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Restaurants and bars are reeling from persistent spikes of coronavirus cases and related restrictions in their communities, driving retail spending in December down for the third month in a row.

Even as people continue to splurge on shopping, they cut back on going out to eat and shop.

Gas stations saw the biggest jump in spending last month, up 6.6%, as people traveled for holiday visits despite health warnings.

Frontline workers across the country are getting their hands on some Crocs many others cannot.

has announced that Grammy-nominated artist Post Malone is gifting 10,000 pairs of his sold out Duet Max Clog II Crocs to frontline workers at 70 hospitals across the country.

The shoes are well known for their comfortableness, and the Duet Max Clog II marks Malone's fifth collaboration with the company. They were released last month and like the proceeding pairs sold out in less than a day.

Allow me to ask a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?

the downsides of our app system — principally the control that Apple and Google, the dominant app store owners in much of the world, exert over our digital lives — are onerous enough to contemplate another path.

in recent months, Microsoft’s Xbox video gaming console, the popular game Fortnite and other game companies have moved ahead with technology that makes it possible to play video games on smartphone web browsers.

There is “no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one,”

This newsletter is about finding ways to make this stuff stick in your mind and to arm you with the information you need to take control of your digital life.

how to start? The definition of privacy itself. I think it’s time to radically expand it.

GRANITE CITY, Ill.—Ever since the layoffs a few years ago, many residents here had wondered when the local steel plant would again fire up its furnaces—or close forever.

Not only were hundreds of steelworkers left jobless when United States Steel Corp. X -1.49% scaled down its operations in Granite City, Ill., in 2015, but lunch deliveries to the plant vanished for a local diner while a shoe store’s work-boot sales plummeted. At least 26 businesses closed within a year, according to an area chamber of commerce.

The Granite City steel plant didn’t entirely close. Before the layoffs started, the plant employed 2,200, making it the town’s biggest employer, according to a securities filing. After layoffs of approximately 1,500 employees, some were eventually brought back, but the furnaces remained off.

We’re now awash in “crypto” hype—cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and fundraising efforts like initial coin offerings. For every venture capitalist or technical expert, there’s a half-dozen hype men and fly-by-night startups making the entire space look like a 21st-century version of the Amsterdam tulip mania.

These applications can’t be found on a coin exchange, and they aren’t going to turn anyone into an overnight billionaire. But they could bring much-needed change to some of the world’s most critical, if unsexy, industries. This means new ways of transferring real estate titles, managing cargo on shipping vessels, mapping the origins of conflict materials, guaranteeing the safety of the food we eat and more. Using blockchain, you could prove that a particular diamond on sale in a Milan boutique came from a particular mine in Russia.

The third reason is that hype I mentioned. The current excitement around cryptocurrency gives blockchain the visibility to attract developers and encourage adoption.

"I think our problems in the NFL along those lines are minimal," Fangio said. "We're a league of meritocracy, you earn what you get, you get what you earn."

"I don't see racism at all in the NFL. I don't see discrimination in the NFL," Fangio added. "... We're lucky. We all live together, joined as one, for one common goal, and we all intermingle and mix tremendously. If society reflected an NFL team, we'd all be great."

Fangio called Floyd's death a "societal issue that we all have to join in to correct."

Souder estimates at the rate of loss at his restaurant, it will lose $250,000 a quarter, which forced him to lay off 75 employees in one day.

Souder's restaurant is a microcosm of the coronavirus' ravaging of an industry and a sign of what awaits other sectors of the US economy.

In an open letter to President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the National Restaurant Agency estimated a drop in sales by "$225 billion during the next three months, which will prompt the loss of between five and seven million jobs."

As odds of a global recession rise, governments and central banks around the world are racing to fend off the economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus. The toll has already landed hard on jittery financial markets. Stocks continued to sell off on Thursday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 969 points, or about 3.6%, as investors fled stocks. Companies have shut factories, canceled conferences and drastically scaled back employee travel.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final passage to a roughly $8 billion spending package to provide medical supplies in hard-hit areas and pay for vaccine research. President Trump has said he will sign the bill. Despite such measures, many economists now say growth is likely to slow considerably this year — if not contract altogether.

Goldman Sachs projected on Sunday that because of the coronavirus, the U.S. economy would grow by an anemic 0.9% during the first three months of 2020 and would flatline during the second quarter.

LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.

Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)

With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”

The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.

In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.

Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said

As of Wednesday, 15 of the top 20 bestselling books are about race, racism and white supremacy in the US. Sales surged following the last eight days of protest after George Floyd's death in police custody.

"White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism," novel "The Vanishing Half" by black author Brit Bennett and the children's picture book "I Am Enough," are in such high demand that many of them are temporarily out of stock or only available in ebook or audio form.

"This doesn't happen every day," Kendi tweeted Tuesday. "It is fitting it happens on the day we are Blacking Out for Black lives and hopefully supporting our local independent bookstores too."

The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.

Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."

"What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).

"Next time you see a TV commercial for a prescription drug, remind yourself that you know nothing about medical treatment and that everybody who made the commercial has a financial interest in your future behavior." —Eric Horowitz, Psychology Today, How Pharmaceutical Ads Distort Healthcare Markets

"According to Kantar Media, a firm that tracks multimedia advertising, 771,368 such ads were shown in 2016, the last full year for which data is (sic) available, an increase of almost 65 percent over 2012."

What catches my ears is the way in which drug presentations are made, often beginning with a personal story about someone suffering from a specific disease and how a particular drug helped them along. All well and good, until we learn that the players are usually fake patients called "actor portrayals" and fake doctors, often referred to as "actor portrayals" or "doctor dramatizations." After learning what a drug might be good for, the ads consist of rapid staccato-like talk about possible side-effects and lists in tiny text that are virtually impossible to read.