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Many of the most effective ways corporations avoid taxes involve shifting their profits and operations overseas and leaving companies that operate solely in the US at a massive competitive disadvantage. 

they automatically get a 50 percent discount on their taxes on all profits booked overseas. American profits are taxed at the full corporate rate of 21 percent, but profits of foreign subsidiaries are only taxed at 10.5 percent.  

These multinationals are then able to subtract the taxes they pay to foreign governments from what they owe the IRS. If that amount is more than the 10.5 percent they would typically have to pay, they owe the US government nothing.  

Basically, the more equipment and factories a company has overseas, the more tax-free profit it can earn

When you combine these loopholes with a cadre of other tax breaks, it allows many companies to completely avoid paying their federal dues. How are domestic companies and mom and pop operations supposed to compete?

Most of these advantages became law thanks to the 2017 Trump tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

"One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform," Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday.

"We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added," the company said.

But Musk is cheering the dogecoin comeback. Following the Coinbase announcement, Musk resurfaced a tweet of his from last July that showed a gigantic cloud with a dog's face on it and the text "dogecoin standard" that was approaching a landscape labeled "global financial system."Enter your email to receive CNN's nightcap newsletter. "close dialog"We read all day so you don’t have to.Get our nightly newsletter for all the top business stories you need to know.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! Thanks for signing up for the CNN Business Nightcap newsletter."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css from creative 52221 */@keyframes bx-anim-1334631-spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); }}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1334631 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 240px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #00c59e;border-style: none;background-size: contain;background-color: #00c59e;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 18px;vertical-align: middle;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 18px 5px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(0, 0, 0);stroke-width: 1.5px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {width: 310px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 290px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 230px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1> *:first-child {alt: CNN business Nightcap;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 380px;padding: 15px 0 0 10px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 300px;padding: 18px 0 0;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;font-size: 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-size: 15px;min-width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 16px;padding: 8px 0 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;padding: 6px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-UY4jwxF {width: 695px;paddi

Moderna’s full approval request comes as more than 50 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, but the pace of vaccinations has dropped sharply since mid-April. A recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed signs that some hesitant people have been persuaded: About a third of people who had planned to “wait and see” whether they would get vaccinated said that they had made vaccine appointments or planned to do so.

Mormons exude the confidence of a once reviled but now thriving minority. Founded in upstate New York in 1830, by a 24-year-old visionary called Joseph Smith, their religion is one of the world’s richest and fastest-growing. It claims to have almost 17m members in 160 countries.

Sadly, a comparison between the Mormon and evangelical churches also suggests how hard it will be for evangelicals to follow the Latter-day Saints’ lead. The big difference between the two is psychological and rooted in their divergent histories.

Utah conservatism is a reminder to the American right of its more expansive, optimistic past. It also offers a warning of where Republicans’ current pessimistic course may lead. Almost half of Mormons under the age of 40 voted for Joe Biden.

many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.

The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.

China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then

Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.

in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.

Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.

But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.

Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive

The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.

The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.

this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.

A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”

Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.

He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.

Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.

The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.

China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.

as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.

two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.

As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises

What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?

China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places

China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital

More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.

U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.

Wind and solar generators have gained substantial market share, and as battery costs fall, batteries paired with that green power are beginning to step into those roles by storing inexpensive green energy and discharging it after the sun falls or the wind dies.

President Biden is proposing to extend renewable-energy tax credits to stand-alone battery projects—installations that aren’t part of a generating facility—as part of his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, which could add fuel to an already booming market for energy storage.

renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.

the specter of more state and federal regulations to address climate change is accelerating the trend.

the combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves.

Much of the nation’s gas fleet, on the other hand, is relatively young, increasing the potential for stranded costs if widespread closures occur within the next two decades.

most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages.

Duke Energy Corp. , a utility company based in Charlotte, N.C., that supplies electricity and natural gas in parts of seven states, is still looking to build additional gas-fired power plants. But it has started to rethink its financial calculus to reflect that the plants might need to pay for themselves sooner, because they might not be able to operate for as long.

