ReportWire

Tag: COVID-19 pandemic

  • New incentives could boost satisfaction with in-person work, but few employers are making changes

    New incentives could boost satisfaction with in-person work, but few employers are making changes

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    NEW YORK — Justin Ryan Horton has two jobs. When he’s not working 24-hour shifts as a firefighter, the 22-year-old is working as an administrative assistant for a local community college from his home in Colorado Springs.

    Firefighting is, of course, not a work-from-home kind of job. So when the community college position gave Horton the choice to clock in remotely, he took it.

    “I’m gone a lot being a firefighter,” Horton said. “Instead of coming home and then seeing my family for a few minutes before leaving to go to my other job… I feel like I have just more time with (them) when I work from home.”

    The COVID-19 pandemic upended what working looks like for millions of people all around the world. While many jobs can only be done in person, swaths of employers shuttered their physical doors and moved their workplaces increasingly online.

    Workers have since begun to return to the office in waves, at least for part of the week, and navigating that transition is an ongoing and significant hurdle for employers and workers alike. And many simply cannot fathom a return to the pre-COVID status quo, changing how companies approach their staffing needs.

    Retaining employees who don’t want to work in person is an issue for companies, but relatively few employers (13%) have introduced new incentives that would make employees more satisfied with it, according to a newly released poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

    About 3 in 4 human resources representatives say that retaining employees who don’t want to work in the office is a problem — including 19% who call it a “major problem.” Another 54% of HR representatives call it a minor problem. And only about one-third of HR professionals say employees at their workplace are “extremely” or “very” happy about returning to the workplace.

    “Once workers discovered that (remote work could be) less expensive and… make their life a little easier, they just wanted to keep doing it, even once the pandemic began fading away,” Marjorie Connelly, senior fellow with NORC’s Public Affairs & Media Research department, told The Associated Press.

    In both the HR survey and a separate poll of U.S. adults, researchers found that the top factors behind employees’ desire to work from home include their prioritization of flexibility and work-life balance. Other HR representatives and employees who work from home cite the length and costs of commuting as key.

    Those are some of the main reasons that Megan Homis, 33, prefers remote work. As a senior account executive for an advertising and marketing firm in Southern California, Homis goes into the office once a month.

    “With traffic, it’s about an hour and 45 minute drive each way into the office,” she said. “And on top of that, I have two little kids — so just wrangling childcare for them with drop off and pick up is a lot.”

    Homis said that the ability to work remotely will continue to be a priority for her down the road. She would consider potentially going into the office more if an employer offered sufficient incentives and support for in-person work, but hasn’t seen opportunities that would sway her in that direction yet.

    Bill Castellano, a professor in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, notes that flexibility is key — particularly in giving employees agency for scheduling their work.

    “Employees really value more of when to do work vs. where to do work,” Castellano, who was not involved in the NORC surveys, said. He added that this is a key benefit for many remote workers today — and could be duplicated in physical offices with the right policy, such as having flexible start times.

    There are some initiatives that could incentivize more employees to work in-person — or at least increase their satisfaction about already going into the office — the poll shows. Most hybrid workers (55%) say paying employees more for their in-office work would provide “a lot” of encouragement for them to work in-person more often.

    Additional pay topped the list across respondents whether they were working in-person, remotely (44%) or in hybrid (50%) roles. However, just 4% of HR representatives whose companies have introduced new policies to get employees back to the workplace say that higher compensation is among them.

    Employees who are already going into the office — either entirely or part-time — indicated that other incentives such as commuter benefits, in-office childcare, free food and social gatherings could also add at least “some” more satisfaction with returning to the office.

    Those in-office perks had less sway among solely remote workers, Connelly noted — particularly social gatherings. “For example, I work hundreds of miles away from the main office, so they can have a pizza party (and) all the pizza parties they want, but I’m not going to be affected by it,” she said.

    Regardless, many U.S. employees have returned to in-person work, or had never left. Most paid employees report that they work in person per NORC’s survey, and three-quarters of those in-person employees say they are required by their employer to do so. About 1 in 10 indicate that they could work remotely but prefer working from the office.

    Meanwhile, about one-third of paid employees surveyed work remotely or in hybrid positions. The majority cited convenience and work-life balance, as well as a lack of in-office requirements, as reasons to do so.

    The number of people working remotely has fallen significantly since the peak of COVID-19 — but is still far higher than pre-pandemic levels.

    Estimates are mixed, but according to a Pew Research Center survey published in March, 35% of workers with jobs that can be completed remotely were working from home all of the time. That’s down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020. Still, that’s much higher than the mere 7% recorded before the pandemic.

    This coincides with dwindling work-from-home options from employers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72.5% of private-sector establishments, for example, had little to no telework in mid-2022 — up from 60.1% a year earlier.

    “I would think that this trend downward will continue, but I don’t think it’s going to go down to zero… (or) where we were pre-pandemic,” Castellano said, adding that he believes the hybrid model will grow in popularity. “The question is, what kind of schedule will that be?”

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  • Tackling climate change and alleviating hunger: States recycle and donate food headed to landfills

    Tackling climate change and alleviating hunger: States recycle and donate food headed to landfills

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    ELMSFORD, N.Y. — When Sean Rafferty got his start in the grocery business, anything that wasn’t sold got tossed out.

    But on a recent day, Rafferty, the store manager for ShopRite of Elmsford-Greenburgh in New York, was preparing boxes of bread, donuts, fresh produce and dairy products to be picked up by a food bank. It’s part of a statewide program requiring larger businesses to donate edible food and, if they can, recycle remaining food scraps.

    “Years ago, everything went in the garbage … to the landfills, the compactors or wherever it was,” said Rafferty, who has 40 years in the industry. “Now, over the years, so many programs have developed where we’re able to donate all this food … where we’re helping people with food insecurities.”

    New York is among a growing number of states targeting food waste over concerns it is taking up diminishing landfill space and contributing to global warming as meat, vegetables and dairy release the greenhouse gas methane after being dumped in a landfill. Rescuing unwanted fruits and vegetables, eggs, cereals and other food also helps to feed hungry families.

    Globally, about a third of food is wasted. In the United States, it’s even higher, at 40%, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. The U.S. spends about $218 billion each year growing and producing food that is wasted. About 63 tons (57 metric tons) goes to waste, including 52.4 tons (47.5 metric tons) that ends up in landfills and 10 tons (9 metric tons) never harvested from farms.

    “What’s shocking to people often is not only how much we waste … but also the impact,” said Emily Broad Leib, a Harvard University law professor and director of the school’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. “Food waste causes about 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

    Broad Leib says 20% of water in the U.S. is used to grow food “that we then just throw away, so we’re basically taking water and putting it directly into a landfill.”

    But she and others also note there is growing awareness of the need to do something about food waste in the U.S.

    In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency announced a goal of 50% food waste reduction by 2030.

    That has prompted a number of state-led initiatives, along with smaller, nonprofit efforts.

    Ten states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation or executed policies to reduce, compost or donate waste. All 50 states have passed legislation shielding donors and recovery organizations from criminal and civil liability linked to donated food.

    California and Vermont have launched programs converting residents’ food waste into compost or energy, while Connecticut requires businesses, including larger food wholesalers and supermarkets, to recycle food waste. Farmers in Maryland can get a tax credit of up to $5,000 per farm for food they donate.

    Several states have joined New York in setting up systems allowing food to be donated. Rhode Island requires food vendors servicing education institutions to donate any unused food to food banks, while Massachusetts limits the amount of food that businesses can send to landfills, which Broad Leib said has increased food donations in the state by 22% over two years.

    New York’s program is in its second year, and state officials believe it’s having a significant impact.

    As of late October, the program had redistributed 5 million pounds (2.3 million kilograms) of food — the equivalent of 4 million meals — through Feeding New York State, which supports the state’s 10 regional food banks and is hoping to double that number next year. Among those required to donate food include colleges, prisons, amusement parks and sporting venues.

    “Certainly, we should be reducing the amount we waste to start with, but then we should be feeding people before we throw food away if it’s good, wholesome food,” said Sally Rowland, supervisor with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Organics, Reduction and Recycling section. “To me, it’s a commonsense kind of thing and I think it’s just kind of built that momentum of people understanding about how much food we’re really wasting.”

    New York’s Westchester County has eight refrigerated trucks that pick up all types of perishable food, according to Danielle Vasquez, food donations coordinator for Feeding Westchester, one of the state’s food banks.

    The group started working with businesses in 2014 but has seen participation ramp up since the donation law went into effect last year. Much of the food collected goes to nearly 300 programs and partners throughout the county, including a mobile food pantry and the Carver Center, a nonprofit serving Port Chester’s families and children, which has a pantry.

    “This time of year is very important for us and a lot of families across Westchester,” Vasquez said. “There is the high cost of food. There is a high cost of living. Westchester is a very expensive county to live in. … We are here to supplement our families as much as we can so, that way, they can focus that money on paying their bills.”

    Among those visiting the Carver Center earlier this month was Betsy Quiroa, who lamented how the cost of everything had gone up since the coronavirus pandemic. She was counting on getting milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables during her visit and said she didn’t care if the produce was dented or slightly damaged.

    “Coming here is good,” said Quiroa, a mother of four who relies on Social Security. “If you are not working, you buy nothing. This is the problem.”

    Despite New York’s success, advocates for food waste worry not enough is being done to meet the 2030 goal. Broad Leib and others have called for a national effort to coordinate the various state and local policies.

    There is a goal, “but we don’t really have a great roadmap … and how we’re going to actually achieve that end goal by 2030, which is kind of crazy,” Broad Leib said, adding that a one-person liaison office in the USDA isn’t sufficient to address the problem.

    Kathryn Bender, a University of Delaware assistant professor of economics, said donation programs are helpful, but she worries they might shift the burden from businesses to nonprofits, which could struggle to distribute all the food.

    “The best solution for food waste is to not have it in the first place,” Bender said. “If we don’t need to produce all that food, let’s not put all the resources into producing that food.”

    ___

    Casey reported from Boston.

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  • Tackling climate change and alleviating hunger: States recycle and donate food headed to landfills

    Tackling climate change and alleviating hunger: States recycle and donate food headed to landfills

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    ELMSFORD, N.Y. — When Sean Rafferty got his start in the grocery business, anything that wasn’t sold got tossed out.

    But on a recent day, Rafferty, the store manager for ShopRite of Elmsford-Greenburgh in New York, was preparing boxes of bread, donuts, fresh produce and dairy products to be picked up by a food bank. It’s part of a statewide program requiring larger businesses to donate edible food and, if they can, recycle remaining food scraps.

    “Years ago, everything went in the garbage … to the landfills, the compactors or wherever it was,” said Rafferty, who has 40 years in the industry. “Now, over the years, so many programs have developed where we’re able to donate all this food … where we’re helping people with food insecurities.”

    New York is among a growing number of states targeting food waste over concerns it is taking up diminishing landfill space and contributing to global warming as meat, vegetables and dairy release the greenhouse gas methane after being dumped in a landfill. Rescuing unwanted fruits and vegetables, eggs, cereals and other food also helps to feed hungry families.

    Globally, about a third of food is wasted. In the United States, it’s even higher, at 40%, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. The U.S. spends about $218 billion each year growing and producing food that is wasted. About 63 tons (57 metric tons) goes to waste, including 52.4 tons (47.5 metric tons) that ends up in landfills and 10 tons (9 metric tons) never harvested from farms.

    “What’s shocking to people often is not only how much we waste … but also the impact,” said Emily Broad Leib, a Harvard University law professor and director of the school’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. “Food waste causes about 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

    Broad Leib says 20% of water in the U.S. is used to grow food “that we then just throw away, so we’re basically taking water and putting it directly into a landfill.”

    But she and others also note there is growing awareness of the need to do something about food waste in the U.S.

    In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency announced a goal of 50% food waste reduction by 2030.

    That has prompted a number of state-led initiatives, along with smaller, nonprofit efforts.

    Ten states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation or executed policies to reduce, compost or donate waste. All 50 states have passed legislation shielding donors and recovery organizations from criminal and civil liability linked to donated food.

