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all is far from well in the kingdom of Bezos. At a defining moment for the company, it is letting customers down.

the promise to ship anything to our doorstep in a day or two that has gained it the trust of an astonishing 112 million Prime members in the U.S. (a nation of 129 million households) has evaporated nearly overnight.

it feels like Amazon is little better than any other retailer at getting us what we need, when we need it.

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field

publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.

"We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”

Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Treasury secretary, plans to tell lawmakers that the U.S. risks a longer, more painful recession unless Congress approves more aid and urge them to “act big” to shore up the recovery.

“Economists don’t always agree, but I think there is a consensus now: Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now—and long-term scarring of the economy later,” Ms. Yellen will say. “Over the next few months, we are going to need more aid to distribute the vaccine; to reopen schools; to help states keep firefighters and teachers on the job.”

Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, unveiled last week, provides for another round of direct stimulus payments, extended and enhanced jobless benefits, funding for schools and first responders and the creation of a nationwide vaccination program. It also includes longstanding Democratic priorities, such as raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding paid leave for workers.

Indonesia became the first country outside China to give emergency use approval to a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd., despite findings that place the candidate’s efficacy among the lowest for new coronavirus vaccines

Indonesia’s food and drug agency said Monday that a late-stage clinical trial in the large city of Bandung showed Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine to be 65.3% effective. That compares to clinical trial results out of Brazil last week showing the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 78%.

A rate of 65% exceeds the 50% threshold that the World Health Organization and many regulatory authorities consider necessary for widespread use. Western vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and jointly by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE have reported their vaccines to be more than 90% effective; another developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC was at least 62% effective, according to the team.

Russia’s military incursion deeper into Ukraine is one of those rare events that won’t merely affect the world. It will change the world.

By moving further into a sovereign state to bring it under his thumb, Russian President Vladimir Putin has shattered the security architecture that has prevailed in Europe since the end of the Cold War, and no one knows what will take its place.

fissures that have been lying just beneath the surface in American politics, separating internationalists and neo-isolationists, are becoming more visible, particularly in the Republican Party.

Private lenders are pushing to break up the government’s near monopoly in the $100 billion-a-year student-loan market.

The banking industry’s main lobbying group, the Consumer Bankers Association, is pressing for the government to instate caps on how much individual graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government to cover tuition. That would force many families to turn to private lenders to cover portions of their bills. While that could mean lower interest rates for some, it could constrain funding to households with blemished credit histories.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in new business for private lenders, a group currently dominated by SLM Corp. , better known as Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo & Co., and Discover Financial Services .

The culprits: rising mortgage rates, a tax bill that reduces the incentives for homeownership and a growing weariness among first-buyers being priced out of the market—all of which are expected to damp demand for homes this year.

“It’s still going to be a tight market, but we’re moving from an extremely tight market to one that has some wiggle room around the edges for buyers,” said Daren Blomquist, a senior vice president at the housing-research firm Attom Data Solutions.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said he expects sales to be flat this spring from a year earlier. Roughly 2.06 million homes were sold between March and June 2017, up from about 2 million in the same period a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.

the billionaire businessman disappeared from the public limelight following brushes with Chinese regulators in recent weeks.

The 56-year-old former English teacher founded Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. from a small apartment in eastern China in 1999.

The startup grew from a fledgling internet business matching wholesale buyers and sellers into a fast-growing technology empire,

“What has happened shows that nothing is forever, that history has not ended, and that even the foundations of the world are changing,” Mr. Siemoniak said

“We were fascinated by democracy, especially by American democracy,” said Mr. Siemoniak, who later served as his country’s defense minister and is currently an opposition lawmaker.

Then came the Nov. 3 election and an American president who sought to overturn the results with claims of systemic electoral fraud and egged on supporters who then stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. There has been no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.

Mr. Lee, the 52-year-old grandson of Samsung’s founder, received a 30-month prison sentence from a South Korean appeals court on Monday, in a retrial of his 2017 conviction for bribing South Korea’s former president. His prior time behind bars of roughly a year counts toward his new sentence. If granted early parole, Mr. Lee could walk free next year.

In a sign of his vast influence, Mr. Lee’s detainment triggered a selloff across Samsung’s affiliates, wiping away billions of dollars in market value. Samsung Electronics fell 3.4%, battery maker Samsung SDI Co. slid 4.2% and Samsung C&T Corp. , the conglomerate’s de facto holding company, dropped 6.8%.

Unlike in 2017, Samsung Electronics—the conglomerate’s crown jewel—isn’t in the middle of a historic run in memory-chip prices. That period was so fruitful that it negated the ill effects of the prior year’s embarrassing global recall of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.

Saudi Arabia Curbs Death Penalty in Move to Soften Image - WSJSaudi Arabia Curbs Death Penalty in Move to Soften Image - WSJRIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Saudi Arabia said Monday it had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment for drug-related offenses that led to an 85% reduction in executions, as the conservative Muslim kingdom seeks to soften its image to attract Western tourists and foreign investment.