To remedy that, Duke in public filings said it is considering shortening the plants’ expected lifespan from about 40 years to 25 years and recouping costs using accelerated depreciation, an accounting measure that would let the company write off more expenses earlier in the plants’ lives

It may also consider eventually converting the plants to run on hydrogen, which doesn’t result in carbon emissions when burned.

as batteries help wind and solar displace traditional power sources, some investors view the projects with caution, noting that they, too, could become victims of disruption in coming years, if still-other technological advances yield better ways to store energy.

Gas plants that supply power throughout the day face the biggest risk of displacement. Such “baseload” plants typically need to run at 60% to 80% capacity to be economically viable, making them vulnerable as batteries help fill gaps in power supplied by solar and wind farms.

Today, such plants average 60% capacity in the U.S., according to IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. By the end of the decade, the firm expects that average to fall to 50%, raising the prospect of bankruptcy and restructuring for the lowest performers.

“It’s just coal repeating itself.”

It took only a few years for inexpensive fracked gas to begin displacing coal used in power generation. Between 2011, shortly after the start of the fracking boom, and 2020, more than 100 coal plants with 95,000 megawatts of capacity were closed or converted to run on gas, according to the EIA. An additional 25,000 megawatts are slated to close by 2025.

Batteries are most often paired with solar farms, rather than wind farms, because of their power’s predictability and because it is easier to secure federal tax credits for that pairing.

Already, the cost of discharging a 100-megawatt battery with a two-hour power supply is roughly on par with the cost of generating electricity from the special power plants that operate during peak hours. Such batteries can discharge for as little as $140 a megawatt-hour, while the lowest-cost “peaker” plants—which fire up on demand when supplies are scarce—generate at $151 a megawatt-hour, according to investment bank Lazard.

Solar farms paired with batteries, meanwhile, are becoming competitive with gas plants that run all the time. Those types of projects can produce power for as little as $81 a megawatt-hour, according to Lazard, while the priciest of gas plants average $73 a megawatt-hour

Even in Texas, a state with a fiercely competitive power market and no emissions mandates, scarcely any gas plants are under construction, while solar farms and batteries are growing fast. Companies are considering nearly 88,900 megawatts of solar, 23,860 megawatts of wind and 30,300 megawatts of battery storage capacity in the state, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. By comparison, only 7,900 megawatts of new gas-fired capacity is under consideration.

California last summer experienced the consequences of quickly reducing its reliance on gas plants. In August, during an intense heat wave that swept the West, the California grid operator resorted to rolling blackouts to ease a supply crunch when demand skyrocketed. In a postmortem published jointly with the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission, the operator identified the rapid shift to solar and wind power as one of several contributing factors.

Mr. Morgan, who has closed a number of Vistra’s coal-fired and gas-fired plants since becoming CEO in 2016, said he anticipates most of the company’s remaining gas plants to operate for the next 20 years.

Quantum Energy Partners, a Houston-based private-equity firm, in the last several years sold a portfolio of six gas plants in Texas and three other states upon seeing just how competitive renewable energy was becoming. It is now working to develop more than 8,000 megawatts of wind, solar and battery projects in 10 states.

“We pivoted,” said Sean O’Donnell, a partner in the firm who helps oversee the firm’s power investments. “Everything that we had on the conventional power side, we decided to sell, given our outlook of increasing competition and diminishing returns.”

Speaking frankly, it’s a lie,” says Liang Yong, a gruff villager. The official investigation of Ziyun’s economy was, he says, perfunctory.

Provincial leaders popped into his village, rendered their verdict that it had left poverty behind and then sped off. “It’s a show. In our hearts we all know the truth,”

Pork is pricey these days, so he eats meat just a couple of times a week. After paying his two children’s school fees, he has little money left.

He is poorer than many others in China, especially in its cities.

But the ability to scrape enough together for meat, education and heating marks Mr Liang as someone who has in fact left extreme poverty

Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”.

It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011.

Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.)

In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5%

It decollectivised agriculture, giving farmers an incentive to produce more. It allowed people to move around the country to find work. It gave more freedom to entrepreneurs. It helped by building roads, investing in education and courting foreign investors. Its goal was to boost the economy;

The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020.

tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot

They spent public money widely.