    California and Vermont have launched programs converting residents’ food waste into compost or energy, while Connecticut requires businesses, including larger food wholesalers and supermarkets, to recycle food waste. Farmers in Maryland can get a tax credit of up to $5,000 per farm for food they donate.

    Several states have joined New York in setting up systems allowing food to be donated. Rhode Island requires food vendors servicing education institutions to donate any unused food to food banks, while Massachusetts limits the amount of food that businesses can send to landfills, which Broad Leib said has increased food donations in the state by 22% over two years.

    New York’s program is in its second year, and state officials believe it’s having a significant impact.

    As of late October, the program had redistributed 5 million pounds (2.3 million kilograms) of food — the equivalent of 4 million meals — through Feeding New York State, which supports the state’s 10 regional food banks and is hoping to double that number next year. Among those required to donate food include colleges, prisons, amusement parks and sporting venues.

    “Certainly, we should be reducing the amount we waste to start with, but then we should be feeding people before we throw food away if it’s good, wholesome food,” said Sally Rowland, supervisor with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Organics, Reduction and Recycling section. “To me, it’s a commonsense kind of thing and I think it’s just kind of built that momentum of people understanding about how much food we’re really wasting.”

    New York’s Westchester County has eight refrigerated trucks that pick up all types of perishable food, according to Danielle Vasquez, food donations coordinator for Feeding Westchester, one of the state’s food banks.

    The group started working with businesses in 2014 but has seen participation ramp up since the donation law went into effect last year. Much of the food collected goes to nearly 300 programs and partners throughout the county, including a mobile food pantry and the Carver Center, a nonprofit serving Port Chester’s families and children, which has a pantry.

    “This time of year is very important for us and a lot of families across Westchester,” Vasquez said. “There is the high cost of food. There is a high cost of living. Westchester is a very expensive county to live in. … We are here to supplement our families as much as we can so, that way, they can focus that money on paying their bills.”

    Among those visiting the Carver Center earlier this month was Betsy Quiroa, who lamented how the cost of everything had gone up since the coronavirus pandemic. She was counting on getting milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables during her visit and said she didn’t care if the produce was dented or slightly damaged.

    “Coming here is good,” said Quiroa, a mother of four who relies on Social Security. “If you are not working, you buy nothing. This is the problem.”

    Despite New York’s success, advocates for food waste worry not enough is being done to meet the 2030 goal. Broad Leib and others have called for a national effort to coordinate the various state and local policies.

    There is a goal, “but we don’t really have a great roadmap … and how we’re going to actually achieve that end goal by 2030, which is kind of crazy,” Broad Leib said, adding that a one-person liaison office in the USDA isn’t sufficient to address the problem.

    Kathryn Bender, a University of Delaware assistant professor of economics, said donation programs are helpful, but she worries they might shift the burden from businesses to nonprofits, which could struggle to distribute all the food.

    “The best solution for food waste is to not have it in the first place,” Bender said. “If we don’t need to produce all that food, let’s not put all the resources into producing that food.”

    ___

    Casey reported from Boston.

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  • Canned seafood moves beyond tuna sandwiches in a pandemic trend that stuck

    Canned seafood moves beyond tuna sandwiches in a pandemic trend that stuck

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    SAN FRANCISCO — Sardines swirling in preserved lemons. Mackerel basking in curry sauce. Chargrilled squid bathing in ink. All are culinary delicacies long popular in Europe that are now making their mark on U.S. menus.

    The country’s canned seafood industry is moving well beyond tuna sandwiches, a pandemic-era trend that began with Americans in lockdown demanding more of their cupboard staples.

    Since then, the U.S. market has only expanded, fueled by social media influencers touting the benefits of the high-powered protein food in brightly colored metal containers. On the TikTok channel Tinned — Fishionado, Kris Wilson posts recipes for quick meals, including one mixing leftover rice, soy sauce, avocado and a runny egg with a tin of smoked mussels from the Danish company Fangst.

    Tinned fish, as it’s called in Europe, is now a regular offering on menus at wine bars from San Francisco to Houston to New York, where patrons scoop the contents straight out of the can. There are even tinned fish clubs that mimic wine clubs by sending members monthly shipments of various seafood packed in various combinations of spices, oils and sauces. Videos on tinned fish, from tastings to how-to tips on cleaning the fishy smell from cans, have generated more than 30 million views on TikTok.

    U.S. canned seafood industry sales have grown from $2.3 billion in 2018 to more than $2.7 billion so far this year, according to market research firm Circana.

    Becca Millstein opened a Los Angeles-based tinned fish business in 2020 after eating more of it during coronavirus lockdowns.

    “When we were all quarantining at home, preparing 100% of our meals day in and day out, it was very time consuming to create satiating meals,” she said. “I just found myself eating so much canned fish, and at the same time, the options that I found when strolling up and down the aisles of my local grocery store just were not great.”

    Millstein lived in Spain in college and spent time in Portugal, both countries where tinned fish has long been a part of people’s diets, so she knew there were better options to be had.

    “I was eating the same canned fish that my great grandmother Rose in Brooklyn was eating in the 1930s,” she said. “I thought that was just insane.”

    Her company, Fishwife Tinned Seafood Co., set out to offer high-quality, sustainably sourced seafood.

    Millstein said she sought out canneries in Spain and Portugal and contacted fishers along the West Coast who connected her to canneries in Oregon and Washington.

    “Our mission is really to just galvanize the canned fish industry and transform and make it what we think it can be,” Millstein said, adding that means offering much more “than tuna fish sandwiches.”

    Priced from $7.99 to $10.99 per tin, Fishwife products are meant to be delicacies that can be served over rice bowls, on charcuterie boards or in salads, Millstein said. She added that her company’s sales grew by 250% from 2021 to 2022, and are on track to jump about 150% this year, though she declined to release dollar figures.

    To that end, Fishwife’s products include smoked salmon brined in salt, garlic salt and brown sugar then hand-packed into cans with Sichuan chile crisps crafted in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Its anchovies from the Cantabrian Sea are packed with premium Spanish extra virgin olive oil, sourced directly from farmers in northern Spain.

    The company’s smoked albacore tuna is caught in the Pacific Northwest, with one fishing pole at a time to minimize harm to marine species such as sea turtles, sharks, rays, dolphins and seabirds that can be caught unintentionally during commercial fishing operations.

    “These are products that you would want to serve to people who are coming over for dinner,” Millstein said. “They’re not just something that you would want to maybe like mash up really quickly and feed yourself for a quick, cheap protein fix.”

    Simi Grewal, a co-founder of the San Francisco wine shop and bar DECANTsf, said her business turned to tinned fish to feed customers partly because it doesn’t have a kitchen suitable for cooking.

    “It’s super versatile, especially when we’re talking about pairing with wine,” she said.

    Tinned fish at the shop runs anywhere from $8 for Ati Manel garfish, a needle-like fish offred in olive oil from Portugal, to $36 for Conservas de Cambados ‘Sea Urchin Caviar’ from Spain’s Galician estuaries.

    “People make a lot of assumptions about, you know, tinned fish being a cheap product. And you know, when you come here, this is a very highly curated program,” she said. “I spend hours and hours a month researching these folks and trying to find what are the newest items that they have out.”

    Maria Finn, a chef and author in the Bay Area, said tinned fish is attracting everyone from foodies in search of the newest taste to doomsdayers stocking their bunkers. She takes the mussels from Patagonia Provisions on her annual mushroom hunts for a quick lunch and keeps packed cans of Wild Planet sardines in her bag in case wildfire threatens her home.

    “I figure if anything can keep you alive for a long time, it’s going to be a tin of sardines packed in olive oil,” she joked.

    Tinned fish can last up to five years and requires no refrigeration, offering an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, which is the largest agricultural source of greenhouse gasses and has a bigger carbon footprint than any other protein source. The way humans produce and consume food contributes nearly 30% to greenhouse gas emissions, according to scientists.

    But tinned fish is not without its drawbacks.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cautioned people, especially pregnant women, to avoid eating too much fish, especially tuna or swordfish that may contain high amounts of mercury. But many tins contain smaller fish like sardines and anchovies that have the added benefit of being low in mercury. The canned products, however, tend to have a higher salt content than fresh seafood, health officials say.

    Greenpeace has expressed concerns about overfishing to meet the growing demand and cautions buyers to do their research to make sure the products are sustainable. Longlining is one of the most commonly used methods for fishing tuna, which can snare other species like turtles or dolphins, according to the environmental group.

    California was once home to thriving sardine canning factories in the coastal town of Monterey, which inspired John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.” The industry disappeared decades ago as the fish population plummeted. The canneries have long been replaced with hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops.

    John Field, a research fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, doesn’t see large factories ever coming back, but he said the trend could help small local canneries and sustainable fishing.

    He admits thought that he’s not so sure about ordering a tin off a menu.

    “Personally, when I go out to an expensive dinner, I probably would prefer to have fresh fish than from a can,” he said.

    ___

    Watson reported from San Diego.

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  • 10 Freeway to reopen by Tuesday, much earlier than originally thought

    10 Freeway to reopen by Tuesday, much earlier than originally thought

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    Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that the fire-damaged 10 Freeway would reopen sooner than expected — Tuesday “at the latest.”

    “Five lanes in both directions,” Newsom said at a news conference Thursday evening at the site of the fire in downtown Los Angeles.

    More than 100 columns along the swath of the freeway were damaged — nine or 10 of them severely, officials said. Construction crews have erected wooden structures to shore up the overpass while the repair work gets underway.

    “By Tuesday next week, trucks, passenger vehicles in both directions will be moving again,” Newsom said. “We’ve doubled the crews, we’ve doubled down on our efforts here.”

    Newsom said 250 contractors were working on repairing the bridge, including 30 carpenters joining efforts in the most recent day.

    “Things continue to move favorably in our direction,” Newsom said. “The bridge structure itself seems to be in better shape than we anticipated.”

    Mayor Karen Bass thanked Los Angeles residents who had switched to public transit and heeded calls to avoid crowding surface streets while the 10 remained closed this past week.

    “This is a good day in Los Angeles,” Bass said.

    Gloria Roberts, appointed director of Caltrans District 7, thanked the governor and mayor for their leadership. She also praised Caltrans workers who had logged numerous hours at the site.

    “Proud to bleed orange,” she said, sparking chuckles and smiles from the governor and mayor.

    The fire, which arson investigators believe was intentionally set, started at a property under the 10 that was being leased from the California Department of Transportation. No arrests have been made, and the investigation remains ongoing.

    Although the exact cause of the fire has not been revealed, “there was [malicious] intent,” Newsom said at a news conference Monday afternoon. The cost of the repair project also remains under assessment.

    In addition to pallets, sanitizer accumulated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was stored under the overpass and helped fuel the flames, according to sources familiar with the probe who were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation.

    The fire was reported early Saturday, shortly after midnight, in the 1700 block of East 14th Street after a pallet yard under the freeway caught fire and spread to a second pallet yard, damaging the freeway overpass and destroying several vehicles, including a firetruck, authorities said.

    As part of its investigation, the Los Angeles Fire Department will inspect other underpasses in the city, according to Mayor Bass.

    “L.A. city wants to make sure our house is in order,” she said. “We have a number of leases under the freeway as well. So we are looking at those to make sure that what we’re doing is appropriate as well.”

    The Los Angeles Times reported that immigrant businesses had occupied the space beneath the freeway while their landlord dodged Caltrans, to which it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid rent. State officials, tenants and a lawyer for the company leasing the land maintain that Caltrans was long aware of conditions under the freeway that fueled the fire.

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    Jeremy Childs, Ruben Vives

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  • A health official in Michigan is taking her county to court over $4 million resignation offer

    A health official in Michigan is taking her county to court over $4 million resignation offer

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    LANSING, Mich. — The top health official in one of Michigan’s largest counties is asking a judge to uphold a $4 million settlement in exchange for her resignation, coming after months of conflict with local conservative leaders who were elected in response to COVID-19 restrictions.

