April 27, 2024

You are here: Home / 2020 / Archives for March 2020

Archives for March 2020

Defense Production Act Has Been Used Routinely, but Not With Coronavirus

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The law permits federal agencies to skip an often bureaucratic procurement process that can take months and force companies to come to the table to sign a contract. Given the speed of the crisis, Joshua Gotbaum, a former assistant secretary of defense for economic security, said the government did not have the luxury of normal bidding and contracting.

“Under the process of business as usual, they’re not even going to award contracts until this month or April, then there will be a protest,” he said. “Under the Defense Production Act, they could have sat down with people in February” and finalized a contract.

Previous administrations have also been hesitant to invoke the law for nonmilitary matters.

If the federal government used the law to make itself the priority, other clients that had worked through the company’s procurement process could have their orders delayed, though under the law, the vendor is protected from lawsuits.

“My general experience is when you’re in the midst of a national crisis, contractors generally speaking want to help,” said Ernest B. Abbott, who was the general counsel of FEMA during the Clinton administration. “They want to participate. They want to be able to keep their people employed to build what’s needed for the nation.”

But Mr. Hall, who in the months after Mr. Trump took office assisted Customs and Border Protection in using the law to secure body armor from Armor Express, a Michigan-based company, said such caution had allowed understanding of the law’s powers to atrophy.

“You have people on the civil side saying, ‘What is this thing? I might get in trouble using it,’” Mr. Hall said.

While FEMA and Health and Human Services have discussed the law in training situations, Mr. Hall said he often had to press his superiors to prepare for its use in the event of a national emergency, such as a pandemic.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/us/politics/coronavirus-defense-production-act.html

Filed Under: Economy News

CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Brother of Governor, Tests Positive for Coronavirus

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

“I have been exposed to people in recent days who have subsequently tested positive and I had fever, chills, and shortness of breath,” Chris Cuomo said in a Twitter post on Tuesday, adding that he was hopeful he had not passed on the illness to his wife and children. He joked that “the rest of the family seem pleased” by his isolation in their basement, writing, “We will all beat this by being smart and tough and united!”

Governor Cuomo was in the midst of a nationally televised coronavirus briefing when news of his brother’s diagnosis became public. The governor said that he had learned of Chris Cuomo’s illness on Tuesday morning, and that his brother “is going to be fine.”

“He’s young, in good shape, strong — not as strong as he thinks — but he will be fine,” the governor said, wryly. (The Cuomos often engage in on-air brotherly teasing.)

But Governor Cuomo continued at length about the more serious implications of his brother’s diagnosis, including his relief that their 88-year-old mother, Matilda Cuomo, had not moved into Chris Cuomo’s home. The governor said he had told his brother that such a move would be “a mistake.”

“You bring her to your house, you expose her to a lot of things,” the governor said. “She would have been doing what she wanted to do, he would have been doing what he wanted to do; it would have seemed great and harmless. But now we have a much different situation. Because if he was exposed, chances are she may very well have been exposed, and then we would be looking at a different situation than just my brother sitting in his basement for two weeks.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/business/media/chris-cuomo-coronavirus.html

Filed Under: Media Business

Chemical brothers: Monsanto & BASF knew for years their products destroy US farms, documents reveal

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, the firms disregarded the risks even while they planned on how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage.

The documents (some of them date back more than a decade) have been uncovered during a recent successful $265 million lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

They also revealed how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing, in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

In some of the internal BASF emails, employees were joking about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail.”

Also on rt.com Monsanto sues California over weed killer cancer warnings

Records showed that at private meetings dating back to 2009, agricultural experts warned that the plan to develop a dicamba-tolerant system could have catastrophic consequences.

Dicamba herbicide would normally kill crops such as soybean or cotton, but Monsanto altered the genes in these crops to create genetically modified varieties which are resistant. This meant that farmers can spray the weedkiller directly on those soybean or cotton plants to destroy weeds but leave the crops unharmed.

The experts told Monsanto that farmers were likely to spray old volatile versions of dicamba on the new dicamba-tolerant crops. They have warned that even new versions were still likely to be volatile enough to move away from the special cotton and soybean fields on to crops growing on other farms.

What is more important, under the system designed by Monsanto and BASF, only farmers buying Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean seeds would be protected from dicamba drift damage.

Monsanto’s monster-herbicide blamed for killing millions of crop acres Monsanto’s monster-herbicide blamed for killing millions of crop acres

According to a report prepared for Monsanto in 2009 as part of industry consultation, such “off-target movement” was expected, along with “crop loss”, “lawsuits” and “negative press around pesticides.” Monsanto’s own projections estimated that dicamba damage claims from farmers would total more than 10,000 cases, including 1,305 in 2016, 2,765 in 2017 and 3,259 in 2018.