I

n 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan

One of the biggest challenges has been the terrain where the poor live.

about 30% of the country’s total—that were designated as poverty-stricken when Mr Xi began his anti-poverty campaign were all mainly rural. Most were mountainous or on inhospitable land

to introduce industry

mostly modern agriculture.

government created a 25-hectare zone for growing and processing shiitake mushrooms

the shiitake are a cash crop, letting them earn about 80 yuan a day, a decent wage.

In the 1980s China broke up communal farms, letting people strike out on their own. Now the government wants them to pool their resources again

turning farmers into “shareholders”

Residents get stakes in new rural enterprises, which, all going well, will pay dividends.

The Luomai shiitake farm is run by China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned firm. But there is a risk that as the anti-poverty campaign fades away, some projects will fizzle.

The second approach to helping hard-up villages was more radical: moving inhabitants to better-connected areas.

2016 and 2020 officials relocated about 10m people.

The government concluded that it was too costly to provide necessary services, from roads to health care, to the most remote villages

A frequent problem after moving people into such housing is finding work for them.

the government called on local officials to arrange jobs for at least one member of each household.

with her new surroundings. There is a good school just across the street, which is far better for her child.

A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland.

recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor.

namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor.

If poverty is calculated this way it becomes almost impossible to eliminate,

China does not count any poverty in its cities because welfare safeguards supposedly help those without money.

But workers who have moved from the countryside lack the right documentation for ready access to urban welfare.

And for any city-dweller, support is meagre. In relative terms about a fifth of China’s urban residents can be classified as poor,

To reduce relative poverty, China needs different tactics from the ones used in its campaign against extreme poverty.

policies for which it has shown little eagerness.

On the streets of Guiyang, the booming capital of Guizhou, hardship is still a common sight.

Zhou Weifu, a porter in his 50s, scoffs at the suggestion that poverty is over. “What kind of work is this? I can barely make any money,”

With the US economy under renewed pressure as coronavirus infections and deaths rise, stimulus checks, funding for state and local governments and enhancements to unemployment benefits are increasingly important.

"This nation ... remains in the grip of a deadly virus and a reeling economy," Biden said Wednesday. "I hope that the Senate leadership will find a way to deal with their Constitutional responsibilities on impeachment while also working on the other urgent business of this nation."

The ratio of job openings to unemployed workers remains high and, outside the affected sectors, wage growth has not fallen much.

economic disruption appears concentrated in certain sectors, rather than spread widely.

If job creation were to return to the average pace achieved between June and November 2020, the pre-pandemic peak in employment would be reconquered in less than a year.

But if people instead regard these excess savings as delayed income, then the cash hoard represents stimulus that has not yet gone to work, to be unleashed when the economy fully reopens.

total fiscal stimulus in 2020 amounted to almost $3trn (about 14% of GDP in 2019)

a government-backed housing-finance firm, by mid-December Americans had accumulated about $1.6trn in excess savings.

economists typically assume that households are much less likely to spend wealth windfalls (such as the gains from a rise in the stockmarket) than income.

And stimulus has more than made up the disruption to incomes in 2020

Mr Biden’s proposed $1.9trn of stimulus, which includes another $1,400 in cheques, would make the total fiscal boost in 2021 roughly equal to that in 2020.

Typically, Keynesians argue that fiscal stimulus boosts the economy because of a sizeable “multiplier” effect. But the case for the stimulus to be as large as Mr Biden’s proposal “has to be that you think the multiplier in 2021 is really small”,

it seems destined to take total spending in the economy beyond what it can produce next year, resulting in a burst of inflation.

Indeed, since January 6th, when the Democrats won the crucial Senate seats in Georgia that might allow them to pass a big stimulus, the ten-year Treasury yield has risen from about 0.9% to around 1.1%.

bond investors have been expecting higher real interest rates, rather than just higher inflation.

Mr Powell says the Fed has learned the lessons of 2013, when its hints that it might taper asset purchases sent bond markets into a tizz.