    Ottawa County leaders had attempted to fire Adeline Hambley in January after they took majority control of the county’s board of commissioners. Finding themselves unable to, the board opted to offer her $4 million — equivalent to a quarter of the health department’s 2024 budget — in return for her resignation. She also would have had to drop her lawsuit against the county.

    The board backed off the offer, saying it was only a “tentative settlement agreement.” David Kallman, the county’s legal counsel, told The Associated Press that “there has never been an agreement by the board to accept the $4 million. There were discussions.”

    But Hambley’s lawyer filed a motion Thursday to enforce the settlement, and it’s scheduled to go in front of a judge on Nov. 27.

    “The parties agreed to settle this matter on Nov. 6, 2023. Now, defendants have remorse and want out of the deal,” Hambley’s lawyer, Sarah Riley-Howard, wrote in the filing.

    Public health officials and local health departments across the country became political targets during the pandemic due to lockdowns and restrictions.

    Ottawa County’s health department serves 300,000 residents in the western part of the state. Earlier this year, county commissioners voted to cut the department’s upcoming budget by nearly $4 million. The board had threatened deeper cuts, and Hambley took to social media to protest.

    The county’s 11-member board of commissioners was transformed last year when eight incumbents were defeated by a slate of challengers tied closely to a group known as Ottawa Impact, which was formed in 2021 partly in response to mask mandates in the county.

    Kyle Terpstra, a Republican commissioner, resigned from his position on the board Thursday, just hours after the Hambley lawsuit was filed. He said “significant changes in my personal and professional life” led to the resignation.

    Hambley sued the commissioners earlier this year for “termination in violation of public policy.” In October, the state’s appeals court ruled Hambley could be fired only for “just cause.”

    But following a nearly eight-hour closed session at a Nov. 6 meeting, commissioners voted to “accept counsel’s recommendation regarding litigation and settlement activities” regarding Hambley. The settlement was later revealed to be $4 million, in return for Hambley’s resignation.

    Hambley would work until at least Nov. 30 but no later than Dec. 15 under the agreement.

    Nathaniel Kelly, a safety manager at an HVAC company and who has no public health experience, is in line to take over the county health department.

    The county requested approval from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services for Kelly to serve as acting health officer, but the state told the county it couldn’t appoint a health officer until a vacancy exists, according to a spokesperson with the department.

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  • Dubai Air Show opening as aviation soars following pandemic lockdowns, even as wars cloud horizon

    Dubai Air Show opening as aviation soars following pandemic lockdowns, even as wars cloud horizon

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The biennial Dubai Air Show opens Monday as airlines are poised to make major aircraft purchases after rebounding from the groundings of the coronavirus pandemic, even as Israel’s war with Hamas clouds regional security.

    That conflict, as well as Russia’s war on Ukraine, likely will influence the five-day show at Al Maktoum Airport at Dubai World Central. It is the city-state’s second airfield after Dubai International Airport, which is the world’s busiest for international travel and home base for the long-haul carrier Emirates.

    While commercial aviation takes much of the attention, arms manufacturers also have exhibitions at the show. Two major Israeli firms — Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. and Israel Aerospace Industries are participating.

    Rafael also sponsored a meeting of air force commanders Sunday at a luxury Dubai hotel, highlighting the balancing act being struck by the UAE amid anger in the Arab world over the Israel-Hamas war. The UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms, established diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020.

    The firm Russian Helicopters likely will have staff on hand for the air show after appearing at the Abu Dhabi arms fair earlier this year despite being sanctioned by the U.S. and others over Moscow’s attack on Ukraine. ROSCOSMOS, the Russian state space company, also is at the show.

    Global aviation is booming after the coronavirus pandemic saw worldwide lockdowns and aircraft grounded — particularly at Al Maktoum Airport, which served for months as a parking lot for Emirates double-decker Airbus 380s.

    Air traffic is now at 97% of pre-COVID levels, according to the International Air Transport Association. Middle Eastern airlines, which supply key East-West routes for global travel, saw a 26.6% increase in September traffic compared to a year earlier, IATA says.

    Emirates, a main economic engine for Dubai amid its booming real estate market, announced record half-year profits of $2.7 billion Thursday. That is up from $1.2 billion for the same period last year, potentially putting the airline on track for another record-breaking year. The airline says it has repaid some $2.5 billion of the loans it received during the height of the pandemic to stay afloat.

    Tim Clark, president of Emirates, told Bloomberg in September to “watch this space” when it comes to purchases from both Airbus and Boeing during the air show. The airline is hiring a slew of new pilots and crew, likely to staff new aircraft.

    “We’ve got a lot of big plans for the airline going forward,” Clark said. “New fleet, larger numbers, larger network.”

    Also in the market is Riyadh Air, a new Saudi carrier being creataed as part of trillions of dollars worth of spending planned in the kingdom. In March, the airline announced an order of up to 72 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jetliners and has further plans to expand.

    Turkish Airlines also may make a record-shattering purchase of 355 aircraft from Airbus, including 250 A321neo aircraft, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.

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  • Bayern Munich reports record revenues of $913 million

    Bayern Munich reports record revenues of $913 million

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    Bayern Munich has emerged from the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic in good financial health after reporting record total revenues of 854.2 million euros ($913 million) for the 2022-23 season

    ByThe Associated Press

    November 12, 2023, 11:10 AM

    Bayern’s Harry Kane, left, celebrates with his teammate Serge Gnabry after scoring his side’s second goal during the German Bundesliga soccer match between Bayern Munich and Heidenheim at the Allianz Arena stadium in Munich, Germany, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

    The Associated Press

    MUNICH — Bayern Munich has emerged from the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic in good financial health after reporting record total revenues of 854.2 million euros ($913 million) for the 2022-23 season.

    The previous record was 750.4 million euros ($802 million) from 2018-19.

    Bayern chief financial officer Michael Diederich said this “equates to an increase of around 30%” from the previous year and called it “an extraordinary achievement.”

    Bayern had posted record revenues every year from 2015 until the coronavirus pandemic influenced a downturn in 2020.

    Diederich said the group’s net profit rose to 35.7 million euros ($38 million), an increase of 23 million euros compared to the previous season.

    “Everything we earn is invested in sport,” Diederich said. “For us, it’s always first and foremost about sport. Our claim remains to be top both domestically and internationally. Our most important return on investment is titles.”

    Bayern has won an unprecedented 11 straight Bundesliga titles.

    ___

    AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

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  • A fragile global economy is at stake as US and China seek to cool tensions at APEC summit

    A fragile global economy is at stake as US and China seek to cool tensions at APEC summit

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    WASHINGTON — The United States and China are the two global economic heavyweights. Combined, they produce more than 40% of the world’s goods and services.

    So when Washington and Beijing do economic battle, as they have for five years running, the rest of the world suffers, too. And when they hold a rare high-level summit, as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will this week, it can have global consequences.

    The world’s economy could surely benefit from a U.S.-China détente. Since 2020, it has suffered one crisis after another — the COVID-19 pandemic, soaring inflation, surging interest rates, violent conflicts in Ukraine and now Gaza. The global economy is expected to grow a lackluster 3% this year and 2.9% in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    “Having the world’s two largest economies at loggerheads at such a fraught moment,” said Eswar Prasad, senior professor of trade policy at Cornell University, “exacerbates the negative impact of various geopolitical shocks that have hit the world economy.”

    Hopes have risen that Washington and Beijing can at least cool some of their economic tensions at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which starts Sunday in San Francisco. The meeting will bring together 21 Pacific Rim countries, which collectively represent 40% of the world’s people and nearly half of global trade.

    The marquee event will be the Biden-Xi meeting Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit, the first time the two leaders will have spoken in a year, during which time frictions between the two nations have worsened. The White House has sought to tamp down expectations, saying to expect no breakthroughs.

    At the same time, Prasad suggested that the threshold for declaring a successful outcome is relatively low. “Preventing any further deterioration in the bilateral economic relationship,” he said, “would already be a victory for both sides.’’

    The U.S.-China economic relationship had been deteriorating for years before it erupted in 2018, at the instigation of President Donald Trump, into an all-out trade war. The Trump administration charged that China had violated the commitments it made, in joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, to open its vast market to U.S. and other foreign companies that wanted to sell their goods and services there.

    In 2018, the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports to punish Beijing for its actions in trying to supplant U.S. technological supremacy. Many experts agreed with the administration that Beijing had engaged in cyberespionage and had improperly demanded that foreign companies turn over trade secrets as the price of gaining access to the Chinese market. Beijing punched back against Trump’s sanctions with its own retaliatory tariffs, making U.S. goods more expensive for Chinese buyers.

    When Biden took office in 2021, he kept much of Trump’s confrontational trade policy, including the China tariffs. The U.S. tax rate on Chinese imports now exceeds 19%, versus 3% at the start of 2018, before Trump imposed his tariffs. Likewise, Chinese import taxes on U.S. goods are up to 21%, from 8% before the trade war began, according to calculations by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

    One of the tenets of Biden’s economic policy has been to reduce America’s economic reliance on Chinese factories, which came under strain when COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, and to solidify partnerships with other Asian nations. As part of that policy, the Biden administration last year forged the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity with 14 countries.

    In some ways, U.S.-China trade tensions are even higher under Biden than they were under Trump. Beijing is seething over the Biden administration’s decision to impose — and then broaden — export controls that are designed to prevent China from acquiring advanced computer chips and the equipment to produce them. In August, Beijing countered with its own trade curbs: It began requiring that Chinese exporters of gallium and germanium, metals used in computer chips and solar cells, obtain government licenses to send those metals overseas.

    Beijing has also taken aggressive actions against foreign companies in China. Orchestrating what appears to be a counterespionage campaign, its authorities this year raided the Chinese offices of the U.S. consulting firms Capvision and the Mintz Group, questioned Shanghai employees of the Bain & Co. consultancy and announced a security review of the chipmaker Micron.

    Some analysts speak of a “decoupling’’ of the world’s two biggest economies after decades in which they relied deeply on each other for trade. Indeed, imports of Chinese goods to the United States were down 24% through September compared with the same period of 2022.

    The rift between Beijing and Washington has forced many other countries into a delicate predicament: Deciding which side they’re on when they actually want to do business with both countries.

    The IMF says such economic “fragmentation’’ is damaging to the world. The 190-country lending agency estimates that higher trade barriers will subtract $7.4 trillion from global economic output after the world has adjusted to the higher trade barriers.

    And those barriers are rising: Last year, the IMF said, countries imposed nearly 3,000 new restrictions on trade, up from fewer than 1,000 in 2019. The agency foresees international trade growing just 0.9% this year and 3.5% in 2024 — down sharply from the 2000-2019 annual average of 4.9%.

    The Biden administration insists it isn’t trying to undermine China’s economy. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with her Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, in San Francisco and sought to set the stage for Biden-Xi summit.

    “Our mutual desire — both China and the United States — is to create a level playing field and ongoing, meaningful and mutually beneficial economic relations,” Yellen said.

    Xi, too, has reason to try to restore economic cooperation with the United States. The Chinese economy is under heavy strain. Its real estate market has collapsed, youth unemployment is rampant and consumer spirits are low. The raids on foreign businesses have spooked international companies and investors.

    “With serious headwinds facing the Chinese economy and many U.S. firms packing up their bags and leaving China, Xi needs to convince investors that China is still a profitable place to conduct business,’’ said Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator. “This will not be an easy sell.’’

    Complicating matters is that the tensions between Washington and Beijing go well beyond economics. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has punished dissent in Hong Kong and the autonomous Muslim region of Xinjiang. His government made aggressive territorial demands in Asia, engaging in deadly border clashes with India and bullying the Philippines and other neighbors in parts of the South China Sea it claims as its own. It has increasingly threatened Taiwan, which it considers a renegade Chinese province.

    U.S.-China tensions could intensify next year with presidential elections in Taiwan and the United States, where criticism of Beijing is among the few areas that unite Democrats and Republicans.

    Xi’s policies appear to be costing China in the battle for world opinion. In a recent survey of people in 24 countries, the Pew Research Center reported that the United States was viewed more favorably than China in all but two (Kenya and Nigeria) nations.

