobs at the start of the pandemic, like leisure, retail and education, are adding them back. But roughly 18 percent of the 1.9 million women who left the work force since last February — or about 360,000 — were 16 to 24, according to an analysis of seasonally unadjusted numbers by the National Women’s Law Center.

At the same time, the number of women who have dropped out of some form of education or plan to is on the rise. During the pandemic, more women than men consistently reported that they had canceled plans to take postsecondary classes or planned to take fewer classes, according to a series of surveys by the U.S. Census Bureau since last April.

“We’ve focused in particular on the digital divide and the impact of that on the learning loss for kids,” said Reshma Saujani, founder of the nonprofit group Girls Who Code. “But we’re not talking about how the caregiving crisis is impacting the learning loss for kids and how it’s disproportionately impacting girls and girls of color.”

All of this can have long-term knock-on effects. Even temporary unemployment or an education setback at a young age can drag down someone’s potential for earnings, job stability and even homeownership years down the line, according to a 2018 study by Measure of America that tracked disconnected youth over the course of 15 years.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

For the past year, the British economy has yo-yoed with the government’s pandemic restrictions. On Monday, as shops, outdoor dining, gyms and hairdressers reopened across England, the next bounce began.

The pandemic has left Britain with deep economic wounds that have shattered historical records: the worst recession in three centuries and record levels of government borrowing outside wartime.

Last March and April, there was an economic slump unlike anything ever seen before when schools, workplaces and businesses abruptly shut. Then a summertime boom, when restrictions eased and the government helped usher people out of their homes with a popular meal-discount initiative called “Eat Out to Help Out.”

Beginning in the fall, a second wave of the pandemic stalled the recovery, though the economic impact wasn’t as severe as it had been last spring. Still, the government has spent about 344 billion pounds, or $471 billion, on its pandemic response. To pay for it, the government has borrowed a record sum and is planning the first increase in corporate taxes since 1974 to help rebalance its budget.

By the end of the year, the size of Britain’s economy will be back where it was at the end of 2019, the Bank of England predicts. “The economy is poised like a coiled spring,” Andy Haldane, the central bank’s chief economist said in February. “As its energies are released, the recovery should be one to remember after a year to forget.”

Even though a lot of retail spending has shifted online, reopening shop doors will make a huge difference to many businesses.

Daunt Books, a small chain of independent bookstores, was busy preparing to reopen for the past week, including offering a click-and-collect service in all of its stores. Throughout the lockdown, a skeleton crew “worked harder than they’ve ever worked before, just to keep a trickle” of revenue coming in from online and telephone orders, said Brett Wolstencroft, the bookseller’s manager.

“The worst moment for us was December,” Mr. Wolstencroft said, when shops were shut in large parts of the country beginning on Dec. 20. “Realizing you’re losing your last bit of Christmas is exceptionally tough.”

He says he is looking forward to having customers return to browse the shelves and talk to the sellers. “We’d sort of turned ourselves into a warehouse” during the lockdown, he said, “but that doesn’t work for a good bookshop.”

With the likes of pubs, hairdressers, cinemas and hotels shut for months on end, Brits have built up more than £180 billion in excess savings, according to government estimates. That money, once people can get out more, is expected to be the engine of this recovery — even though economists are debating how much of this windfall will end up in the tills of these businesses.

Monday is just one phase of the reopening. Pubs can serve customers only in outdoor seating areas, and less than half, about 15,000, have such facilities. Hotels will also remain closed for at least another month alongside indoor dining, museums and theaters. The next reopening phase is scheduled for May 17.

Over all, two-fifths of hospitality businesses have outside space, said Kate Nicholls, the chief executive of U.K. Hospitality, a trade group.

“Monday is a really positive start,” she said. “It helps us to get businesses gradually back open, get staff gradually back off furlough and build up toward the real reopening of hospitality that will be May 17.”

Credit…Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters

Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, has reached a deal to raise $12.4 billion from the sale of a 49 percent stake in a pipeline-rights company.

The money will come from a consortium led by EIG Global Energy Partners, a Washington-based investor in pipelines and other energy infrastructure.

Under the arrangement announced on Friday, the investor group will buy 49 percent of a new company called Aramco Oil Pipelines, which will have the rights to 25 years of payments from Aramco for transporting oil through Saudi Arabia’s pipeline networks.

Aramco is under pressure from its main owner, the Saudi government, to generate cash to finance state operations as well as investments like new cities to diversify the economy away from oil.

The company has pledged to pay $75 billion in annual dividends, nearly all to the government, as well as other taxes.

Last year, the dividends came to well in excess of the company’s net income of $49 billion. Recently, Aramco was tapped by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s main policymaker, to lead a new domestic investment drive to build up the Saudi economy.

The pipeline sale “reinforces Aramco’s role as a catalyst for attracting significant foreign investment into the Kingdom,” Aramco said in a statement.

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, the deal has the virtue of raising money up front without giving up control. Aramco will own a 51 percent majority share in the pipeline company and “retain full ownership and operational control” of the pipes the company said.

