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Contents contributed and discussions participated by ethanshilling

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ethanshilling

For the Economy, the Present Doesn't Matter. It's All About the Near Future. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...economy-jobs-future.html

US economics pandemic

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  • The economy is at a major inflection point, and the question is whether job creation will accelerate in the months ahead.
  • The new jobs numbers that the Labor Department released Friday morning don’t matter.These numbers can sometimes be unimportant in the sense that any one economic report offers only a partial view of what is going on, and is subject to margins of error and future revisions.
  • One worrisome sign in the new employment numbers: State and local governments appear to be cutting jobs en masse. They cut a total of 83,000 positions, about 69,000 in education.
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  • But the economy is still in a deep hole, with nine million fewer jobs than a year ago, or around 12 million shy of where we would be if pre-pandemic job growth had continued over the last year.
  • In normal times, the total employment gains reported Friday would be a blockbuster number. But continuing to add jobs at that pace would still mean a two-year grind back to pre-pandemic employment levels.
  • The report that 379,000 jobs were added in February and that the unemployment rate edged down to 6.2 percent is good news.
  • Will many of these jobs come back, if schools are able to operate at full capacity by the fall? The Biden pandemic rescue plan before the Senate includes $130 billion to help schools reopen safely, and an additional $350 billion to support state and local government budgets more broadly.
  • Huge job gains were reported in February in some of the sectors most directly affected by the pandemic, specifically an increase of 355,000 in leisure and hospitality jobs, most of it tied to restaurant employment.
  • Things remain murky on the longer-term implications of the crisis. The surge in employment in February was entirely driven by people no longer being on temporary layoff — the number of these temporarily unemployed workers fell by 517,000 people.
  • It is easy to describe the pathway back for jobs at schools and restaurants. But true economic health will mean that those 2.2 million people find their way back into the ranks of the employed as well, and that could take more than just a shot in the arm.
ethanshilling

San Diego Zoo Apes Get an Experimental Covid Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...san-diego-zoo-covid.html

world pandemic apes vaccine

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  • The San Diego Zoo has given nine apes an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by Zoetis, a major veterinary pharmaceuticals company.
  • In January, a troop of gorillas at the zoo’s Safari Park tested positive for the virus. All are recovering, but even so, the zoo requested help from Zoetis in vaccinating other apes.
  • Dr. Lamberski said one gorilla at the zoo was also scheduled to be vaccinated, but the gorillas at the wildlife park were a lower priority because they had already tested positive for infection and had recovered.
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  • Infection of apes is a major concern for zoos and conservationists. They easily fall prey to human respiratory infections, and common cold viruses have caused deadly outbreaks in chimpanzees in Africa.
  • Genome research has suggested that chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes will be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the pandemic.
  • Scientists are worrying not just about the danger the virus poses to great apes and other animals, but also about the potential for the virus to gain a foothold in a wild animal population that could become a permanent reservoir and emerge at a later date to reinfect humans.
  • Denmark ended up killing as many as 17 million mink — effectively wiping out its mink farming industry. In the United States, thousands of mink have died, and one wild mink has tested positive for the virus.
  • Although many animals, including dogs, domestic cats, and big cats in zoos, have become infected by the virus through natural spread, and others have been infected in laboratory experiments, scientists say that widespread testing has yet to find the virus in any animal in the wild other than the one mink.
ethanshilling

Once Upon a Time on Mars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rseverance-nasa-astronomy.html

mars science

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  • Three and a half billion years ago, waves splashed and streams surged across this dusty expanse on Mars now known as Jezero Crater. On a nascent Earth, chemistry was coagulating toward the exalted state we call life.
  • Astronomers, philosophers and science fiction writers have long wondered whether nature ran the same experiment there as on Earth. Was Mars another test tube for Darwinian evolution?
  • So humans have sent their progeny across time and 300 million miles of space in search of long-lost relatives, ancient roots of a family tree that might be traced in the Red Planet’s soil.
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  • The Perseverance rover and its little sibling, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed in a cloud of grit on Feb. 18, bristling with antennas and cameras.
  • The rover will scrutinize the debris chemically and geologically, and take photographs, so that scientists on Earth can search for any signs of ancient fossilization or other patterns that living organisms might have produced.
  • Perseverance and Ingenuity operate on very long leashes: 12 minutes of light-travel time — and signal delay — across the ether from Pasadena, where their creators and tenders wait to see what they have accomplished lately.
  • The rocks that return starting in 2031 will be scrutinized for years, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, for what they might say about the hidden history of our lost twin and, perhaps, the earliest days of life in the Solar System.
  • It could be the destiny of this generation to carry out the next great reconnaissance, to discover if we have or ever had any neighbors on these worlds. In Jezero Crater, the dream lives on. We may not ever live on Mars, but our machines already do.
ethanshilling