    Could China change course?

    Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who serves on a House committee that monitors China, noted optimistically that Xi has reversed himself before — notably in declaring a sudden end to the draconian zero-COVID policies that crippled China’s economy last year.

    “We have to give that possibility a chance, even at the same time that we hedge and protect our interests,’’ Krishnamoorthi said. “That’s what I’m hoping we also see come out of this meeting.’’

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  • A fragile global economy is at stake as US and China seek to cool tensions at APEC summit

    A fragile global economy is at stake as US and China seek to cool tensions at APEC summit

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — The United States and China are the two global economic heavyweights. Combined, they produce more than 40% of the world’s goods and services.

    So when Washington and Beijing do economic battle, as they have for five years running, the rest of the world suffers, too. And when they hold a rare high-level summit, as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will this week, it can have global consequences.

    The world’s economy could surely benefit from a U.S.-China détente. Since 2020, it has suffered one crisis after another — the COVID-19 pandemic, soaring inflation, surging interest rates, violent conflicts in Ukraine and now Gaza. The global economy is expected to grow a lackluster 3% this year and 2.9% in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    “Having the world’s two largest economies at loggerheads at such a fraught moment,” said Eswar Prasad, senior professor of trade policy at Cornell University, “exacerbates the negative impact of various geopolitical shocks that have hit the world economy.”

    Hopes have risen that Washington and Beijing can at least cool some of their economic tensions at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which starts Sunday in San Francisco. The meeting will bring together 21 Pacific Rim countries, which collectively represent 40% of the world’s people and nearly half of global trade.

    The marquee event will be the Biden-Xi meeting Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit, the first time the two leaders will have spoken in a year, during which time frictions between the two nations have worsened. The White House has sought to tamp down expectations, saying to expect no breakthroughs.

    At the same time, Prasad suggested that the threshold for declaring a successful outcome is relatively low. “Preventing any further deterioration in the bilateral economic relationship,” he said, “would already be a victory for both sides.’’

    The U.S.-China economic relationship had been deteriorating for years before it erupted in 2018, at the instigation of President Donald Trump, into an all-out trade war. The Trump administration charged that China had violated the commitments it made, in joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, to open its vast market to U.S. and other foreign companies that wanted to sell their goods and services there.

    In 2018, the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports to punish Beijing for its actions in trying to supplant U.S. technological supremacy. Many experts agreed with the administration that Beijing had engaged in cyberespionage and had improperly demanded that foreign companies turn over trade secrets as the price of gaining access to the Chinese market. Beijing punched back against Trump’s sanctions with its own retaliatory tariffs, making U.S. goods more expensive for Chinese buyers.

    When Biden took office in 2021, he kept much of Trump’s confrontational trade policy, including the China tariffs. The U.S. tax rate on Chinese imports now exceeds 19%, versus 3% at the start of 2018, before Trump imposed his tariffs. Likewise, Chinese import taxes on U.S. goods are up to 21%, from 8% before the trade war began, according to calculations by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

    One of the tenets of Biden’s economic policy has been to reduce America’s economic reliance on Chinese factories, which came under strain when COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, and to solidify partnerships with other Asian nations. As part of that policy, the Biden administration last year forged the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity with 14 countries.

    In some ways, U.S.-China trade tensions are even higher under Biden than they were under Trump. Beijing is seething over the Biden administration’s decision to impose — and then broaden — export controls that are designed to prevent China from acquiring advanced computer chips and the equipment to produce them. In August, Beijing countered with its own trade curbs: It began requiring that Chinese exporters of gallium and germanium, metals used in computer chips and solar cells, obtain government licenses to send those metals overseas.

    Beijing has also taken aggressive actions against foreign companies in China. Orchestrating what appears to be a counterespionage campaign, its authorities this year raided the Chinese offices of the U.S. consulting firms Capvision and the Mintz Group, questioned Shanghai employees of the Bain & Co. consultancy and announced a security review of the chipmaker Micron.

    Some analysts speak of a “decoupling’’ of the world’s two biggest economies after decades in which they relied deeply on each other for trade. Indeed, imports of Chinese goods to the United States were down 24% through September compared with the same period of 2022.

    The rift between Beijing and Washington has forced many other countries into a delicate predicament: Deciding which side they’re on when they actually want to do business with both countries.

    The IMF says such economic “fragmentation’’ is damaging to the world. The 190-country lending agency estimates that higher trade barriers will subtract $7.4 trillion from global economic output after the world has adjusted to the higher trade barriers.

    And those barriers are rising: Last year, the IMF said, countries imposed nearly 3,000 new restrictions on trade, up from fewer than 1,000 in 2019. The agency foresees international trade growing just 0.9% this year and 3.5% in 2024 — down sharply from the 2000-2019 annual average of 4.9%.

    The Biden administration insists it isn’t trying to undermine China’s economy. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with her Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, in San Francisco and sought to set the stage for Biden-Xi summit.

    “Our mutual desire — both China and the United States — is to create a level playing field and ongoing, meaningful and mutually beneficial economic relations,” Yellen said.

    Xi, too, has reason to try to restore economic cooperation with the United States. The Chinese economy is under heavy strain. Its real estate market has collapsed, youth unemployment is rampant and consumer spirits are low. The raids on foreign businesses have spooked international companies and investors.

    “With serious headwinds facing the Chinese economy and many U.S. firms packing up their bags and leaving China, Xi needs to convince investors that China is still a profitable place to conduct business,’’ said Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator. “This will not be an easy sell.’’

    Complicating matters is that the tensions between Washington and Beijing go well beyond economics. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has punished dissent in Hong Kong and the autonomous Muslim region of Xinjiang. His government made aggressive territorial demands in Asia, engaging in deadly border clashes with India and bullying the Philippines and other neighbors in parts of the South China Sea it claims as its own. It has increasingly threatened Taiwan, which it considers a renegade Chinese province.

    U.S.-China tensions could intensify next year with presidential elections in Taiwan and the United States, where criticism of Beijing is among the few areas that unite Democrats and Republicans.

    Xi’s policies appear to be costing China in the battle for world opinion. In a recent survey of people in 24 countries, the Pew Research Center reported that the United States was viewed more favorably than China in all but two (Kenya and Nigeria) nations.

    Could China change course?

    Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who serves on a House committee that monitors China, noted optimistically that Xi has reversed himself before — notably in declaring a sudden end to the draconian zero-COVID policies that crippled China’s economy last year.

    “We have to give that possibility a chance, even at the same time that we hedge and protect our interests,’’ Krishnamoorthi said. “That’s what I’m hoping we also see come out of this meeting.’’

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  • COVID-19 fraudster used stolen relief aid to purchase a private island in Florida

    COVID-19 fraudster used stolen relief aid to purchase a private island in Florida

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    YANKEETOWN, Fla. — A freshwater spring bubbles amid the mangroves, cabbage palms and red cedars on Sweetheart Island, a two-acre uninhabited patch of paradise about a mile off the coast of this little Gulf Coast town.

    Pelicans divebomb nearby into the cool waters of Florida’s Withlacoochee Bay and the open view westward holds the promise of dazzling sunsets.

    It may have seemed like an ideal getaway for Florida businessman Patrick Parker Walsh. Instead, he’s serving five and half years in federal prison for stealing nearly $8 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds that he used, in part, to buy Sweetheart Island.

    While Walsh’s private island ranks among the more unusual purchases by pandemic fraudsters, his crime was not unique. He is one of thousands of thieves who perpetrated the greatest grift in U.S. history. They potentially plundered more than $280 billion in federal COVID-19 aid; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.

    The loss represents close to 10% of the $4.3 trillion the U.S. government has disbursed to mitigate the economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

    An AP review of hundreds of pandemic fraud cases presents a picture of thieves and scam artists who spent lavishly on houses, luxury watches and diamond jewelry, Lamborghinis and other expensive cars. The stolen aid also paid for long nights at strip clubs, gambling sprees in Las Vegas and bucket-list vacations.

    Their crimes were relatively simple: The government’s goal was to get cash into the hands of struggling people and businesses with minimal hassle, particularly during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. Safeguards to weed out the swindlers were dropped. As Walsh’s case and thousands of others have shown, stealing the money was as easy as lying on an application.

    The thieves came from all walks of life and all corners of the globe. There was a Tennessee rapper who bragged about the ease of stealing more than $700,000 in pandemic unemployment insurance on YouTube. A former pizzeria owner and host of a cryptocurrency-themed radio show bought an alpaca farm in Vermont with pilfered aid. And an ex-Nigerian government official who grabbed about half a million dollars in COVID-19 relief benefits was wearing a $10,000 watch and $35,000 gold chain when he was arrested.

    Nearly 3,200 defendants have been charged with COVID-19 relief fraud, according to the U.S. Justice Department. About $1.4 billion in stolen pandemic aid has been seized.

    Investigators won’t catch every crook. The scale and scope of the fraud are too large. Pandemic cases often depend on digital evidence, which is perishable, and the financial trail can go cold over time, said Bob Westbrooks, former executive director of the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.

    “The uncomfortable truth is the federal criminal justice system is simply not equipped to fully address the unprecedented volume of pandemic relief fraud cases, large and small, and involving thousands upon thousands of domestic and foreign actors,” Westbrooks said.

    Top Justice Department officials are undeterred by the enormity of the task. They’ve created special “ strike forces ” to hunt down COVID-19 aid thieves and vowed not to give up the chase.

    “We’ll stay at it for as long as it takes,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in August.

    Konstantinos Zarkadas, a New York doctor deeply in debt, joined the rogues’ gallery of COVID-19 fraudsters by falsifying at least 11 separate applications for pandemic aid that netted him almost $3.8 million, according to prosecutors. He bought Rolex and Cartier wristwatches valued at $140,000 for himself and family members and made a hefty down payment on a yacht, according to court records.

    Zarkadas used about $3 million to pay off part of an earlier civil judgment against him for breaching a real estate lease. His most brazen move was to send $80,000 of the looted cash back to the government to settle a federal lawsuit alleging he violated the Controlled Substances Act by dispensing more than 20,000 doses of a weight-loss drug without keeping accurate records, prosecutors said.

    The state of New York revoked Zarkadas’ medical license shortly after he was sentenced to more than four years in prison for swiping the pandemic aid.

    The stolen funds financed the high-rolling lifestyle of Lee E. Price III, a Houston resident with prior felony convictions for forgery and robbery. He swindled nearly $1.7 million by submitting bogus aid applications on behalf of businesses that existed only on paper, according to court records.

    Price wasted little time blowing $14,000 on a Rolex and more than $233,000 for a flashy white Lamborghini Urus, a luxury SUV that can go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds. He also spent thousands of dollars at the Casanova, a Houston stripclub. Price was sentenced to more than nine years in prison.

    Vinath Oudomsine of Georgia also created a fake company that he claimed made $235,000 a year and had 10 employees. A few weeks after Oudomsine applied for the pandemic aid, the government rushed him $85,000 to keep his non-existent business afloat.

    Oudomsine spent nearly $58,000 on a 1999 Charizard Pokémon card, which depicts a gold dragon-like creature, jaws wide open, poised to attack.

    While not as valuable as rare baseball cards — a mint condition Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6 million last year — Pokémon merchandise can command big money as collectors have driven up prices for collectibles issued by the popular franchise.

    At Oudomsine’s sentencing last year, U.S. District Judge Dudley H. Bowen called Oudomsine’s theft “an $85,000 insult” to a country reeling from the pandemic.

    “I feel foolish every time I say it: Pokémon card,” Bowen said before sending Oudomsine to prison for three years.

    Patrick Walsh’s bid to save his aerial advertising businesses started out legitimately but quickly escalated into sizeable fraud.

    Walsh operated a small fleet of cigar-shaped blimps that flew corporate logos over crowded venues. In June 2017, one of his blimps crashed and burned on live television at the men’s U.S. Open golf tournament, one of the world’s premier sporting events.