The state-backed Human Rights Commission said 27 executions were recorded in 2020. That is down from 184 the year before, according to rights watchdog Amnesty International, when Saudi Arabia trailed only China and Iran globally.

Prince Mohammed, the 35-year-old de facto ruler, has previously said the government was working to change the law to reduce the punishment for some crimes from execution to life in prison.

France has inoculated more than 45,000 people in more than two weeks since European regulators authorized the first coronavirus vaccine, made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. Belgium launched mass vaccinations on Tuesday, while the Netherlands gave its first inoculations on Wednesday. Vaccinations in Italy stalled over the holidays and have recently started to pick up.

The U.S. has vaccinated more than five million people, the U.K. more than one million and Germany around 417,000. Israel has inoculated at least 16% of its population with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

“We lacked that kind of flexibility in our approach,” Mr. Rutte said. Dutch health-care workers started being inoculated as of Wednesday morning, with the government planning to increase vaccination to more than 60,000 a week.

The total for the week ended Jan. 9 also was the highest in nearly five months and put claims well above the roughly 800,000 a week they had averaged in recent months

The U.S. labor-market recovery stalled last month with the December jobs report showing the U.S. lost 140,000 payroll positions. The economic recovery’s slowdown has included weakness in household spending, though economists expect the economy to rebound later this year as a Covid-19 vaccine is distributed through the population.

Employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, marking the first decline since the pandemic hit last spring. The leisure and hospitality industry bore the brunt of the decline, shedding 498,000 jobs as a surge in coronavirus infections forced many restaurants and bars to close or scale back operations.

Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, leads the president, 53% to 39%, among registered voters in the new poll, which was conducted in the two days following the debate but before news emerged that Mr. Trump had tested positive for Covid-19. Mr. Biden’s 14-point lead compares with an 8-point advantage last month and 11 points in July, which was his largest of the campaign at that time.

evidence that an individual news event—the debate—is having a material effect on Mr. Trump’s political standing, at least for now

His support has never before fallen below 40% on the ballot against Mr. Biden.

“All you can do is grip the bar as tight as you can, make the smartest decisions you can in real time, plan for the worst and be surprised at something less than worst,” said Mr. Lembo.

Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp.

States are dependent on taxes for revenue—sales and income taxes make up more than 60% of the revenue states collect for general operating funds, according to the Urban Institute. Both types of taxes have been crushed by historic job losses and the steepest decline in consumer spending in six decades.

the trend of rising emigration actually predates the pandemic—and coincides with the emergence of several other important economic trends since 2017, including higher youth unemployment, the state’s renewed grip on the financial sector and an apparently structural downtrend in Chinese growth.

Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.

China, unlike the U.S., has always been a nation of emigrants—its diaspora is among the world’s largest and most influential.

ChatGPT is built atop a so-called large language model—powerful software trained on swaths of text scraped from across the internet to learn the patterns of human language. The vast data supercharges its capabilities, allowing it to act like an autocompletion engine on steroids. The training also creates a hazard. Given the right prompts, a large language model can generate reams of toxic content inspired by the darkest parts of the internet.

ChatGPT’s parent, AI research company OpenAI, has been grappling with these issues for years. Even before it created ChatGPT, it hired workers in Kenya to review and categorize thousands of graphic text passages obtained online and generated by AI itself. Many of the passages contained descriptions of violence, harassment, self-harm, rape, child sexual abuse and bestiality, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company used the categorized passages to build an AI safety filter that it would ultimately deploy to constrain ChatGPT from exposing its tens of millions of users to similar content.

The “second wave” of electric-vehicle buyers isn’t materializing, the Journal reported this week

To lure the first wave took thousands of dollars in taxpayer handouts to each buyer and thousands more in subsidies to encourage companies to build the EVs in the first place. And these buyers were the enthusiasts. How much more will have to be piled on the table to lure those customers who aren’t bewitched by EV cultural and technological appeal and care about having a useful car at an affordable price?

But this was always understood. In the fantasy life of greens, the next step would be to ban the sale of new gasoline cars altogether. Except Americans vote: Politicians who don’t get the votes of Americans don’t get to make policy, including the policy of denying them the choice to buy gasoline-powered vehicle

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.

Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.

General Electric Co. GE -1.39% helped invent the world as we know it: wired up, plugged in and switched on. Born of Thomas Alva Edison’s ingenuity and John Pierpont Morgan’s audacity, GE built the dynamos that generated the electricity, the wires that carried it and the lightbulbs that burned it.

To keep the power and profits flowing day and night, GE connected neighborhoods with streetcars and cities with locomotives. It soon filled kitchens with ovens and toasters, living rooms with radios and TVs, bathrooms with curling irons and toothbrushes, and laundry rooms with washers and dryers.

He eliminated some 100,000 jobs in his early years as CEO and insisted that managers fire the bottom 10% of performers each year who failed to improve, in a process that became known as “rank and yank.” GE’s financial results were so eye-popping that the strategy was imitated throughout American business.