China's Plan to Win in a Post-Pandemic World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...national-peoples-congress.html

politics economics china

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China unveiled a road map for cementing its rise in a post-Covid world as it opened one of its biggest political events of the year on Friday, casting its success against the coronavirus as evidence of the superiority of its top-down leadership while warning of threats at home and abroad.
  • The message on Friday was one of optimism about the strength of its economy and the solidarity of its people, and of struggle against an array of challenges: a hostile global environment, demographic crises at home and resistance to its rule of Hong Kong.
  • According to the plan, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, will be amended to change the process of selecting the territory’s chief executive and the legislature.
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  • The changes will amount to a new electoral process with “Hong Kong characteristics,” Wang Chen, a Politburo member who specializes in legal matters, said in a speech.
  • Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 on the promise that it would be accorded a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. But “Beijing’s full grip on power in Hong Kong may happen well before 2047,” said Diana Fu, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
  • The government promised economic growth of “over 6 percent,” a relatively modest target by the standards of China’s pre-pandemic expansion but a big turnabout from last year and a signal of its commitment to keeping the world’s second-largest economy humming.
  • The forecast indicates that China expects a strong rebound after the pandemic brought the country’s economy to a standstill for several months last year.
  • The spending increases over the past two decades, which have given China the world’s second-largest military budget today, have paid for a modernization and expansion program aimed at challenging American military dominance in the Pacific, especially in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.
  • Strengthening that message will be a major focus for Mr. Xi as he looks ahead to two important political events. In July, the party will celebrate the centenary of its founding.
  • As China’s rivalry over science and technology with the United States and other countries remains at a boil, Beijing is digging deep into its pockets in a bid for victory.
  • Just over a year after the coronavirus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, Beijing also pledged to increase resources to guard against emerging infectious diseases and biosafety risks.
  • The Communist Party’s latest five-year plan specifically calls for the construction of a “Polar Silk Road,” presumably aimed at helping China better capitalize on new energy sources and faster shipping routes in the Arctic.
  • China’s military budget is set to rise by around 6.9 percent this year, a slight increase from last year. As overall government spending is projected to decline slightly, the People’s Liberation Army is still being funded robustly.
  • As countries continue to grapple with the pandemic, the party has doubled down on the message that China’s political model of strong, centralized leadership is superior to the chaos of liberal democracies.
  • The government addressed concerns about China’s aging population and shrinking labor force by announcing pension reforms and gradual changes to the official retirement age
  • On Friday, the government announced plans to build a system to support “family development” and strengthen marriage and family counseling services.
  • “Fully implement the party’s basic policy on religious work,” read a draft of the five-year plan. “Continue to pursue the sinicization of China’s religions and actively guide religions so that they can be compatible with socialist society.”
ethanshilling

He Honors Black New Yorkers. Not All Black Activists Are Thrilled. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orris-street-renaming-nyc.html