    “I was teeing off and I looked up and saw it on fire, and I felt sick to my stomach,” said professional golfer Jamie Lovemark, according to an Associated Press report. The pilot — the sole passenger — was badly injured but survived, according to a National Transportation Safety Board investigation.

    In the wake of the crash, Walsh’s clients began to bail, his attorneys wrote in court filings. To stay afloat, he obtained high-interest loans that also allowed him to expand his businesses. By 2019, his companies had sales of $16 million and had expanded into Latin America and Asian markets.

    Then the pandemic hit. “COVID-19 did not slow down business, it killed it,” Walsh’s attorneys wrote. He panicked.

    Between March 2020 and January 2021 Walsh submitted more than 30 fraudulent applications for emergency pandemic aid and received $7.8 million, according to the Justice Department. Even if Walsh had followed the rules, his companies would have only qualified for a “small subset” of those loans, federal prosecutors alleged.

    “His crimes are egregious and the product of greed,” prosecutors wrote in court papers. They cited the purchase of Sweetheart Island, undisclosed “luxury goods,” oil fields in Texas and a downpayment on a home in tony Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

    Walsh’s attorneys said in a court filing that he wasn’t motivated by avarice, but desperation. Walsh was under enormous pressure to rescue his businesses and to support his large family, they wrote. He has 11 children.

    U.S. District Judge Allen C. Winsor didn’t buy the argument.

    This was not “a single moment of weakness,” Winsor said in sentencing Walsh in January to more than five years behind bars.

    As part of his plea deal, Walsh agreed to return the $7.8 million he stole and to sell Sweetheart Island, which was among his first purchases with the stolen federal money, according to the court records.

    Prosecutors said Walsh used $90,000 of those funds to help finance the $116,000 island purchase. Florida property records show that the island was sold for $200,000 at the end of June.

    Walsh’s attorneys said he didn’t buy the island as a “tropical paradise for entertainment” but as a real estate opportunity. They did not explain how the businessman would have transformed the isolated isle into a profit center.

    Withlacoochee Bay is scattered with similar small, uninhabited islands. The only hint that anyone had ever tried to develop Sweetheart Island were a few low, timeworn cinder block walls that extend into the water. There was still a “For Sale” sign posted on a weather-beaten and leafless tree that resembled a scarecrow warning people to stay away.

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  • Japan’s SoftBank hit with $6.2B quarterly loss as WeWork, other tech investments go sour

    Japan’s SoftBank hit with $6.2B quarterly loss as WeWork, other tech investments go sour

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    TOKYO — Japanese technology company SoftBank Group Corp. racked up a huge loss in the July-September quarter as its technology investments, most notably office-sharing company WeWork, went sour.

    Tokyo-based SoftBank loss totaled 931 billion yen ($6.2 billion) in the last quarter, a reversal from the 3 trillion yen profit it posted in the same period a year earlier.

    SoftBank has a sprawling investment portfolio and tends to have erratic financial results that fluctuate with market trends.

    That has been highlighted by the troubles at WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week amid turmoil in the U.S. commercial real estate market after the pandemic sent vacancies soaring in major cities like New York and San Francisco.

    SoftBank holds a nearly 80% stake in WeWork.

    SoftBank’s chief financial officer, Yoshimitsu Goto, sought to allay investor’s worries, stressing in an online news conference that the company was still going strong overall, making cautious investment decisions and plans to keep growing.

    He said WeWork’s troubles were “regrettable.” SoftBank will study what went wrong and try to do better with its future Vision Fund investments, Goto said.

    SoftBank’s financial damage related to WeWork in the July-September quarter totaled 234 billion yen ($1.5 billion), according to the company, which was the first telecoms operator to bring the iPhone to Japan.

    Goto gave as an example of a hopeful development the recent IPO on Nasdaq of British semiconductor and software design company Arm, which SoftBank acquired in 2016.

    The listing did not directly affect SoftBank’s earnings results, but a gain of $47 billion was recorded as a capital surplus.

    SoftBank’s quarterly sales were little changed, edging up to 1.67 trillion yen ($11 billion) from 1.61 trillion yen. The company does not give full year forecasts.

    SoftBank used to own significant stakes in Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet but sold them a couple of years ago. SoftBank has also sold its stake in Uber to ride out hard times, and dramatically reduced its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce and technology company.

    SoftBank Group Corp. shares rose 1.1% Thursday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

    ___

    Yuri Kageyama is on X, formerly Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

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  • Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear reelected to second term in Kentucky, overcoming state’s GOP dominance

    Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear reelected to second term in Kentucky, overcoming state’s GOP dominance

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    LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection to a second term Tuesday, notching another significant statewide victory in an increasingly red state that could serve as a model for other Democrats on how to thrive politically heading into next year’s defining presidential election.

    “Tonight, Kentucky made a choice, a choice not to move to the right or to the left but to move forward for every single family,” Beshear told a raucous crowd of supporters in Louisville.

    The governor withstood relentless attempts to connect him to Democratic President Joe Biden, especially his handling of the economy. Beshear insulated himself from the attacks by focusing on state issues, including his push for exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban that he said would make it less extreme. His reelection gave pro-choice advocates nationwide yet another victory since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

    While Beshear kept Biden at arms-length during the campaign, he benefited politically from massive infusions of federal pandemic and infrastructure money pumped into Kentucky. Biden spoke with Beshear Tuesday evening to congratulate him on his re-election win.

    Beshear said his victory “sends a loud, clear message — a message that candidates should run for something and not against someone. That a candidate should show vision and not sow division. And a clear statement that anger politics should end right here and right now.”

    The win also marks the 45-year-old governor as a Democrat to watch, a candidate with the skills to win a decisive victory in difficult political terrain.

    Beshear rode his stewardship over record economic growth and his handling of multiple disasters, from tornadoes and floods to the COVID-19 pandemic, to victory over Cameron, the state’s attorney general and a protege of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In what could be a preview of how Democrats campaign in 2024, Beshear hammered Cameron throughout the campaign for his support of the state’s sweeping abortion ban, which makes no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

    Cameron, who was seeking to become Kentucky’s first Black governor, called Beshear to congratulate his former law firm colleague on his victory.

    “We all want the same thing for our future generations,” Cameron said in his concession speech. “We want a better commonwealth, one in which it can ultimately be a shining city on a hill, a model and example for the rest of the nation to follow.”

    The outcome gives divided government another stamp of voter approval in Kentucky, as Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature and continue to dominate the state’s congressional delegation, including both U.S. Senate seats. Beshear has wrangled with GOP lawmakers over a series of policy issues during his tenure.

    While Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman earned new four-year terms as a ticket, their win did nothing to change Kentucky’s identity as a solidly red state or prevent a Republican sweep of all other statewide constitutional offices on Tuesday’s ballot.

    Republican Michael Adams won reelection as secretary of state, while GOP nominee Russell Coleman, a former U.S. attorney, claimed the job of attorney general.

    Republican Allison Ball, who is finishing her second term as state treasurer, was elected state auditor. The GOP also won contests for state treasurer and state agriculture commissioner to maintain its electoral dominance in Kentucky.

    Beshear’s victory sustains a family dynasty that has repeatedly defied the Bluegrass State’s tilt toward the GOP. His father, Steve Beshear, is a former two-term governor. By the end of Andy Beshear’s second term, a Beshear will have presided in the Kentucky governor’s office for 16 of the last 20 years.

    Cameron tried nationalizing the campaign in a state where Republican ex-President Donald Trump remains popular. Beshear followed his successful campaign formula from 2019, when he narrowly defeated GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, by sidestepping discussion of Biden or Trump, focusing instead on Kentucky matters and emphasizing his leadership during a tumultuous first term.

    In the end, Cameron was unable to overcome the personal popularity of Beshear, who became a living room fixture across Kentucky with his press conferences during the pandemic. From those briefings, Beshear became known to many Kentuckians as much by his first name as his last.

    Throughout the campaign, Beshear offered an upbeat assessment of the state, while Cameron pounded away at the governor’s record and linked it to Biden. Beshear touted the state’s record-high economic development growth and record-low unemployment rates during his term, and said he has Kentucky poised to keep thriving.

    The governor touted his efforts for a new Ohio River bridge that will connect Kentucky and Ohio without tolls. Beshear was rewarded Tuesday with a strong showing in key suburban Kentucky counties across the river from Cincinnati.

    The race nonetheless reflected the widening gap nationally between rural and urban voters, with Beshear running up big margins in Louisville, Lexington and Cameron winning large swaths of rural Kentucky. But the Democratic governor also notched some wins in rural areas, including several Appalachian counties well beyond the suburbs of the state’s biggest cities.

    Beshear was thrust into crisis management during the pandemic and when deadly tornadoes tore through parts of western Kentucky — including his father’s hometown — in late 2021, followed by devastating flooding the next summer in sections of the state’s Appalachian region in the east. The governor oversaw recovery efforts that are ongoing, offering frequent updates and traveling to stricken areas repeatedly.

    Cameron blasted the governor’s restrictions during the pandemic, saying the shutdowns crippled businesses and caused learning loss among students. Beshear said his actions saved lives, mirrored those in other states and reflected guidance from the Trump administration.

    Cameron and his GOP allies tried to capitalize on Beshear’s veto of a measure banning gender-affirming care for children, portraying the governor as an advocate of gender reassignment surgery for minors.

    Beshear hit back, claiming his foes misrepresented his position while pointing to his faith and support for parental rights to explain his veto. He said the bill “rips away” parental freedom to make medical decisions for their children.

    Beshear, a church deacon, said he believes “all children are children of God.”

    In declaring victory, the governor ripped into GOP groups he accused of running ads “full of hate and division.”

    “And you know what? We beat ’em all at the same time,” Beshear said.

    During the campaign, Beshear denounced Cameron’s support for the state’s existing near-total abortion ban as extremist, and the governor’s campaign ran a viral TV ad featuring a young woman, now in her early 20s, who revealed she was raped, and later became pregnant, by her stepfather when she was 12 years old but eventually miscarried. She took aim at Cameron in the ad, saying: “Anyone who believes there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it’s like to stand in my shoes.”

    Cameron signaled that he would sign legislation adding the rape and incest exceptions, but days later he resumed a more hardline stance, indicating during a campaign stop that he would support such exceptions “if the courts made us change that law.” It highlighted the complexities of abortion-related politics for Republicans since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

    Kayla Long cited abortion rights as an important issue for her as she cast her ballot for Beshear in Shelbyville, between Louisville and Frankfort, on Tuesday.

    “I think it’s a woman’s right to choose,” she said. “And I don’t think politicians should be involved in that choice at all.”

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  • Is hybrid work the new normal?

    Is hybrid work the new normal?

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    Is hybrid work the new normal? – CBS News


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    As the pandemic eased, you might expect employees who’d been working from home would head back to the office. But as it turns out, that never happened! Instead, a modern work style – a blend of commuting part-time and working part-time remotely from home – is becoming the new normal. Correspondent David Pogue talks with experts and technologists about who is benefitting from this new work style, and who is hurting.

    Be the first to know

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  • Californians bet farming agave for spirits holds key to weathering drought and groundwater limits

    Californians bet farming agave for spirits holds key to weathering drought and groundwater limits

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    MURRIETA, Calif. — Leo Ortega started growing spiky blue agave plants on the arid hillsides around his Southern California home because his wife liked the way they looked.

    A decade later, his property is now dotted with thousands of what he and others hope is a promising new crop for the state following years of punishing drought and a push to scale back on groundwater pumping.

    The 49-year-old mechanical engineer is one of a growing number of Californians planting agave to be harvested and used to make spirits, much like the way tequila and mezcal are made in Mexico. The trend is fueled by the need to find hardy crops that don’t need much water and a booming appetite for premium alcoholic beverages since the COVID-19 pandemic.

    It’s attracted entrepreneurs such as Ortega, as well as some California farmers. They’re seeking to shift to more water-efficient crops and irrigation methods to avoid fallowing their fields with looming limits on how much groundwater they can pump, as well as more extreme weather patterns anticipated with climate change. Agave, unlike most other crops, thrives on almost no water.