Aramco said Saudi Arabia would retain control over how much oil the company produces.

Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich neighbor, has struck similar oil and gas deals with outside investors.

Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh.

Global stocks drifted lower from recent highs on Monday ahead of a batch of first-quarter earnings reports.

The S&P 500 dipped 0.1 percent after reaching a record on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 also declined from a high reached on Friday, dropping 0.2 percent . The FTSE 100 in Britain was also down slightly.

Stocks have recently been propelled higher by expectations that the global economy will recover strongly from the pandemic this year. Much of the impetus is expected to come from the United States, where trillions of dollars are being spent on various economic recovery packages. On Sunday, Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, said the economy was at an “inflection point” and on the cusp of growing more quickly.

But there are still concerns about the uneven nature of the recovery within countries and between them. For example, parts of Europe and South America are still struggling to contain outbreaks of the coronavirus and the vaccine rollout is slower than in the United States and Britain.

Oil prices and Treasury notes

Oil futures rose. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose 2 percent to $60.49 a barrel.
Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes were little changed at 1.66 percent.

Retail sales

Retail sales in the eurozone rose more than economists forecast, data published Monday shows. Sales jumped 3 percent in February from the previous month, compared with predictions of a 1.7 percent increase.
In England, nonessential retail stores opened on Monday for the first time in more than three months. Shares in JD Sports, a clothing retailer, rose in the morning and hit a record high. But by midmorning shares were down alongside several other large British brands, including Marks & Spencer and Next. Foot traffic in shopping locations across Britain was three times greater than last week, according to data from Springboard.

The deadline to file a 2020 individual federal return and pay any tax owed has been extended to May 17. But some deadlines remain April 15, Ann Carrns reports for The New York Times. So it’s a good idea to double-check deadlines.

Most, but not all, states are following the extended federal deadlines, and a few have adopted even more generous extensions.

But the Internal Revenue Service has not postponed the deadline for making first-quarter 2021 estimated tax payments. This year, the first estimated tax deadline remains April 15. Some members of Congress are pushing for the I.R.S. to reconcile the deadlines, but it’s unclear whether that will happen, with April 15 less than a week away.

Most states have retained their usual deadlines for first-quarter estimated taxes. One exception is Maryland, which moved both its filing deadline and the deadline for first- and second-quarter estimated tax payments to July 15.

Credit…Elaine Cromie for The New York Times

Even as unionization elections, like the lopsided vote against a union at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., have often proven futile, labor has enjoyed some success over the years with an alternative model — what sociologist of labor calls the “air war plus ground war.”

The idea is to combine workplace actions like walkouts (the ground war) with pressure on company executives through public relations campaigns that highlight labor conditions and enlist the support of public figures (the air war). The Service Employees International Union used the strategy to organize janitors beginning in the 1980s, and to win gains for fast-food workers in the past few years, including wage increases across the industry, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times.

“There are almost never any elections,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It’s all about putting pressure on decision makers at the top.”

Labor leaders and progressive activists and politicians said they intended to escalate both the ground war and the air war against Amazon after the failed union election, though some skeptics within the labor movement are likely to resist spending more revenue, which is in the billions of dollars a year but declining.

Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the retail workers union, said in an interview that elections should remain an important part of labor’s Amazon strategy. “I think we opened the door,” he said. “If you want to build real power, you have to do it with a majority of workers.”

But other leaders said elections should be de-emphasized. Jesse Case, secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters local in Iowa, said the Teamsters were trying to organize Amazon workers in Iowa so they could take actions like labor stoppages and enlist members of the community — for example, by turning them out for rallies.

Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

President Biden’s sweeping pandemic relief bill and his multitrillion-dollar initiatives to rebuild infrastructure and increase wages for health care workers are intended to help ease the economic disadvantages facing racial minorities.

Yet academic experts and some policymakers say still more will be needed to repair a yawning racial wealth gap, in which Black households have a mere 12 cents for every dollar that a typical white household holds.

The disparity results in something of a rigged game for Black Americans, in which they start out behind in economic terms at birth and fall further behind during their lives, Patricia Cohen writes in The New York Times. Black graduates, for example, have to take out bigger loans to cover college costs, compelling them to start out in more debt — on average $25,000 more — than their white counterparts.

The persistence of the problem affects the entire economy: A study by McKinsey & Company found that consumption and investment lost because of the gap cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

It also has deep historical roots. African-Americans were left out of the Homestead Act, which distributed land to citizens in the 19th century, and largely excluded from federal mortgage loan support programs in the 20th century.

As a result, the gap is unlikely to shrink substantially without policies that specifically address it, such as government-funded accounts that provide children with assets at birth. Several states have experimented with these programs on a small scale.

“We have very clear evidence that if we create an account of birth for everyone and provide a little more resources to people at the bottom, then all these babies accumulate assets,” said Michael Sherraden, founding director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, which is running an experimental program in Oklahoma. “Kids of color accumulate assets as fast as white kids.”

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