US new york

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  • Last March, a crowd gathered in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate a new name for Gold Street: Ida B. Wells Place. Jacob Morris, the tireless activist behind the renaming effort, addressed the group.
  • A force behind the renaming of some 40 streets and monuments in New York after prominent Black New Yorkers, including the performer Paul Robeson, the civil rights activist Ella Baker and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, he likes to talk and he likes to nudge, both of which come in handy when dealing with community boards and city bureaucracies.
  • For more than 15 years, Mr. Morris has been on a mission to increase Black representation in public spaces. The end result tends to look impressive, but the work itself is tedious, requiring hundreds of hours at local government meetings that few have the patience to attend, much less engage in.
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  • Starting in the 1970s, Mr. Morris got into real estate development, owning several buildings, as well as the Rare Bird video store chain, all in SoHo.
  • Getting a street renamed can take months, if not years. Though the process varies slightly in each district, proposals generally require petitions signed by 100 or more community members, accompanied by a detailed biography of the individual to be honored and a description of the person’s relationship to the area.
  • Any city resident can propose renaming a street, but few do. “Maybe he is taking up all the airtime, but he doesn’t have competition,” Mr. Singletary said.
  • And although Mr. Morris’s work is largely appreciated — and any antics at least tolerated with some humorous discomfort — he does have at least one detractor, in Central Harlem. An active resident there, Julius Tajiddin, took issue with how Mr. Morris planned to collaborate with Touro College, Mr. Morris’s former employer, to commemorate the country’s first Black pharmacy owner with a street renaming in Harlem.
  • “Almost every month Jacob finds a reason to be agitated, excited, outraged and militant, and usually he’s quite right in his concerns,” said David Levering Lewis, a Black historian who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographical work on W.E.B. Du Bois
  • He got his first taste of local politics when Lincoln was in middle school, and Mr. Morris realized that the city’s public schools were not required to count the test scores of students with learning disabilities toward their official averages.
  • He also learned about famous Black figures with little-known footprints in New York City, like Frederick Douglass, who, during his escape from slavery, had landed by boat at the Chambers Street dock in Manhattan.
  • At a higher level of city government, Mayor Bill de Blasio has rushed to reassign commemorative sites around the city to diverse figures without problematic biographies.
  • Three years ago, farther north in Central Park, the De Blasio administration removed a statue of J. Marion Sims, a gynecological pioneer who made breakthroughs by operating without anesthesia on enslaved women.
  • Mr. Morris hopes either would give a fair hearing to the many initiatives he is pushing. Those include: Establishing a freedom trail linking abolitionist sites in Manhattan
  • Mr. Morris has been working on some of these projects for over a decade. “If I’m responsible for New York City having a freedom trail,” he said, “that’ll be huge.” He paused. “That’ll be a legacy thing for me.
ethanshilling

Business and Stock Market Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stock-market-today

US business pandemic

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  • Hiring picked up last month as states lifted restrictions and stepped up vaccination efforts, with the government reporting on Friday that the American economy added 379,000 jobs last month.
  • But there are still about 9.5 million fewer jobs today than a year ago. Congress is considering a $1.9 trillion package of pandemic relief intended to carry struggling households and businesses through the coming months.
  • The unemployment rate in February was 6.2 percent, down from the previous month’s rate of 6.3 percent.
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  • “We’re still in a pandemic economy,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Federal Reserve economist. “Millions of people are looking for work and willing to work, but they are constrained from working.”
  • More than four million people have quit the labor force in the last year, including those sidelined because of child care and other family responsibilities or health concerns.
  • Most of the February gains came in the leisure and hospitality industries, including restaurant and bars, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. “There’s still a long way to go,” Ms. Pollak said
  • The labor market gained 379,000 jobs in February, yet unemployment rates for Black workers rose, underlining the uneven damage the pandemic continued to inflict.
  • Unemployment among Black women over 20 rose to 8.9 percent from 8.5 percent the prior month, while the rate for Black men older than 20 increased to 10.2 percent from 9.4 percent.
  • Black people hold 1.5 million fewer jobs than they did a year ago, down nearly 8 percent since the start of the pandemic. White workers, who make up a bigger share of the American population, have lost 6.3 million jobs — down 5 percent.
  • “Over the course of a long expansion, these persistent disparities can decline significantly,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said in a recent speech, though he added that “without policies to address their underlying causes, they may increase again when the economy ultimately turns down.”
ethanshilling

Connecticut Eases Coronavirus Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-coronavirus-restrictions.html

US pandemic connecticut

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Connecticut will later this month end capacity limits in restaurants, offices and several other businesses, Ned Lamont, the state’s governor, said on Thursday, following moves by other states that have eased some virus-related restrictions.
  • “This is not Texas, this is not Mississippi — this is Connecticut,” Mr. Lamont said at a news conference.
  • Starting on March 19, restaurants, retail stores, libraries, personal care services, gyms, offices and houses of worship will no longer have their capacity restricted.
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  • Several other limits will remain in place, including safety and cleaning protocols at gyms and personal care services like salons and spas.
  • Mr. Lamont’s announcement — made nearly a year after Connecticut’s first confirmed case of the virus — is a significant step forward for the state’s reopening.
  • As of Thursday, the state had 433 people hospitalized with the virus. Its average positive test rate over the past seven days is at 2.3 percent, which Mr. Lamont said was the lowest rate in nearly four months.
  • Still, over the past week, Connecticut has reported an average of 22 new virus cases a day per 100,000 people, a rate that is the 10th highest per capita among all states.
  • Throughout the pandemic, officials have had to adjust restrictions, finding a balance between safety, economic concerns and political pressure.
  • The governors of New York and New Jersey, both also Democrats, with whom Mr. Lamont has collaborated significantly on the pandemic response, have raised capacity limits in businesses, including restaurants, in the past month.
ethanshilling