It is unclear whether policymakers are committed to “average inflation targeting” as an end in itself, or simply as a means to stop inflation expectations from slipping too much during the downturn,

the assumption of cheap money that underpins today’s sky-high asset prices and the sustainability of rocketing public debt might begin to unravel.

The most likely outcome is that Congress agrees on a smaller stimulus than Mr Biden has proposed, and that overheating, if it occurs, proves temporary.

nobody really knows how fast the economy can grow without setting off inflation.

GameStop continued to soar as the Reddit investors stayed bullish on their favorite stock. By Jan. 22, it closed at $65. On Monday, it finished at nearly $77. On Tuesday, it nearly doubled to close at around $148. And Wednesday, it more than doubled, ending at $347.51.

Another member suggested that the Reddit traders were part of a resistance movement of sorts, writing, "[T]his is not a war on billionaires, the wealthy yada yada, but it may well be described as a resistance against injustice, inequality, rigged rules, uneven playing field etc which has been rampant on Wall Street forever."

With the stock market near all-time highs, there had already been worries that a bubble was coming. "The danger, as the dot-com bubble showed, is that Mr. Market can rationalize just about anything and build it into a narrative,"

Dr. Brannon Traxler, the department's interim public health director, said that the variant's arrival is an important reminder that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over.

Noting the limited supply of vaccines, she added, "Every one of us must recommit to the fight by recognizing that we are all on the front lines now. We are all in this together."

But the one first seen in South Africa has more mutations in its spike protein than the one from the United Kingdom. Several of its mutations are also present in a variant that was first identified in Brazil.

The coronavirus variants have alarmed public health experts in recent months, posing a new challenge even as vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have raised hopes in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company said that when its vaccine was used against the variant from South Africa, the vaccine produced levels of virus-fighting antibody titers that were around six times less than when it's used against other variants.

As a result, Moderna said it will test booster doses of its vaccine, including one that would be tailored to fight strains that have recently emerged.

Earlier this week, Moderna said its COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against new variants of the coronavirus — but that the vaccine is more effective against the strain first identified in the U.K. than the one found in South Africa.

Researchers have found growing evidence that both of the variants circulating in South Africa and Brazil may be capable of evading the body's immune system, heightening the risk of reinfection, as NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff recently reported.

The first U.S. case of the strain from Brazil was identified earlier this week in the Minneapolis metro are

by turning to social media

Reddit

this is the new normal.”

through a process known as “short selling.”

and then pocketing the difference.

they’re a byproduct of the connected internet

And now it’s happening to finance.”

They band together on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, messaging services like Signal and Telegram and collaboration services like Slack to trade tips.

Reddit shut down a subreddit where tens of thousands of Trump supporters congregated.

The cry: “Rally the troops, my brothers.”

'It was a horrible scene': Capitol Police have a $500M budget. Why were they unprepared at the Jan. 6 riot?

“People get swept up in this and are likely to follow the lead of the multitude,”

“How many of the protesters that stormed the Capitol actually thought the FBI would be hunting them down and threatening them with 20-year jail terms?”

The GameStop investors have fallen victim to the same kind of group thinking, Kamen said, without considering or fully understanding that huge, easy profits can just as quickly turn into a major financial loss.

They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.

These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.

the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform

The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.

Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.

the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.

“One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”

Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.

“People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”

Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.

Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.

But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.

The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)

Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.

Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”

Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.

executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees and page owners have access to it.)

Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.

there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.

Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.

CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.

It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.

The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.

This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.

As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.

irchner, currently a senator, is back to capitalize on Argentina’s dissatisfaction, this time as a vice-presidential candidate to Alberto Fernández (no relation), a little-known former adviser from the moderate wing of her Peronist Justicialist party. The pair promise to reverse Macri’s economic overhaul and restore standards of living for a suffering working class.

Macri says the solution to the country’s current economic crisis is not a return to protectionism, but more jobs. He wants to create a million and a half of them in the private sector by stimulating tourism, agriculture and the creative industries, as well as cutting taxes for younger workers and regulating more of the informal sector

Macri’s rival Alberto Fernández served as cabinet chief to his running mate’s husband, Néstor Kirchner (president from 2003 to 2007) and then in the early months of Cristina’s first term. Like the Kirchners, Fernández belongs to the Justicialist Party, the formal home of the ideologically complex Peronist movement.