    “When we were watering them, they didn’t really grow much, and the ones that weren’t watered were actually growing better,” Ortega said, walking past rows of the succulents.

    He is now investing in a distillery after his initial batches of spirits, made from Agave americana, sold for $160 a bottle.

    Consumers started spending more on high-quality spirits during the pandemic shutdowns, which spurred a rise in premium beverage products, said Erlinda A. Doherty, an agave spirits expert and consultant.

    Tequila and mezcal were the second-fastest growing spirit category in the country in 2022, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

    Both are proprietary spirits under Mexican laws, which are recognized in U.S. trade agreements. Much like how champagne hails from a region of France, anything called tequila must contain at least 51% blue Weber agave and be distilled in Jalisco or a handful of other Mexican states. Mezcal can be made from a variety of agave types but must be produced in certain Mexican states.

    Agave growers and distillers in California — as well as some in Texas and Arizona — are betting there is an appetite for more agave-based spirits even if they are produced outside of Mexico and not called tequila or mezcal.

    “We seem to have this insatiable thirst for agave, so why not have a domestically grown supply?” Doherty said. “I am kind of bullish on it.”

    Alfonso Mojica Navarro, director of the Mexican Chamber of the Tequila Industry, said tequila has a lengthy history, global reputation for excellence and close connection with Mexican culture. While he didn’t comment specifically on California’s foray into agave spirits, he said he believes Mexico can respond to the growing demand.

    “The tequila industry is concerned that each time there are more players trying to take advantage of tequila’s success by producing agave spirits, liqueurs or other beverages that allude to the Mexican drink, its origins and characteristics despite not being the same,” he said in a statement.

    Agave isn’t grown on a large scale in California yet, and it would take years for that to happen. But spirits, made by cooking the plant’s core to produce sugars that are fermented, are proving popular, said Ventura Spirits owner Henry Tarmy, who distilled his first batch five years ago.

    “We’ve sold everything we’ve made,” he said.

    Much like Mexico has, California is taking steps to protect its nascent industry. The state legislature enacted a law last year requiring “California agave spirits” be made solely with plants grown in the state and without additives.

    A dozen growers and a handful of distillers also formed the California Agave Council last year, and the group has tripled in size since then, said Craig Reynolds, the founding director who planted agave in the Northern California community of Davis. He said those making agave spirits have a deep appreciation for Mexican tequila.

    “We have about 45 member growers,” he said. “All of them want more plants.”

    Agave takes little water but presents other challenges. The plant typically takes at least seven years to grow and is tough to harvest, and a mature plant can weigh hundreds of pounds. Once cut, it has to be grown all over again.

    Still, many see agave as a viable alternative as California — which supplies the bulk of the country’s produce — explores ways to cut back water use.

    While record rain and snowfall over the winter mostly ended a three-year drought in California, more dry periods are likely in store. The state enacted a law nearly a decade ago to regulate the pumping of groundwater after excessive pumping led some residents’ wells to run dry and the land to sink. Scientists expect extreme weather patterns will become even more common as the planet warms, causing more drought.

    Stuart Woolf, who grows tomatoes and almonds in the state’s crop-rich Central Valley, said he started thinking about agave after estimating he’ll only be able to farm about 60% of his land in 20 years due to water limitations. And that’s despite investing in solar energy and groundwater recharge projects to protect the farm that has been in his family for generations.

    After trying out a test plot a few years ago, Woolf went on to plant some 200,000 agave on land he otherwise would have fallowed. Each acre of agave is taking only 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of water a year — a tenth of what row crops demand and even less than pistachio and almond trees, he said.

    Woolf and his wife Lisa gave a $100,000 donation to the University of California, Davis, which formed a research fund to look at the succulent’s varieties and its potential as a low-water crop.

    “I have been trying to figure out what is a crop that I can grow that is somewhat climate-resilient, drought-tolerant, so I can utilize our land,” Woolf said. “The amount of water I am giving them is so low, I don’t think I am ever going to have a problem.”

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  • North Korean art sells in China despite UN sanctions over nuclear program

    North Korean art sells in China despite UN sanctions over nuclear program

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    BEIJING — For sale at a recent Beijing art exposition was a painting with an asking price of $2,460 that depicted the snow-capped Mount Paektu, the mythical birthplace of the Korean people.

    A portrait of a prim young lady in bright brushstrokes was being sold for $5,190. For buyers on a budget, there were colorful landscapes being offered for less than $100.

    The dealer hawking the art made no effort to disguise who produced the pieces, despite stiff U.N. sanctions prohibiting the sale of such goods: “They were painted over there,” the dealer said, “in North Korea.”

    The dealer, who had salt-and-pepper hair and refused to divulge his name, was a representative of an art gallery that trumpets itself as China’s premier seller of North Korean art. The gallery, The Paintings Say Arirang, also operates a studio for North Korean artists in the outskirts of Beijing.

    Housed in a fenced and heavily surveilled compound, the North Koreans paint glorified, idyllic visions of life back home. For the right price, the Arirang studio says, the artists will render “exquisite” portraits at “unimaginable prices.”

    The gallery’s existence and conspicuous sales tactics, experts say, highlight China’s lax enforcement of U.N. sanctions targeting North Korea to stymie Pyongyang’s nuclear program. A. The U.N. has sanctioned a long list of North Korean goods, including arms, coal and art. The U.N. has also sought to block North Koreans from working overseas in the hopes of preventing North Korea from garnishing the wages of such laborers to fund its nuclear program. U.N. report in March singled out Arirang for selling North Korean art and hosting North Korean artists in apparent violation of sanctions.

    China has a long history of rebuffing efforts by the U.N. to rein in such suspected sanctions violators, and last year vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have toughened such restrictions. The U.N. reported that Arirang did not respond to requests for information.

    Arirang was not hard for the U.N. to find. That’s because the gallery is actively seeking to tap a niche audience drawn to the unique, socialist realist style of North Korean artists.

    Arirang was founded by Jin Zhe, an ethnic Korean and art lover born in China near the North Korean border, according to posts written by Jin on Arirang’s website. The son of a prominent painter, Jin spent years at a Chinese state-run radio station before a trip to Pyongyang instilled a taste for North Korean art. Jin, Arirang’s director, couldn’t be reached for comment.

    An Arirang employee told The AP by phone that the studio was in operation and offered a tour of the complex. She also said the studio was selling customized portraits by its North Korean artists. The employee, a woman identifying herself as surnamed Shen, changed her story a few days later, saying the base wasn’t in operation because “business is bad.”

    When AP journalists visited the “painting base,” guards turned them away.

    In lengthy posts on Chinese chat application WeChat, the art gallery expounds at length on the beauty rendered by North Korean artists because they are free from the fetters of the “market economy.”

    “They do not compare who is richer than the other, but simply focus on pure aesthetics,” Arirang wrote on WeChat. “They regard the pursuit of art as a mission of spiritual civilization,” not vulgar commodification.

    Such art is exceptionally valuable, Arirang said, “because of its superb realistic skills, high-cost performance, high collection value and other advantages.”

    In most countries, art is seen as a form of self-expression. But in North Korea it is strictly regulated. Artists work directly for North Korea’s propaganda authorities, and their mission is to create art glorifying the state and its socialist, nationalist ideology.

    Their work also provides income for the North Korean state.

    “All artists in North Korea are slaves to the Party,” said Song Byeok, a dissident artist who painted propaganda posters in North Korea until he fled to the South two decades ago. “North Korean art is a tool of the Kim family, with no identity of its own.”

    Posts on Arirang provide glimpses of the artists’ lives in China. In one photo, they raise glasses of beer around sizzling barbecue. Others show them playing ping pong or visiting historic monuments and bustling market streets.

    Nearly a thousand paintings had been rendered in Arirang’s “painting base,” Jin wrote wrote on WeChat. The artists work hard, often refusing breaks, the gallery’s director added.

    “It’s very relaxing, no worries,” Jin recounted one artist saying.

    Another told Jin that they can’t sleep until they were done, Jin said.

    BG Muhn, an expert in North Korean art at Georgetown University, said artists enjoy special care and respect in North Korean society.

    “The interesting thing is they don’t consider themselves doing propaganda art,” said Muhn, who met artists on nine trips to North Korea. “They feel they are doing art for the country, to serve the country and the people.”

    For decades, North Korean art was created largely for North Korean audiences. That changed in the 1990s when Pyongyang’s biggest benefactor, the Soviet Union, collapsed. North Korea desperately needed cash, so it turned to its artists.

    The government organized teams of artists to go to friendly countries in Africa and the Middle East, where they erected sculptures and painted murals eulogizing local leaders. Those efforts were financially lucrative. At the same time, the private art market took an interest, especially after South Korea began encouraging trade with its northern neighbor. Tens of thousands of paintings began flowing into South Korea, often through Chinese dealers.

    After Kim Jong Un took power in 2011, Pyongyang began loosening its grip on the artists’ creativity. They were told they no longer had to make portraits glorifying state leaders. Business boomed: Pyongyang’s state-run Mansudae studio outfitted a museum in Cambodia and was paid to erect statutes of soldiers and dictators in Senegal, the Congo, Angola, and over a dozen other sites across Africa. North Korea reaped tens of millions of dollars in art sales.

    That success evaporated when the U.N. slapped sanctions on Pyongyang in 2016 and 2017 after a series of nuclear and missile tests. Detectives questioned an art dealer in Italy and seized paintings in South Korea. Pyongyang’s art exports slowed, then ground to a halt when North Korea sealed its borders during the pandemic.

    But there are signs that North Korea’s isolation is thawing. China’s relations with North Korea have warmed as ties with the West have soured. Moscow is courting Pyongyang, with Kim visiting Russia in September to discuss arms sales amid the war with Ukraine.

    Art and cultural exchanges are now resuming, Jin wrote recently.

    “Art is becoming an important way for the outside world to understand North Korea,” Jin wrote on WeChat. “Through unremitting effort and by expanding their horizons, North Korean artists will definitely go abroad and out into the world.”

    ___

    Corrects to say that North Korean landscape paintings were being sold at a Beijing art exposition for less than a hundred dollars, not a few hundred dollars.

    AP writer Alan Suderman contributed to this story from Washington.

    Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org

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  • North Korean art sells in China despite UN sanctions over nuclear program

    North Korean art sells in China despite UN sanctions over nuclear program

    [ad_1]

    BEIJING — For sale at a recent Beijing art exposition was a painting with an asking price of $2,460 that depicted the snow-capped Mount Paektu, the mythical birthplace of the Korean people.

    A portrait of a prim young lady in bright brushstrokes was being sold for $5,190. For buyers on a budget, there were colorful landscapes being offered for a few hundred dollars.

    The dealer hawking the art made no effort to disguise who produced the pieces, despite stiff U.N. sanctions prohibiting the sale of such goods: “They were painted over there,” the dealer said, “in North Korea.”

    The dealer, who had salt-and-pepper hair and refused to divulge his name, was a representative of an art gallery that trumpets itself as China’s premier seller of North Korean art. The gallery, The Paintings Say Arirang, also operates a studio for North Korean artists in the outskirts of Beijing.

    Housed in a fenced and heavily surveilled compound, the North Koreans paint glorified, idyllic visions of life back home. For the right price, the Arirang studio says, the artists will render “exquisite” portraits at “unimaginable prices.”

    The gallery’s existence and conspicuous sales tactics, experts say, highlight China’s lax enforcement of U.N. sanctions targeting North Korea to stymie Pyongyang’s nuclear program. A. The U.N. has sanctioned a long list of North Korean goods, including arms, coal and art. The U.N. has also sought to block North Koreans from working overseas in the hopes of preventing North Korea from garnishing the wages of such laborers to fund its nuclear program. U.N. report in March singled out Arirang for selling North Korean art and hosting North Korean artists in apparent violation of sanctions.

    China has a long history of rebuffing efforts by the U.N. to rein in such suspected sanctions violators, and last year vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have toughened such restrictions. The U.N. reported that Arirang did not respond to requests for information.

    Arirang was not hard for the U.N. to find. That’s because the gallery is actively seeking to tap a niche audience drawn to the unique, socialist realist style of North Korean artists.