Suburban Home Sales Soar in the New York Region - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...yc-suburbs-housing-demand.html

US new york housing

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  • Heading into the spring sales season, the housing market in the suburbs of New York has already gone into overdrive, with bidding wars becoming the norm and many homes selling within days of coming on the market.
  • The frenetic sales activity — a second wave after a surge last summer — has been fueled by multiple forces: historically low mortgage rates; pandemic-fatigued city dwellers desperate for more space; and many employers’ willingness to embrace remote work, allowing buyers to look in places beyond what would be considered an easy commute.
  • “This is the strongest market I have seen in two decades,” said Sara Littlefield, an agent in Connecticut with Coldwell Banker.
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  • “If there is a silver lining in this devastating pandemic, it’s that it has allowed people the freedom to make lifestyle choices like relocating, or downsizing, or moving up,” Ms. Littlefield added, “and they’re taking that freedom.”
  • “The spring market really began in October — that’s how crazy it’s been,” according to Vicki Gaily, a real estate agent based in Saddle River, N.J.
  • As soon as pandemic restrictions eased, Ms. Gaily, the founder of Special Properties, a division of the real estate firm Brook Hollow Group, noticed a burst of pent-up demand, largely from people fleeing urban areas. “I haven’t had a day off since,” she said.
  • “I’ve never seen the inventories as low as they are now,” Ms. Gaily said, noting that in Saddle River, which is in Bergen County, there are “maybe 40 homes” available right now, down from the usual range of 55 to 85 this time of year.
  • Buyers throughout Long Island are likely to face continued competition, too, along with rising prices, in large part because of the shrinking supply of available homes.
  • “In the last two months we’ve seen such a depletion of new inventory that sales growth has been nominal,” said Mr. Miller, the Manhattan-based appraiser who also follows the Long Island market.
  • “We would normally have five to six months’ worth at any one time,” said Seth Pitlake, an agent at Douglas Elliman in Merrick. “It’s not that inventory is not increasing,” he said, “it’s just that anything that comes out in the market is being scooped up.”
  • “We would put in an offer only to find out someone else offered $40,000 over the asking price,” said Ms. Monforte, a clinical social worker, adding that “every free moment was devoted to looking.”
  • And what do buyers want? “They want green space,” said James Gavin, an agent with Laffey Real Estate in Manhasset, “and a lot are asking for a home office and then a pool.”
ethanshilling

Ivermectin Does Not Alleviate Mild Covid-19 Symptoms, Study Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...irus-ivermectin-treatment.html

US pandemic study

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  • Ivermectin, a controversial anti-parasitic drug that has been touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment, does not speed recovery in people with mild cases of the disease, according to a randomized controlled trial published on Thursday in the journal JAMA.
  • Some studies have indicated that the drug can prevent several different viruses from replicating in cells. And last year, researchers in Australia found that high doses of ivermectin suppressed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in cell cultures.
  • But the drug has also proved divisive. While some scientists see potential, others suspect that effectively inhibiting the coronavirus may require extremely high, potentially unsafe doses.
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  • “There’s been a lot of conflicting views on this, sometimes extreme conflicting views,” said Dr. Carlos Chaccour, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who was not involved in the new study.
  • In the new study, Dr. López-Medina and his colleagues randomly assigned more than 400 people who had recently developed mild Covid-19 symptoms to receive a five-day course of either ivermectin or a placebo.
  • They found that Covid-19 symptoms lasted about 10 days, on average, among people who received the drug, compared with 12 days among those who received the placebo, a statistically insignificant difference.
  • The researchers did find that seven patients in the placebo group deteriorated after enrolling in the trial, compared to four in the ivermectin group, but the numbers were too small to draw a meaningful conclusion.
  • Bigger trials, which are currently underway, could provide more definitive answers, said Dr. Rabinovich, who noted that she was “totally neutral” on ivermectin’s potential usefulness.
ethanshilling