Former President Juan Domingo Perón initiated the Peronist movement in the 1940’s. A populist, he built his support base among trade unions and the working class, advocating state intervention in the economy, strong labor rights and generous public welfare schemes for the poor. But his politics also incorporated elements like nationalism, and an authoritarian strain.

But just what Peronism stands for ideologically is extremely complicated. The movement today is sprawling and diverse, containing politicians on both the left and the right. During her two terms from 2008 to 2015, Kirchner pursued welfare programs and subsidies on services. But another nominally Peronist president, Carlos Menem, carried out large-scale privatizations of public assets and reduced budgetary spending during the 1990’s.

The pitfalls of Macri’s reform program has proved a defining factor in this election. In an effort to reduce public debt and make the country more appealing to foreign investors, the president has scrapped protectionist policies on industry, cut public spending and cancelled subsidies on gas, electricity and public transport.

He also floated the peso, which had been artificially over-valued during the Kirchner era, and removed currency controls that limited the amount of U.S. dollars and other foreign exchange businesses and individuals could buy.

Economic hardship under Macri has made it easy for Kirchner and Fernández to promise a return to the good days under Peronism. They did far better than predicted at a king of primary election in August, winning a 15 point lead over Macri.

The pair’s success, indicating a possible return to protectionist Peronist economics in Argentina, has spooked financial markets, accelerating the peso’s fall.

His name was William Blount, born in 1749 to a wealthy family in North Carolina, one of the most corrupt parts of British North America.

But with so many groups — the Cherokee and Creek nations, the Continental Congress, the British, the Spanish, etc. — vying for the southern frontiers, no one knew how to claim those lands.

Blount had other ideas.His strategy was simple: Make up the names of hundreds of settlers and then snap up the best plots with these ghost entries at North Carolina’s new land office, which opened in 1783. Then, he tried to raise land values by luring British investors with fairy tales of North America’s emerging real estate markets.

With his associates, among them a young lawyer named Andrew Jackson, Blount eventually “owned” about 1 million acres, much of it deep inside Indian country. He used these claims to gain influence with both state and federal officials. In 1790, Blount became governor of the Southwest Territory

In the face of constant invasion, several hundred Cherokees declared war on the Southwest Territory on Sept. 11, 1792.

Blount begged U.S. officials for aid, but federal authorities were focused on Ohio, prompting Blount and his confidants to privately rage that the do-gooders in the nation’s capital preferred “savage” friends to white families. So they took matters into their own hands, with Blount quietly instructing Jackson and other confidants to launch scorched-earth missions into Indian country.

required U.S. citizens to abide by solemn treaties, including a new one with the Cherokee in 1794.

this treaty blocked white settlers from further trespassing on Indian grounds, which meant they could not buy Blount’s more remote claims.

in early 1797, he used his position as one of the first senators from Tennessee to approach British agents about invading the Spanish-held lands of the Gulf Coast.

President Adams found out about these half-baked plans in a bombshell letter, which he showed to his wife, Abigail. “Here is a diabolical plot,” she wrote. The president also sent the evidence to the House of Representatives, which voted to impeach Blount “for high crimes and misdemeanors” on July 7, 1797. The senators then used their removal powers from Article I, Section 5, to expel him from the chamber.

The next year, they drew up five articles of impeachment, each of which noted that Blount had acted “contrary to the duty of his trust and station” and “against the peace and interests” of the United States.

“For the first time ever, we are having a national political conversation about billionaires in American life. And that is because many people are noticing the vast differences in wealth and opportunity,

Financial disparities between the rich and everyone else have widened over the past several decades in America, with inequality returning to levels not seen since the 1920s, as the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution

The poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, Zucman found.

At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a “wealth tax” on vast fortunes, with many expressing concern they will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.