    Arirang was founded by Jin Zhe, an ethnic Korean and art lover born in China near the North Korean border, according to posts written by Jin on Arirang’s website. The son of a prominent painter, Jin spent years at a Chinese state-run radio station before a trip to Pyongyang instilled a taste for North Korean art. Jin, Arirang’s director, couldn’t be reached for comment.

    An Arirang employee told The AP by phone that the studio was in operation and offered a tour of the complex. She also said the studio was selling customized portraits by its North Korean artists. The employee, a woman identifying herself as surnamed Shen, changed her story a few days later, saying the base wasn’t in operation because “business is bad.”

    When AP journalists visited the “painting base,” guards turned them away.

    In lengthy posts on Chinese chat application WeChat, the art gallery expounds at length on the beauty rendered by North Korean artists because they are free from the fetters of the “market economy.”

    “They do not compare who is richer than the other, but simply focus on pure aesthetics,” Arirang wrote on WeChat. “They regard the pursuit of art as a mission of spiritual civilization,” not vulgar commodification.

    Such art is exceptionally valuable, Arirang said, “because of its superb realistic skills, high-cost performance, high collection value and other advantages.”

    In most countries, art is seen as a form of self-expression. But in North Korea it is strictly regulated. Artists work directly for North Korea’s propaganda authorities, and their mission is to create art glorifying the state and its socialist, nationalist ideology.

    Their work also provides income for the North Korean state.

    “All artists in North Korea are slaves to the Party,” said Song Byeok, a dissident artist who painted propaganda posters in North Korea until he fled to the South two decades ago. “North Korean art is a tool of the Kim family, with no identity of its own.”

    Posts on Arirang provide glimpses of the artists’ lives in China. In one photo, they raise glasses of beer around sizzling barbecue. Others show them playing ping pong or visiting historic monuments and bustling market streets.

    Nearly a thousand paintings had been rendered in Arirang’s “painting base,” Jin wrote wrote on WeChat. The artists work hard, often refusing breaks, the gallery’s director added.

    “It’s very relaxing, no worries,” Jin recounted one artist saying.

    Another told Jin that they can’t sleep until they were done, Jin said.

    BG Muhn, an expert in North Korean art at Georgetown University, said artists enjoy special care and respect in North Korean society.

    “The interesting thing is they don’t consider themselves doing propaganda art,” said Muhn, who met artists on nine trips to North Korea. “They feel they are doing art for the country, to serve the country and the people.”

    For decades, North Korean art was created largely for North Korean audiences. That changed in the 1990s when Pyongyang’s biggest benefactor, the Soviet Union, collapsed. North Korea desperately needed cash, so it turned to its artists.

    The government organized teams of artists to go to friendly countries in Africa and the Middle East, where they erected sculptures and painted murals eulogizing local leaders. Those efforts were financially lucrative. At the same time, the private art market took an interest, especially after South Korea began encouraging trade with its northern neighbor. Tens of thousands of paintings began flowing into South Korea, often through Chinese dealers.

    After Kim Jong Un took power in 2011, Pyongyang began loosening its grip on the artists’ creativity. They were told they no longer had to make portraits glorifying state leaders. Business boomed: Pyongyang’s state-run Mansudae studio outfitted a museum in Cambodia and was paid to erect statutes of soldiers and dictators in Senegal, the Congo, Angola, and over a dozen other sites across Africa. North Korea reaped tens of millions of dollars in art sales.

    That success evaporated when the U.N. slapped sanctions on Pyongyang in 2016 and 2017 after a series of nuclear and missile tests. Detectives questioned an art dealer in Italy and seized paintings in South Korea. Pyongyang’s art exports slowed, then ground to a halt when North Korea sealed its borders during the pandemic.

    But there are signs that North Korea’s isolation is thawing. China’s relations with North Korea have warmed as ties with the West have soured. Moscow is courting Pyongyang, with Kim visiting Russia in September to discuss arms sales amid the war with Ukraine.

    Art and cultural exchanges are now resuming, Jin wrote recently.

    “Art is becoming an important way for the outside world to understand North Korea,” Jin wrote on WeChat. “Through unremitting effort and by expanding their horizons, North Korean artists will definitely go abroad and out into the world.”

    ___

    AP writer Alan Suderman contributed to this story from Washington.

    Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org

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  • At 15, he is defending his home and parenting his sister. One young man’s struggle to stay in school

    At 15, he is defending his home and parenting his sister. One young man’s struggle to stay in school

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    LOS ANGELES — This was the summer Deneffy Sánchez was supposed to learn algebra, biology and the other ninth grade classes he failed last year because he was too depressed and overwhelmed. But advancing to 10th grade had to take a back seat for now. He had more pressing concerns.

    It was June. Deneffy, 15, lay in the twin bed he shares with his mother and little sister, while their new roommate — a stranger only weeks before — lamented having to live with his family.

    “I would never have let them live here if I’d known how they behave,” Fabiola Del Castillo told a reporter in Spanish. Deneffy’s mother, Lilian López, stood next to her in the cramped room where they all ate and slept.

    “Saturday is the first. You need to leave by then,” Del Castillo said, turning to López.

    Saturday was only three days away. For Deneffy, that meant a ticking clock.

    He had to save his apartment.

    ___

    No one has stopped the clock for Deneffy or other older students who fell behind when the pandemic shuttered classrooms.

    Time is running out on high school, yet millions of students aren’t showing up to class every day. When they do make it, untold numbers are so consumed with their troubles that they struggle to learn. Others have disappeared from school altogether.

    Each community has its own set of circumstances that have conspired to sabotage young people’s dreams during and after COVID-19. In Los Angeles and much of California, housing insecurity has devastated children and teens’ chances at recovery like nothing else.

    “Housing is the biggest reason kids aren’t going to school or we can’t find them,” says Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, an organization that helps dozens of Los Angeles Unified schools follow up with students who are chronically absent.

    Last year, two in five Los Angeles Unified School District students missed more than 10% of the school year, according to data supplied by the district.

    There’s more. By April, the district had lost track of more than 2,500 students — kids who quietly stopped attending school and never appeared to enroll elsewhere, according to preliminary data posted on the district website.

    The reasons are varied and, in many cases, entirely unknown. Deneffy’s odyssey is but one example of how the pandemic wrecked the life of a vulnerable teen, and why he’s struggled to return to studying.

    ___

    Before the pandemic, Deneffy didn’t like school. But he rarely missed it.

    He spent his afternoons playing soccer or baseball with friends at the park. On the weekends, he trained with the police department’s youth cadet program, advancing his mom’s dream that he become a police officer.

    This summer, while more fortunate teens worked their first jobs, flirted at the beach or even attended summer school, Deneffy was inside. He was holding down a spot in an apartment, engaged in a battle of wills with a hostile adult roommate.

    On the day a reporter visited his home, he lay in bed, a fuzzy blanket emblazoned with the face of Queen Elsa from “Frozen” pinned to the wall behind him. He pretended to be lost in his phone, but he was secretly recording Del Castillo just in case his family needed it someday.

    Just feet away, his mother, a petite 47-year-old who emigrated from Guatemala 22 years ago, stood calm, her 3-year-old daughter at her knee.

    “But I paid all of the rent for June since you didn’t have it. And you said that you would pay for July,” she said in Spanish. López had given Del Castillo money orders totaling $1,240, though López doubted the landlords charged that much for the dilapidated 450-square-foot apartment.

    “Yes,” said Del Castillo, acknowledging López had paid for both June and July. “But how am I going to have you here two months? I can’t.”

    Turning back to the reporter, Del Castillo continued: “They don’t let me sleep. They’re loud and they snore.” She started to cry.

    Then she added a new threat. Having spent all the money López gave her, Del Castillo didn’t have July’s rent. So she would relinquish the apartment and keys at the end of the month.

    They needed to get out.

    ___

    The majority of students the government considers “homeless” do indeed have a place to sleep, but it’s precarious and often shared with roommates, according to federal statistics. In Los Angeles, more than 13,000 students are homeless and 2,000 of them stay in shelters, the city’s superintendent said last spring.

    López says she was assaulted while the family stayed in a shelter after getting evicted three years ago. That’s why she’s determined to find her own housing.

    The scarcity of affordable housing in Los Angeles has given anyone with an apartment lease in their name the power to take advantage of people like López who don’t have the saved cash, references or savvy to compete for their own place and are desperate to avoid shelters.

    It was Deneffy’s idea for him to stay in the apartment for weeks on end and physically block Del Castillo from throwing them out. She had once locked out López and Jennifer, his little sister, while he was at school.

    “It’s scary that she could do that again and we couldn’t do anything about it,” he said. “I don’t feel safe leaving.”

    Without a father at home, Deneffy, in some ways, has filled the gap. He watches Jennifer when his mom has to work. He wants a job to help pay rent. He often thinks about López dying and making him responsible for his little sister.

    Jennifer already has a name for her teenage brother. She calls him Papá.

    ___

    Studies show students who take on parental roles have struggled to stay in school. Family responsibilities or financial obligations have caused 35% of student dropouts since the pandemic, according to a January report from Communities in Schools and MDRC, a think tank focused on poverty and education.

    Deneffy began shouldering adult responsibilities at the same time he lost control over his home and school life. He became homeless in September 2020, just a week after his mom gave birth to Jennifer.

    School was online that fall and for most of the year. Instead of engaging and supporting him at that difficult moment, school was alienating. When he logged into seventh grade Zoom classes from the chaotic shelter, “I felt like they were judging me,” he says of his classmates. “I couldn’t focus.”

    Seventh grade was a total loss academically and socially. Not wanting to explain his living situation, he stopped talking to friends, classmates and teachers.

    That all caught up to him in ninth grade as classes became harder. He never raised his hand. He didn’t have home internet, making it difficult to complete homework. When the school gave tests, he guessed at the answers.

    His school offered homework help after his grades crashed. It was assistance he could use.

    But what he really wanted was a therapist.

    Deneffy says he asked his school’s “psychiatric social worker” sometime in the fall of ninth grade if she could get him professional mental health counseling. But the demand for such help has skyrocketed. A full 42% of high school students surveyed in 2021 by the Centers for Disease Control said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, compared with 28% a decade before.

    Instead of getting him his own therapist, the social worker pulled him out of study hall when she could — about once a month — for “check-ins,” according to Deneffy. District and school representatives said they supported homeless students, but would not comment on Deneffy’s situation.

    When he visited the social worker, he’d smile at the pictures of her dog, play with the fidget spinners on her desk and update her on his living situation. She’d ask him to rate his stress levels. It was usually a 10 — the highest level.

    She’d praise him for recognizing his depression and finding his own coping mechanisms, drawing princesses and people wearing Victorian clothing and repeating positive affirmations to himself. He’d return to class feeling relaxed.

    Until the next class started.

    ___

    The stress started to mount that spring. One of the families they were sharing an apartment with had a daughter in drug rehabilitation. She would come home and suffer from withdrawal, or she would use drugs again. And Deneffy would witness a lot of it.

    He spent school days listening to moody electronic music in his earbuds and staring at his phone. ”When is this gonna be over?” he would think to himself. “When will I get my happy ending — an apartment?”

    Some days he didn’t show up to school at all, skipping as much as 30 days of school that spring. During year-end finals, two of the women assigned to help him with his homework pulled him out of class and brought him to their office, a former storage space outfitted with desks and a table.

    Why hadn’t he done any homework all year? they asked. Why hadn’t he studied?

    “I’m sorry,” he remembers telling them. “You should just just give up on me.”

    They wouldn’t lose hope, they said. They urged him to go to summer school.

    It was a five-week session meant to help him pass his subjects and feel confident going into 10th grade. Without summer school, he might not have enough credits to graduate on time. (Studies show that failing classes increases the likelihood of a student dropping out.)

    All of this would make it harder for Deneffy to reach his goal of going to college and becoming a therapist. But any personal goals felt remote as Del Castillo continued to rage against his mother. She regularly fought with López and called her ugly names in front of Deneffy and Jennifer.

    “It felt,” Deneffy says, “like knives stabbing me in my stomach.”