The Promises to Coal Country Are Familiar, but Can Biden Deliver? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kentucky-coal-biden.html

US biden coal environment

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  • From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia.
  • President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry.
  • President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there.
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  • In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation.
  • Past administrations have “accomplished really important work,” said Peter Hille, the president of Mountain Association, a Kentucky-based nonprofit group focused on community development, “but it has not been fundamentally transforming.”
  • If Mr. Biden is to succeed, local economic experts and historians say, he will need to avoid the pitfalls of even the most serious past efforts at lifting up the region, many of which exacerbated economic gaps and further isolated its poorest communities.
  • “Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”
  • Days after taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order on climate change that also promised a new focus on economic development in communities that have been reliant on coal mining and power plants.
  • Federal programs, from the war on poverty to the Obama administration’s cash infusion, “improved the quality of life for many in the middle class,” Mr. Eller said, “but most of your services, your food stores, your health services, and all kinds of things became concentrated in those select growth centers at the expense of those more removed, rural areas.”
  • Mr. Campbell, 36, said he hoped Mr. Biden would not sideline people like him in his new energy plan. He expects coal mining in his area to dry up completely in the next five years, and for many miners in his age group, there are no clear substitutes.
  • Of course, not everyone is waiting for Washington to come to the rescue, or even thinks it is the best approach. Gwen Johnson, who operates a bakery near Neon, said outside help was often misplaced and the money mishandled.
  • Old mines, if left to lie, can be dangerous for residents living near them and environmentally destructive. As climate change brings more extreme weather, the chances of mudslides, rockslides and other public safety hazards will increase.
  • Others see a broader need. Many in the region voted — twice — for Mr. Trump, some believing that he would bring economic prosperity, others as a form of protest against an establishment and a new economy that left them behind.
ethanshilling

Global Action Is 'Very Far' From What's Needed to Avert Climate Chaos - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reement-emissions-targets.html

world climate

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The global scientific consensus is clear: Emissions of planet-warming gases must be cut by nearly half by 2030 if the world is to have a good shot at averting the worst climate catastrophes.The global political response has been underwhelming so far.
  • The head of the United Nations climate agency, Patricia Espinosa, said the figures compiled by her office showed that “current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals.”
  • Still missing from the ledger is the United States, which has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country in history.
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  • The tally was all the more damning because fewer than half of all countries submitted fresh targets to the United Nations. The Paris climate accord, designed to limit an increase in global temperatures, had urged them to do so by the end of 2020.
  • The Biden administration has said it aspires to net-zero emissions by 2050 but has yet to detail how it will get there.
  • Likewise, China, which currently produces the largest share of emissions, has yet to submit new 2030 targets to the United Nations.
  • Some of the biggest emitter countries — including Australia, Brazil and Russia — submitted new plans for 2030 without increasing their ambitions.
  • Mexico lowered its climate targets, which the Natural Resources Defense Council described as a signal that “Mexico is effectively retreating from its previous leadership on climate and clean energy.”
  • In contrast, 36 countries — among them Britain, Chile, Kenya, Nepal and the 27 countries of the European Union — raised their climate targets.
  • The end goal is to limit global temperature increase to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of 1990 levels.
  • “This report confirms the shocking lack of urgency, and genuine action,” Aubrey Webson, a diplomat from Antigua and Barbuda and the chairman of the alliance, said in a statement.
ethanshilling

The Merit, Thrills, Boredom and Fear of Police Work - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rosa-brooks-justin-fenton.html

US police

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • By Justin FentonIn late 2015, I interviewed several young police officers over lunch in the middle of their patrol shift.
  • I asked each officer the same question: What do you want to be doing in 10 years? I assumed one might say “detective,” another “chief.”
  • Most of them responded with the same word: “tactical.” They wanted to be on a SWAT team, or something like it, handling shootouts and other high-risk situations.
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  • They were earnest about wanting to serve the public, but they also seemed a little bored, stopping cars and checking them for guns and drugs. They were mostly white. All the drivers were Black.
  • In “Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City,” the Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks takes a novel approach, chronicling her experiences over the past few years as a volunteer reserve officer with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.
  • The constant deluge of tragic and avoidable conflict is enough to make some of her patrol partners callous and cruel — one even calls the residents “animals” — but Brooks also shows that the officers are coping with their own despondency.
  • Her style recalls the work of immersion journalists like George Plimpton, Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich — who happens to be Brooks’s mother. Brooks makes this part of the story, nesting in a book on policing a beautifully written mini-memoir about growing up the daughter of a famous activist and writer, who disdains the police but also values a certain toughness.
  • Culture and training can lead well-meaning officers toward tragic outcomes. But in other cases, departments make it possible for dishonorable officers to flourish.
ethanshilling