Steyer has proposed his own wealth tax, but Schultz ripped the idea as “ridiculous,” while Bloomberg suggested it was not constitutional and raised the prospect of America turning into Venezuela.

Zuckerberg suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power. Microsoft co-founder Gates criticized Warren’s wealth tax and mused about its impact on “the incentive system” for making money.

David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, told CNBC that a wealth tax would not “solve all of our society’s problems” and raised questions about its practicality. Also appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.

America has long had rich people, but economists say the current scale of inequality may be without precedent. The number of billionaires in America swelled to 749 in 2018, a nearly 5 percent jump, and they now hold close to $4 trillion collectively.

“The hyper concentration of wealth within the top 0.1 percent is a mortal threat to the American economy and way of life,” Boyle said in an interview. “If you work hard and play by the rules, then you should be able to get ahead. But the recent and unprecedented shift of resources to billionaires threatens this. A wealth tax on billionaires is fair and, indeed, necessary.”

“A lot of people in the Wall Street crowd still think the world is top-down,” Wylde said. “They think the people at the top of the pecking order are still making the decisions or driving the debate, as opposed to the new reality of grass-roots mobilization. They don’t realize the way pushback to their criticism goes viral.”

Lance Drucker, president and CEO of Drucker Wealth Management, said he has recently heard alarm from many of his millionaire clients over plans like Warren’s to implement a wealth tax on fortunes worth more than $50 million.

“Honestly, it’s only been the last month when people started getting worried,” said Drucker in an October interview. “These tax proposals are scaring the bejeezus out of people who have accumulated a lot of wealth.”

Some financial planners are urging wealthy clients to transfer millions to their offspring now, before Democrats again raise estate taxes. Attorneys have begun looking at whether a divorce could help the super-rich avoid the wealth tax. And some wealthy people are asking whether they should consider renouncing their U.S. citizenship and moving to Europe or elsewhere abroad ahead of Democrats’ potential tax hikes.

he has heard discussions about leaving the country and renouncing citizenship or other legal tax planning moves due to Democrats’ tax plans from several multimillionaires. “As the frustration mounts and tax burdens rise, people will consider it, just the way you have New Yorkers moving to Florida.

Vaping

The school district lawsuits are added to the catalogue of woes besetting the cynical opportunists who undid decades of good work to create a new generation of nicotine addicts

the company founded by Bowen and Monsees set about fine-tuning their idea. It developed a vaporizer that resembled a high-tech gadget rather than the cylindrical cigarette look-alikes and bong-like pipes already on the market. And in a major chemical breakthrough, it perfected a “vape juice” based on nicotine salts rather than free-base nicotine. This allowed the company to deliver more of the addictive drug without the harsh effect that makes new smokers gag and hack.

When Juul debuted in 2015, the clever little rectangle wasn’t aimed exclusively at existing smokers — people who might receive a net health benefit from switching their addiction to a smokeless device. Eye-catching ads, viral hashtags and social media celebrities pushed the product into America’s high schools and middle schools.

Use of tobacco-related products by teenagers was falling at the time of Juul’s launch, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, but that hopeful trend is ruined now. Overall use by high school students rose 38 percent from 2017 to 2018, driven by a 78 percent rise in the daily use of e-cigarettes.

“Juuling” is a verb known to tens of millions of American children today; more than 3 million of them Juul daily.

Sadly, the horse is out of the barn. Anyone who has experienced nicotine addiction can report that kicking the habit is easier to pledge than to accomplish

An untold number of those 3 million-plus high school Juulers will be battling to quit for years, perhaps decades, to come.

get this: We know nothing of the long-term health effects of vaping. Nicotine’s potential harm to the development of young brains is well-documented, but the downstream toll will accrue over time.

This vape craze should never have been allowed to happen. It is a double failure: a failure of governance on the part of federal regulators who should never have permitted a new nicotine delivery system to proliferate without oversight, and a moral failure by investors willing to peddle drugs to kids.

humanity’s moral senses have not kept pace with this power

Empathy could be an emotional bulwark against a warming world, if our collective care produced collective action. But it evolved to respond to suffering right here, right now. Our empathic imagination is not naturally configured to stretch around the planet or toward future generations.