Both Monsanto and BASF defended their products, claiming dicamba is safe “when used correctly,” and an important tool for farmers. Industry estimates suggest that several million acres of crops have now been reported damaged by dicamba. More than 100 US farmers are engaged in litigation in federal court alleging Monsanto and BASF collaboration created a “defective” crop system that has damaged orchards, gardens and organic and non-organic farm fields in multiple states.

The first trial over dicamba damage ended last month with a $265 million jury verdict against Monsanto and BASF. The jury found on behalf of Missouri peach farmers Bill and Denise Bader that dicamba ruined their 34-year-old family farm as the drift has damaged 30,000 peach trees.

The family’s attorney Bill Randles said the companies’ actions to encourage widespread spraying of dicamba over large areas created an “ecological disaster.”

“The documents are the worst that I’ve ever seen for any case that I’ve worked on,” said lawyer Angie Splittgerber, a former tobacco industry defense attorney who works with Randles. “So many of them put things in writing that were just horrifying.”

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/484581-monsanto-profit-farmer-losses/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Wall Street heads for its worst first quarter ever

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Investors remain focused on the worsening Covid-19 outbreak in the US, which officially has become the most affected country, with confirmed cases rising to more than 164,000. President Donald Trump said on Sunday he hopes the country will “be well on our way to recovery” by June 1.

Also on rt.com US faces DEFICIT of GOLD amid coronavirus market rout – media

US stock markets are giving back some of the gains from the previous session, when the Dow jumped nearly 700 points and the SP 500 rallied 3.4 percent. The gains on Monday were led by an eight percent surge in Johnson Johnson shares after the pharmaceutical firm announced a vaccine candidate for the coronavirus.

“I think the market has established some type of bottom,” Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC. “I don’t know if this is October ’08 here; we still have some wood to chop.”

Coronavirus spread prompts WORST DAY on Wall Street since ‘Black Monday’ of 1987 Coronavirus spread prompts WORST DAY on Wall Street since ‘Black Monday’ of 1987

The Dow is now up 20 percent from its coronavirus sell-off low on March 23, while the SP 500 has grown more than 17 percent from those levels.

Despite the recent comeback, Wall Street is headed for its worst start from the beginning of the year. US stock markets are down 21.8 percent since January 1, on track for the worst quarter since 1987 and the worst first quarter ever.

The Dow is down 12 percent in March, on pace for its worst month since October 2008. The SP 500 is down 11 percent this month, also on pace for its worst month since 2008. It is on track for its worst quarter since 2008 and the worst first quarter since 1938.

Goldman Sachs has significantly downgraded its outlook for the US economy between April and June. The investment bank now expects an annualized rate of contraction of 34 percent compared to the previous quarter. Its last estimate was an already-shocking 24 percent.

Goldman has also revised the unemployment rate, projecting it to rise to 15 percent by the middle of the year, compared to nine percent earlier.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/484585-us-stocks-down-coronavirus/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Russia sets up new oil company to potentially take over operations in Venezuela

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Roszarubezhneft, which is owned by the Federal Agency for Government Property Management, will have an authorized capital of 322.7 billion rubles (over $4 billion). 

The company was registered in Moscow on March 28, after Russia’s oil major Rosneft announced the sale of its assets in Venezuela. On Saturday, Rosneft signed an agreement with the newly established government-run company on selling its shares and on the cessation of its participation in all projects in Venezuela (including its stock in Petromonagas, Petroperija, Boqueron, Petromiranda and Petrovictoria). Under the agreement, the oil giant will receive 9.6 percent of shares in Roszarubezhneft.

Also on rt.com Venezuela slams US sanctions on Russia’s Rosneft as an attempt at grabbing control of global oil market

In February, the US slapped sanctions on a Rosneft subsidiary over its trade ties with Venezuela. The Russian company slammed those sanctions as illegal and groundless, pointing out that all of its operations in Venezuela were fully compliant with international law. It has explained that it had been investing in the Venezuelan oil and gas sectors long before the US sanctions were rolled out.

READ MORE: Trump threatens to slap ‘very serious’ sanctions on buyers of Venezuelan crude

Venezuela’s state energy firm PDVSA has also condemned the US sanctions and accuses Washington of attempting to create unfair competition to attain an advantage in the oil market.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/484546-russia-new-oil-company-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Could oil really fall to $0?

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

On Sunday, President Trump extended the social distancing guidelines through the end of April, retreating from his plan to “open up” the economy by Easter. And before the ink was even dry on the $2 trillion stimulus, Congress has already started preparing the fourth emergency coronavirus legislation. As of now, 193 million people in the US and a staggering 2.3 billion people worldwide are living under some sort of lockdown order, according to Raymond James. 