Richard Carranza Will Resign as N.Y.C. Schools Chancellor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hard-carranza-nyc-schools.html

US new york schools

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Richard A. Carranza will resign as chancellor of New York City’s public school system, the nation’s largest, in March, city officials announced Friday.
  • The abrupt move comes after disagreements between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr. Carranza over school desegregation policy reached a breaking point in recent weeks.
  • He will be replaced by Meisha Porter, a longtime city educator and current Bronx superintendent who will become the first Black woman to lead the sprawling system, which has over 1 million students and 1,800 schools.
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  • Mr. Carranza did not have a signature initiative, and he was not able to usher through major desegregation policy, despite his bold declarations.
  • Mr. Carranza’s announcement follows years of tension between the chancellor and the mayor involving who had the final say over major education decisions.
  • The two men repeatedly clashed over school desegregation policy in particular.
  • Mr. Carranza vowed from his first day as chancellor to tackle entrenched segregation in the city’s schools, while the mayor has largely avoided even using the word. New York is home to one of the most segregated public school districts in the nation
  • Mr. Carranza is the second senior cabinet member to leave Mr. de Blasio’s administration during the pandemic; health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned last August. She, too, feuded with the mayor over his decision-making process and said she felt increasingly marginalized.
  • In June 2018, the mayor and chancellor announced a plan to get rid of the selective admissions exam that dictates entry into the city’s elite high schools, including Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science.
  • Black and Latino students are extremely underrepresented in those schools, and low-income Asian-American children are overrepresented.
  • The pandemic, however, forced the mayor to announce some changes to selective admissions policies late last year, including abolishing a rule that gave students in some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods first dibs at selective high schools there
  • Earlier this week, the chancellor encouraged families to refuse standardized testing this year, after President Biden’s administration said states would have to give exams amid the pandemic.
  • Still, the reopening effort has been extraordinarily complex and fraught with logistical issues.The mayor closed all schools in November as virus cases rose, then reopened only elementary schools in December.
ethanshilling

Where Have All the Houses Gone? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-have-all-the-houses-gone.html

US economics crisis pandemic

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  • Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did.
  • Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide
  • “The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic?
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  • A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.
  • “Every additional home that gets pulled off the market incentivizes someone else to not sell their house,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “That’s a self-reinforcing cycle.”
  • Add all of this up, and for every tale of someone who ran off and bought in the suburbs or paid all-cash sight unseen in some far-flung town, the larger story of the pandemic is this: Americans have been staying put.
  • The last decade has also been a period of relatively low interest rates. That incentivized many homeowners to stay in their homes longer than they would have in the past, clinging to cheap mortgages.
  • “We’re all looking for a unified field theory for what’s going on,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We have all these disparate pieces of information.
  • Right now, in a number of metro areas, home prices and rents aren’t just drifting apart; they’re moving in opposite directions. Prices are rising while rents are falling.
  • “I don’t think we’ve seen a housing market quite like this one,” said Jenny Schuetz, a researcher at the Brookings Institution. “And other recessions looked a little bit different, so that makes it hard to know what’s going on.”
  • Recent research by Arpit Gupta at N.Y.U. and colleagues suggests that rents have fallen the most in close-in urban neighborhoods.
  • The ratio of home prices to rents in many metros is now as high as it has been since the housing bubble — but it has spiked during the pandemic in part because rents have fallen, not solely because prices have soared.
  • The pandemic will also eventually subside, and people will gain more certainty about remote work, and more confidence about having strangers in their homes. But for anyone waiting for the typical spring surge in inventory, these reasons for optimism may not materialize in time.
ethanshilling