    As Del Castillo hounded them to leave by July 1, López told friends and acquaintances they needed a new place.

    ___

    That was easier said than done.

    She applied for public housing and cobbled together enough cleaning jobs so her family would receive priority status. Los Angeles County prioritizes people who work at least 20 hours a week, veterans, disabled people and full-time college students. Notably, parents with young children are not on the preference list. Even at the front of the line, López was told it would take six years to get an apartment.

    The first of July came, and Deneffy and his family stayed in the apartment. Del Castillo didn’t move out either. A few days later, she brought in another roommate — this time a man whom Deneffy had seen sleeping on the street, but who had cash to cover the rent. One day the man crumpled to the floor, started bleeding from the mouth and was taken away in an ambulance.

    “I saw this man almost die and I didn’t feel anything,” Deneffy says. “I knew something was wrong with me.”

    One day toward the end of July, López came home and told Deneffy they were leaving. Would he help her pack up their things?

    Deneffy sat still on the bed. This was the day he’d been waiting for, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t imagine going out into the world again.

    Had he forgotten how to talk to people? He panicked at the thought of anyone seeing him dressed, as he was, in shorts and sandals exposing his toes. Or without the black surgical mask that he’d come to rely on to hide his “lumpy and bumpy” face. He sat on the bed as his mom packed up the things around them and moved them into the hallway.

    Del Castillo realized they were leaving, and started tossing their things into the hallway. Once everything was out, Deneffy stepped across the threshold and she latched the door behind him.

    ___

    López had found the new apartment through old friends. It was on the bottom floor of a two-story complex of studio apartments that opened onto a shared concrete courtyard. She knew many of the families that lived there, but not the man they would end up moving in with — a retiree originally from El Salvador.

    It was more comfortable than at Del Castillo’s. There was air conditioning. The new roommate didn’t yell. Jennifer could play with other little kids in the courtyard.

    But after a few weeks, signs of trouble started to emerge. For the $900 apartment, the roommate was charging López $700 — and another man who slept in the closet $450.

    He demanded total silence. López said he tried to kiss her and make other advances. “I’m not sure how long we’re going to be able to stay here,” López said recently.

    When school started during the second week of August, Deneffy was allowed to take 10th grade classes as long as he promised to attend summer school next year.

    To mentally prepare himself for school, Deneffy wakes up around 4 a.m. He tells himself: “You got this.” He tells himself: “A new day means there are going to be new people to talk to with new, interesting problems.”

    Even with this preparation, he is already behind.

    He couldn’t do any homework for the first month of school because, again, he lacked home internet. Now, armed with a school laptop with its own wireless Internet connection, he’s wading through the backlog while trying to tackle new assignments. He’s most worried about the essays his English teacher has assigned.

    “I hate writing,” he says. “I never know where to put the commas and other punctuation.”

    He sees a therapist at school every Wednesday for 50 minutes. Things are looking up, he said, but he realizes his new peace is fragile. Against all odds, his mother has convinced the managers of the apartment building where they live to rent them their own small apartment for $1,250 — more than she brings in each month through government cash assistance and her cleaning jobs. The new place would mean an end to their roommate nightmares. To cover the rent, she’ll have to find a full time job.

    “She tells me not to worry about it,” says Deneffy. “But I do. What if we don’t have money and we get kicked out again?”

    ___

    The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Beijing’s crackdown fails to dim Hong Kong’s luster, as talent scheme lures Chinese

    Beijing’s crackdown fails to dim Hong Kong’s luster, as talent scheme lures Chinese

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    HONG KONG — The exodus of tens of thousands of professionals from Hong Kong triggered by a crackdown on its civil liberties is being offset by new arrivals: mainland Chinese keen to move to the former British colony.

    The Asian financial hub has attracted tens of thousands of visa applications from mainland Chinese under the Top Talent Pass Scheme, a program launched in late 2022 aimed at luring high-income professionals and top global university graduates from around the world, though nine in 10 successful applicants are from China.

    For mainland Chinese, Hong Kong’s unique attributes — such as wider freedom of speech and internet access, its cosmopolitan ambiance, a less oppressive work culture, and a society where ability largely trumps connections — set it apart, according to interviews by The Associated Press with 20 mainland Chinese visa holders.

    Some, like Wu, a finance professional in his 20s, view moving to Hong Kong as a way to gain greater freedom and security. Wu, who asked to be identified by his surname due to fear of government retaliation, said he felt a sense of panic when he was trapped in unpredictable lockdowns in Beijing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    He was tempted to join a protest against China’s stringent COVID-19 restrictions, but opted instead to “run,” a Chinese euphemism for emigrating that became popular during the pandemic. He moved to Hong Kong during the summer.

    “For now, it’s my life boat,” he said.

    The leeway for public dissent has narrowed in China in recent years under leader Xi Jinping. Although they have eroded under crackdowns that followed the imposition of a 2020 national security law, Hong Kong still has Western-style civil liberties that reflect its history as a former colony. China’s communist leaders promised to let the semi-autonomous region keep those freedoms for 50 years after it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

    Wu says he shares with many Hong Kongers a desire for freedom of speech. He’s also happy it has fewer staunch nationalists, popularly known as “little pinks,” than in Beijing. He enjoys the ability to freely move his money to other countries and to be able to access the internet without having to use VPNs to circumvent the censorship that prevails in the Chinese mainland.

    Since the Hong Kong government enacted the national security law, saying it was needed to restore stability following massive pro-democracy protests in 2019, many of the city’s leading activists have been prosecuted. Dozens of civil society groups have been disbanded, and outspoken media outlets like Apple Daily and Stand News have been forced to shut down.

    Those political shifts, alongside strict COVID-19 controls that were lifted in Hong Kong faster than in the mainland, contributed to a decline in Hong Kong’s population from 7.5 million in mid-2019 to 7.3 million in mid-2022. International companies and banks also have been moving away.

    It’s unclear how many Hong Kongers have left for good and how many departures were mainly because of the political climate. But more than 123,800 have moved to Britain and thousands of others gained permanent residency in Canada under special policies for people from Hong Kong after the security law took effect.

    The talent scheme is meant to help plug that brain drain: According to the immigration department, about 37,000 applications from mainland Chinese have already been approved. It is unclear how many have already arrived in the city, which had about 135,000 mainland Chinese already residing there for less than seven years as of 2021, before the program was launched. Many others have become permanent residents after staying in the city for more than seven years: nearly a third of the city’s residents were born in other parts of China and self-ruled Taiwan, though most of those moved to Hong Kong years ago.

    Fresh graduate Zhang Guangwei, 22, said he turned down several job offers in mainland China to work as a software developer in Hong Kong, aiming to escape from China’s notorious “996” working culture, in which employees often work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

    Zhang got a taste of a similar workaholic lifestyle during an internship and he’s happy his Hong Kong job only requires him to work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for five days a week. That allows him spare time to hike and socialize with friends.

    “If work gets too busy, then I feel it’s meaningless for me to earn money,” he said.

    Most of the mid-career people interviewed by AP said they were largely motivated by Hong Kong’s wider educational opportunities for their children.

    Monica Wang, a 39-year-old businesswoman who has secured a visa, was enticed by Hong Kong’s freedom of speech and its portrayal in movies and TV shows as a modern city that embraces a variety of lifestyles. Hungry for new career options, she hopes to relocate to Hong Kong from the nearby city of Zhuhai.

    “I want to see more about the world and I also hope my children can,” she said.

    Most people interviewed by AP appeared undeterred by the narrowing of leeway for dissent and free speech in Hong Kong, which still enjoys wider freedoms than can be found across the border in mainland China. Wang said she viewed the security law as a way to make the city safer.

    Though the new arrivals may alleviate the brain drain in some areas like finance, they may not fully make up for the loss of talent across various sectors, said Simon Lee, an honorary fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Asia-Pacific Institute of Business. The medical sector has lost some “quite experienced” professionals who can’t be easily replaced by doctors who haven’t been trained locally, he said.

    Experts are unsure how the influx of mainland Chinese might shape the city’s future given the dynamic interactions between new arrivals and Hong Kong natives. Although not all newcomers can speak Cantonese — the mother tongue of many Hong Kongers — some of them can secure a job quickly as Mandarin has become an increasingly prominent language in the city after the 1997 handover.

    Hong Kong has been absorbing migrants from the rest of China ever since it was a fishing village centuries ago, and while many were refugees fleeing civil war, poverty or communism, many others came simply in search of better opportunities than they could find back home.

    Such factors are playing out in the lives of new arrivals like Wu, the finance professional.

    He says he finds his local friends and Hong Kong media outlets have become more cautious since he arrived. If the government tightens controls and the political atmosphere becomes too suffocating, Wu said he plans to try to stay for the seven years required to get permanent residency. After that, he said, “there’s a high probability that I will leave.”

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  • Here’s how many jobs are available across the U.S.

    Here’s how many jobs are available across the U.S.

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    Employers posted 9.6 million job openings in September, up from 9.5 million in August according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job monthly Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). The slightly elevated numbers signal that the U.S. job market remains strong even as the U.S. Federal Reserve attempts to cool the economy.

    “Today’s JOLTS report was, simply, a bit boring — in the best possible way,” Nick Bunkers, Indeed hiring lab director of economic research, said in note on today’s report. “Not much has changed over the past few months, and the labor market appears to be stabilizing at a level consistent with a sustainable economy.”

    The September openings are down from a record 12 million in March 2022 but remain high by historical standards. Before 2021 — when the American economy began to surge from the COVID-19 pandemic — monthly job openings had never topped 8 million. Unemployment was 3.8% in September, just a couple of ticks above a half century low.

    Openings were up by 141,000 at hotels and restaurants, which have struggled to attract and keep workers since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020.


    What the September jobs report means for U.S. workers

    03:25

    Focus on wages

    Layoffs fell to 1.5 million from 1.7 million in August, more evidence that workers enjoy an unusual degree of job security. The number of Americans quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence they can find better pay elsewhere — was virtually unchanged.

    The Federal Reserve’s inflation fighters would like to see the job market cool. They worry that strong hiring pressures employers into raising wages — and trying to pass the higher costs along with price increases that feed inflation.

    “The quits rate, which is a good leading indicator of wage pressures, held steady and suggests that wage growth will continue to moderate,” Nancy Vanden Houten, U.S. lead economist at Oxford Economics, said in a note.

    Job growth has stayed strong even as the Fed raises interest rates at a record pace as it battles equally historic inflation. 

    The Fed has raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times since March 2022 in an effort to contain inflation that hit a four-decade high in 2022. In September, consumer prices were up 3.7% from a year earlier, down from a peak 9.1% in June last year but still above the Fed’s 2% target.


    Employers now must post salary ranges on all job listings across New York state

    03:33

    The combination of sturdy hiring, healthy economic growth and decelerating inflation has raised hopes the Fed can pull off a so-called soft landing — raising rates just enough contain price increases without tipping the economy into recession. The central bank is expected to announce later Wednesday that it will leave its benchmark rate unchanged for the second straight meeting as it waits to assess the fallout from its earlier rate hikes.

    “We don’t expect further Fed rate hikes, but risks continued to be tilted in that direction,” Vanden Houten said. “The Fed needs to see more evidence of slower job and wage growth to be convinced that inflation is on a sustainable path back to 2%.”

    On Friday, the Labor Department releases its jobs report for October. Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet expect that U.S. employers added a solid 189,000 jobs last month and that the unemployment rate stayed at 3.8%. 


    UAW’s tentative contract agreements with automakers could end strike

    03:38

    Impact of autoworkers strike on jobs forecast

    Other analysts, such as Bill Adams, chief economist for Comerica Bank, predict an uptick in unemployment, citing economic data from payroll processing company ADP.  Employment fell by 13,000 in the Midwest in September, ADP reported, a likely result of the UAW strike, according to Adams.

    “Comerica forecasts for the unemployment rate to tick up to 3.9% in Friday’s jobs report for October from 3.8% in September, reflecting headwinds from the strike that will presumably abate in November,” Adams said in a research note.

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