In early March, a few forecasters suggested that oil demand may be slightly negative in 2020, dipping by a mere 220,000 bpd. The call was somewhat provocative at the time. 

By the middle of the month, some forecasters said the demand hit could be as large as 10 million barrels per day (mb/d) in the second quarter. A few days later, another set of analysts put it at 13-14 mb/d. By last week, the IEA warned demand could fall by 20 mb/d. 

Also on rt.com Oil recovers from decades’ lows as Russia US agree energy talks

The negative revisions could keep on coming. Oil prices dropped sharply during midday trading on Monday. “For us, this is simply reflecting the increasing awareness that oil demand is breaking away, probably by much more than the 20 percent we have currently in our books for April/May,” JBC Energy said.

The market has fallen apart rather quickly. Some areas are seeing catastrophically low pricing, including prices dipping into negative territory in areas far from takeaway infrastructure. 

“Estimates for the demand side are being revised downwards on an almost daily basis, while on the supply side there is still no sign of any reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Russia,” Commerzbank said in a note on Monday. 

Analysts are now watching global storage capacity, which could fill up in weeks or months at most. The contango for Brent between May and November has widened to a record $13.45 per barrel, a reflection of the massive short-term glut. 

Also on rt.com Oil majors are preparing for $10 oil

 “The oil market supply chains are broken due to the unbelievably large losses in oil demand, forcing all available alternatives of supply chain adjustments to take place during April and May: Onshore product storage surge, refinery run rate cuts globally, massive increase in floating storage deals and upstream supply shut-ins,” Rystad Energy’s head of Oil Markets Bjornar Tonhaugen said in a statement. 

Plains All American Pipeline reportedly sent a letter to US oil producers asking them to curtail production, according to Bloomberg, and other pipeline companies are apparently making similar requests. “We are sending this proactive request to our suppliers to ask that you take steps to reduce oil production in response to the pandemic,” Plains said in the letter, according to Bloomberg.

Goldman Sachs sees US oil production falling by 1.4 million barrels per day (mb/d) between now and the second quarter of 2020. However, the bank said that declines from lower drilling rates today wouldn’t necessarily translate into lower production until the third quarter of this year. 

But because the glut is so gargantuan, and because storage is set to run low at current prices, that means that prices ultimately have to fall even further. “For this reason, our view has been oil prices will need to move to cash costs, resulting in shut-in production,” Goldman analysts wrote in a note on Monday. 

Also on rt.com The lesson US shale refuses to learn

The US rig count fell by 44 (40 oil rigs and 4 gas rigs) last week, the largest decrease in four years. Notably, the Permian basin accounted for 23 of those rigs. 

Bank of America said so much depends on whether or not the world can move past the pandemic in the next few months, or if the scars linger into next year and beyond. “The oil market expects these massive supply and demand shocks to fade within 3 to 4 months, a plausible outcome,” the bank said. “However, if either shock (or both) last for 12 months or longer, the gigantic surplus could keep oil prices below $30/bbl for an extended period.”

This article was originally published on Oilprice.com

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/484566-could-oil-fall-to-0/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Filed Under: Global Business

Coronavirus Prompts Instacart and Amazon Strikes Over Health Concerns

March 31, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Still, she said, she was concerned about losing her livelihood if she were to walk off the job. Ms. Brazier said that most of the Instacart personnel at her store turned up for work on Monday and that it appeared to be a fairly normal day.

Several current and former Instacart workers said it was notable that the walkout appeared to unite those who are classified by the company as independent contractors with so-called in-store shoppers, who are employees and only prepare orders within stores.

In the past, only contractors had taken part in similar actions. But once a Vice article about the walkout began circulating on Friday, said Ryan Hartson, who is an in-store Instacart employee in Chicago, he and other employees decided to join in. “It’s the nature of being front-line workers,” he said. “It feeds into ‘Oh, we need to take action, go forward and do that together.’”

Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies labor, said that organizing typically accelerated in good economic times rather than recessions, with the glaring exception of the Great Depression, in which a sense of despair helped bring workers together.

But Mr. Rosenfeld said he was skeptical that workers could capitalize on the current anxiety and frustration absent favorable legislation that enables organizing, a more accommodating response from employers or more robust assistance from established institutions, like existing unions.

Mr. O’Toole, the Chicago union official, said there were hundreds of Instacart employees in the area that his union was trying to organize after helping to organize a small group in suburban Skokie. He said the call for the strike was “clearly resonating.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/business/economy/coronavirus-instacart-amazon.html

Filed Under: Economy News

Restaurants Find Hope in Delivering Donated Meals to Hospitals

March 30, 2020 by Leave a Comment

The association worked out the details with Stacey Chait, a senior director at NYU Langone, who said she has been getting about 100 emails a day with offers of food. “It’s really, really wonderful to be going through this crisis but have such an outpouring of support and understanding,” she said.