Do India's Cows Have Special Powers? Government Curriculum Is Ridiculed - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...india-cow-exam-curriculum.html

india government cows

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  • Indian students were hitting the books hard in preparation for a big test on cows, reading that India’s cows have more emotions than foreign ones, and that their humps have special powers.
  • But facing widespread ridicule, this weekend the government abruptly postponed the first exam based on a new curriculum, pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
  • Critics said the curriculum, devised by the National Cow Commission set up by Mr. Modi’s government, was an especially bold move by his ruling party to push its ideology and undercut the secularism that is enshrined in India’s Constitution but seems to be increasingly imperiled with each passing day.
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  • “This is very weird, this exam,” said Komal Srivastava, an official for the India Knowledge and Science Society, a nonprofit educational group.
  • India is 80 percent Hindu, but it is also home to large Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious minorities. Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, his party has embarked on a steady, intense and divisive campaign to make India more of an overtly Hindu state.
  • Cows have become a special flash point. Since Mr. Modi came to power, Hindu nationalist lynch mobs have killed dozens of people in the name of protecting cows.
  • In 2019, Mr. Modi’s government established the National Cow Commission with the express purpose of protecting cows. Its website lists, among other objectives, “proper implementation of laws with respect to prohibition of slaughter and/or cruelty to cows.”
  • The study material in the new course was designed by the cow commission, which falls under the Ministry of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and was widely circulated online in several languages, including English.
  • The material has chapters on cow entrepreneurship and sayings from Hindu scriptures.
  • The material that students were asked to absorb for the exam, however, made baseless claims, like one that inside the hump of the Indian cow “there is a solar pulse which is known to absorb vitamin D from the sun’s rays and release it in its milk.”
  • The test was not made mandatory, but India’s University Grants Commission, a federal agency, encouraged students — in fact, all citizens — to study the material and take the exam as an extracurricular activity.
  • Nivedita Menon, a professor of political theory at one of India’s premier educational institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the government was trying to “completely undo research and critical thinking.”
ethanshilling

'Patriots' Only: Beijing Plans Overhaul of Hong Kong's Elections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-hong-kong-elections.html

china hong kong elections

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  • China’s Communist Party already wields outsized influence over Hong Kong’s political landscape. Its allies have long controlled a committee that handpicks the territory’s leader.
  • Now, China plans to impose restrictions on Hong Kong’s electoral system to root out candidates the Communist Party deems disloyal, a move that could block democracy advocates in the city from running for any elected office.
  • Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.
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  • The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Mr. Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.
  • When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.
  • But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.
  • The latest planned overhaul seeks to prevent such electoral upsets and, more important, would also give Beijing a much tighter grip on the 1,200-member committee that will decide early next year who will be the city’s chief executive for the next five years.
  • Mr. Lau, a former senior Hong Kong official, said the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, would probably move to create a high-level group of government officials with the legal authority to investigate every candidate for public office and determine whether each candidate is genuinely loyal to Beijing
  • China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, raised the issue in late January with Mrs. Lam, telling her that having patriots govern Hong Kong was the only way to ensure the city’s long-term stability.
  • “You cannot say, ‘I’m patriotic but I don’t respect the fact that it is the Chinese Communist Party which leads the country,’” Erick Tsang, Hong Kong’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, said at a news conference.
  • “I can only say people worry about that — for example, whether criticism of Communist Party or the political system in China would be regarded as not patriotic, then they have this kind of self-censorship,” said Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer in government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  • “It’s just in connection with these two major and important matters,” Mr. Chow said. “I still believe that, going forward, we still have a role to play.”
ethanshilling

The Pandemic Is Receding in the Worst Hotspots. Will It Last? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-world-turnaround.html

world pandemic

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  • A month ago, the pandemic looked bleak. More than 750,000 coronavirus cases were tallied worldwide in a single day. Infections surged across the entire United States. New variants identified in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa threatened the rest of the world.
  • But the last month has brought a surprisingly fast, if partial, turnaround. New cases have declined to half their peak globally, driven largely by steady improvements in some of the same places that weathered devastating outbreaks this winter.
  • “It’s a great moment of optimism, but it’s also very fragile in a lot of ways,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
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  • Experts believe vaccines have done little to slow most outbreaks so far, but a small group of countries, primarily wealthy ones, plan to vaccinate vulnerable groups by the spring.
  • More contagious variants — or just lapses in social distancing and other control measures — could still bring new spikes in infections that could outpace the positive effects of vaccination.
  • There is no single cause behind the slowdowns, and the factors may differ in different places.
  • Each factor may not be enough on its own. Natural immunity, for instance, is believed to be well short of levels required to stop the epidemic.
  • “During the winter, when things were getting really bad, I think people saw how bad things were getting in their community and made different choices,” Dr. Rivers said.
  • British experts attribute the decline to a strict national lockdown put in place after the holiday season. Vaccines don’t explain it: Even though a quarter of the population has been vaccinated, only the earliest recipients had significant protection by Jan. 10, when cases there started to drop.
  • The challenge of keeping infections down until vaccines take effect will be considerably greater in countries with slower vaccination programs.
  • And a finding from South Africa that the AstraZeneca vaccine had little effect on a fast-spreading variant dealt another blow to countries that had planned to rely on the relatively cheap, easy-to-store vaccine as a part of their rollout.
  • Experts believe that vaccines will play a critical role in keeping infections down, preventing hospitalizations and deaths and even reducing the chance of future mutations if countries are able to vaccinate large swaths of their populations.
  • “We have a small window of opportunity here to take advantage of the decreasing number of new infections,” said Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
ethanshilling