Empathy evolved as the north star to our moral compass. When someone else’s pain feels like our own, we have reason not to harm them. Empathy is also ancient, tuned to a time when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Much as we did back then, we still find it easier to care for people who look or think like us, who are familiar, and who are right in front of us.

hearing about hundreds or thousands of victims leaves us unmoved. Such “compassion collapse” stymies climate action.

Like distance, time diminishes empathy. People find the future psychologically fuzzy

we even tend to view our future selves as strangers. This leads individuals to make shortsighted choices such as accruing debt instead of saving for retirement

Across generations, this tunnel vision worsens. Not only are the consequences of our actions far off, but they will be experienced by strangers who have yet to be born.

Touching the past can connect us to the future, especially when we look back fondly. In one set of studies, psychologists induced people to think about the sacrifices past generations had made for them. These individuals became more willing to sacrifice short-term gains to help future generations, paying forward their forbears’ kindness

One strategy is to turn the abstract concrete. When people make personal (or even virtual) contact with individuals who differ from them, they see them more clearly and empathize with them more deeply.

even if empathy is naturally tuned to the short term, the right tools can expand it into the future and build climate consciousness along the way.

their effectiveness in the climate conversation might also reflect the moral urgency of coming face to face with the people who must live in the world we leave behind

As one child activist recently declared: “You’re all going to be dead in 2050. We’re not. You’re sealing our future now.”

This raises another challenge in caring for the future: We won’t be there. Considering great spans of time means facing our mortality — an unnerving encounter that can turn people inward and increase tribalism.

other experiences can make us feel entwined with the world after us. One is the feeling of awe: a sense of something so vast that it interrupts our selfish preoccupations. Psychologists induce awe by showing people images of enormous things, like the Milky Way or a vista of Himalayan peaks from the show “Planet Earth.” In one such study, after watching awe-inspiring clips vs. amusing ones, people reported feeling small but also more connected to others; they also acted more generously.

Consistent with this idea, psychologists have found that people with a long view of the past are more concerned with environmental sustainability. For instance, older countries score more favorably on an environmental performance index

People made to see the United States as an old country vs. a young one reported feeling closer to future generations and were more willing to donate to environmental organizations.

This might explain why children and teenagers, such as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, have emerged as leaders in the movement for climate action: Children are living, tangible and beloved representatives of the future, not to blame for climate change but at risk of paying for it dearly.

Empathizing with the future, alone, will not save the planet. The majority of carbon emissions come from a tiny number of massive companies, which are abetted by government deregulation. Empathy can be a psychological force for good, but climate change is a structural problem.

That doesn’t mean individuals don’t matter. Our behaviors create norms, social movements and political pressure. Newfound awareness of how voiceless, powerless people suffer has sparked enormous change in the past. It can again.

Empathy is built on self-preservation. We watch out for our children because they carry our genes, for our tribe because it offers sex, safety and sustenance. Spreading our care across space and time runs counter to those ancient instincts. It’s difficult emotional work, and also necessary. We must try to evolve our emotional lives: away from the past and toward a future that needs us desperately. Doing so might help us to finally become the ancestors our descendants deserve.

Caring

China insists on its acceptance as a prerequisite for building economic ties with Taiwan, precisely because doing so is an explicit denial of its existence as a de facto island state.

"And also, the things happening in Hong Kong, people get a real sense that this threat is real and it's getting more and more serious."

Taiwan's interests, she believes, are not best served by semantics but by facing up to the reality, in particular the aspirations of the Taiwanese youth who flocked to her cause.

She has, for example, stopped short of the formal declaration of independence

hina has said it would regard such a move as a pretext for military action.

she is also well aware that as a result of her victory, Beijing may well increase its pressure on Taiwan.

In response, she is trying to diversify Taiwan's trading relationships and boost the domestic economy, in particular by encouraging Taiwanese investors who have built factories in China to consider relocating back home.

And she is planning for all eventualities.

"You cannot exclude the possibility of war at any time," she says.

"Invading Taiwan is something that is going to be very costly for China."