Because it is cheap, familiar, portable and everywhere, pizza is probably the food most commonly sent during a crisis. It is not, however, ideally suited to this crisis, in which people have been urged to stay at least six feet away from one another.

“Putting a bunch of pizza in a common break room and asking a bunch of people to come in there is not supportive of what we’re asking of them as far as social distancing,” said Dr. Gartland, the Emory Healthcare executive.

The logistics of pizza distancing have become a familiar topic to Scott Weiner, a pizza historian and the founder of a company with the self-explanatory name Scott’s Pizza Tours. Since about a week ago, Mr. Weiner has helped arrange the delivery of more than 2,600 pizzas to 73 clinics, hospitals, shelters and other care centers affected by the outbreak.

Donations, which by Sunday night had reached nearly $150,000, arrive through the website of his antihunger nonprofit group, Slice Out Hunger. A dozen or so volunteers there arrange for somebody at each care center to accept delivery of three to 50 plain cheese pies. Employees of Slice, an unrelated pizza-delivery app, then place the order with a local pizzeria, which must agree to follow specific anticoronavirus safety precautions.

One of the project’s aims is to support local businesses, and so independent pizzerias are preferred. “But today I ordered from a Pizza Hut because it was the only option,” Mr. Weiner said Sunday.

He conceded that it is challenging to deliver hot food to facilities that are all but sealed off to the world.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/dining/restaurants-hospitals-coronavirus.html

Filed Under: Small Business

The Medical News Site That Saw the Coronavirus Coming Months Ago

March 30, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Stat is operated separately from The Globe, but the two split some back-office functions, occasionally run each other’s articles and share a headquarters on Exchange Place. The site’s main source of revenue is subscriptions, starting at $35 a month with discounts available. Stat also publishes sponsored content in its newsletters and has started soliciting donations.

Before it attracted a wider readership through its pandemic coverage, Stat drew praise for its investigations of the marketing and prescribing of OxyContin; IBM’s efforts to harness artificial intelligence to cure cancer, which, Stat found, fell short of the hype; and how groupthink may have stymied an Alzheimer’s cure.

With articles written in a straightforward style, Stat is meant for a general audience. But it wants to win over specialists, too — readers like William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who praised the site’s coverage as “accessible” yet “still rigorous.”

“There is no single place on the internet that I would go to better update myself on the diversity of views that are out and circulating,” he said.

Dr. Hanage added that Ms. Branswell’s reporting on the coronavirus had made her “a godlike figure to people who are infectious-disease epidemiologists.”

Ms. Branswell, who has published about 50 articles on the pandemic, was a health reporter at The Canadian Press before taking on the infectious-disease beat at Stat in 2015. In October, she profiled the World Health Organization’s head of health emergencies, Mike Ryan.

“We’re not ready,” Dr. Ryan told her. “If we can’t stop Ebola, what hope do we have of stopping … Disease X?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/business/media/stat-news-boston-coronavirus.html

Filed Under: Media Business

Tech Giants Prepared for 2016-Style Meddling. But the Threat Has Changed.

March 30, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, ordered a “lockdown” for hundreds of employees late last year.

A lockdown is Facebook-speak for a period of intense, focused effort on a high-priority project. The workers, who included engineers and policy employees, were ordered to drop other projects and build tools to prevent interference in the 2020 election, said two people with knowledge of the instructions.

For Mr. Zuckerberg, who once delegated the messy business of politics to his lieutenants, November’s election has become a personal fixation. In 2017, after the extent of Russia’s manipulation of the social network became clear, he vowed to prevent it from happening again.

“We won’t catch everyone immediately, but we can make it harder to try to interfere,” he said.

Facebook has since required anyone running U.S. political ads to submit proof of an American mailing address, and included their ads in a publicly searchable database. It has invested billions to moderate content, drawn up new policies against misinformation and manipulated media, and hired tens of thousands of safety and security workers.

In the 2018 midterm elections, those efforts resulted in a relatively scandal-free Election Day. But 2020 is presenting different challenges.

Last year, lawmakers blasted Mr. Zuckerberg for refusing to fact-check Facebook posts or take down false ads placed by political candidates; he said it would be an affront to free speech. The laissez-faire approach has been embraced by some Republicans, including President Trump, but has made Facebook unpopular among Democrats and civil rights groups.

Still, Facebook’s rank-and-file workers are cautiously optimistic. In late January, just before the Iowa caucuses, a group of employees gathered at the company’s headquarters for a party to celebrate the end of the lockdown.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/technology/facebook-google-twitter-november-election.html

Filed Under: Media Business
Next Page »