College Student's Simple Invention Helps Nurses Work and Patients Rest - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wearable-night-light.html

US pandemic invention student

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  • During his day shift at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Anthony Scarpone-Lambert steps into a patient’s room. The lights are off, but he knows he has to change the IV without disturbing the patient.
  • It’s this dilemma that he sought to fix by inventing what he and his co-founder call the uNight Light, a wearable light-emitting diode, or LED, that allows nurses to illuminate their work space without interrupting a patient’s sleep.
  • Mr. Scarpone-Lambert and his co-founder, Jennifferre Mancillas, are calling the light a breakthrough for frontline health care workers.
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  • They were able to finance the product, which went through 30 prototypes and iterations, with grants and personal money as well as funding from start-up accelerators and awards
  • However, it has features that distinguish it from others on the market, including different light modes — blue, red and white.
  • Red light, which has a long wavelength, can help promote alertness, while blue light, which has a shorter wavelength, tends to do the same while also suppressing melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep, she said.
  • “It’s the tool that you didn’t know that you needed until it’s right on your scrub top, and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, where has this been this whole time?’” Ms. Mancillas said. “It makes life so much easier.”
  • More than 400 nurses have tested the uNight Light, and more than 90 percent said it was helpful, the inventors said. They have received 1,500 orders and will start shipments next month.
ethanshilling

'I'm Not a Cat,' Says Lawyer Having Zoom Filter Difficulties - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cat-lawyer-zoom.html

US court zoom cat

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  • Courts usually don’t let cats argue cases. But here was Rod Ponton, a county attorney in Presidio County, Texas, unable to figure out how to turn off the cat filter on his Zoom call during a hearing on Tuesday in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court.
  • The result was a video immediately hailed across the internet as an instant classic,
  • “If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon.
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  • It offered an injection of harmless levity when many people are experiencing a rough time — and Mr. Ponton took it in good spirits.
  • “Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings,” Judge Roy Ferguson, presiding over the case
  • “I don’t know how to remove it,” he said. “I’ve got my assistant here and she’s trying to.”To get the hearing moving, he offers: “I’m prepared to go forward with it.”Then, crucially, he clarifies: “I’m here live. I’m not a cat.”
  • All in all, the episode took less than a minute before he figured out how to turn the filter off, and they returned to business as usual.
  • This isn’t Mr. Ponton’s first brush with fame. He appeared in the final episode of the Netflix series, “The Confession Killer,” in 2019, about the convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to more than 600 murders in the 1980s, according to The Big Bend Sentinel
ethanshilling

Half of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Have Come Since Nov. 1 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-winter-deaths.html

US pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • New coronavirus cases in the United States have been trending down for weeks, with the daily rolling average falling 50 percent from its peak in early January. Coronavirus deaths, which typically lag cases, are declining as well.
  • Of the 465,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States, half have come in the 99 days from Nov. 1 through Feb. 8.
  • However, spring cases were most likely underreported because of a lack of widespread testing.
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  • Five states — Wyoming, West Virginia, Maine, South Dakota and Kansas — reported at least 75 percent of their total deaths during this 99-day period.
  • Washington State, the first state to report a coronavirus death, has seen about 46 percent of its total reported deaths in the past three months.
  • States in the Northeast that were hardest hit early in the pandemic during the spring wave have never reached the same levels. New York State, for example, saw more new cases over the winter wave, but not as many deaths as in the spring, most likely because spring cases were underreported.
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