As the fight between bosses and workers over returning to the office keeps entering new rounds, new data show how much in-office attendance ramped up last year — especially for white-collar workers with high levels of education.
But even still, the return to the office has been two different stories for men and women. From 2021 to 2022, men spent more time at the workplace while women spent the same amount of time working from home year-over-year.
Last year, 34% of workers said they worked from home at least part of the time, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of how Americans spend their time.
That was down from the 38% of employed people who said the same in 2021 — and a deeper look into Thursday’s data reveals an even more pronounced, but uneven, reduction in the number of people who are working remotely.
More than one quarter of men in 2022 said they spend at least some of their working time at home, while 41% of women said they had work-from-home in their job schedule. One year earlier, it was a different story for men, but not for women. Over one-third of men, 35%, said working from home was part of their routine while 42% of women said the same.
It may be a reminder of the juggle that women face between their personal and professional lives. For example, in homes with children under age 6, women spent just over an hour each day caring for their children while men in those households spent half that amount. That breakdown was unchanged between 2022 and 2021, the data showed.
Meanwhile, the return-to-office trend accelerated for more educated workers from 2021 to 2022. In 2021, 60% of people with at least a bachelor’s degree said they did some of their work from home. In 2022, the share fell to 54% doing some work from home.
When the pandemic shut down offices and other workplaces, people with higher levels of education often had greater chances of being able to stay home while they worked.
That dynamic is still at play now, although the differences between groups are becoming less stark. Last year and in 2021, the share of people with no college degree who said they worked from home at least some of the time stayed below 20%.
It’s unclear what was driving highly-educated workers to spend more time in the office between 2021 and 2022, said Stephan Meier, a Columbia Business School professor who chairs the school’s management division. Some of it could be attributed to return-to-office policies, but it might also be due to growing comfort with vaccination and public-health measures as the pandemic continued, he said.
“What I would care about is who goes to the office and who doesn’t want to go to the office,” he said.
The overall change in numbers is not “a major shift,” said Meier, who teaches students and executives about the future of work. “What those numbers show to me is that the war on remote work is not over.”
The year-over-year decline fits with the trends that Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, is seeing in his own research analyzing where people say they are working these days. Even if there’s less remote work happening, Bloom said, his research shows the “rate of decline is itself declining.”
Bloom thinks the rate of remote work may bottom out next year. “I predict longer-run, from 2025 onwards, this will start to rise again as remote-work technology — hardware, software, [virtual reality, augmented reality], etc. — gets better and continues the long-run rise of [working from home].”
Between May and December 2020, Bureau of Labor Statistics research showed, 42% of employed people said they spent least some of their time working from home as COVID-19 upended daily life.
As a whole, the BLS survey on how Americans use their time paints a picture of a slow return to the office — but not necessarily a return to the way things were before COVID-19.
Before the pandemic, 24% of workers said they spent some of their time working from home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This year, office foot traffic has edged higher, but the rise is incremental and uneven. Earlier in June, average weekly office occupancy surpassed 50% for the first time in three months, according to an ongoing gauge from Kastle Systems, a security-technology provider.
One week later, the company’s barometer of average occupancy across 10 major cities dropped back below 50%. In the data from early June, Tuesdays tended to be the busiest days for offices, and Fridays were the slowest.
Meier said he wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s time-use survey reveals even less time spent working from home. But this is a transitional moment in which businesses are figuring out the particular version of hybrid work duties and office setups that work for them, he said.
“Personally, I do think there is something magical about being in person,” Meier said. “Does it need to be five days a week? Absolutely not.”
Signing up for Amazon Prime is as easy as 1-2-3. Canceling it, not so much.
For years, up until this past April, the online retail giant made customers trying to quit its signature service navigate an odyssey through a labyrinthine system called the “Iliad Flow” named after the epically long and complex masterwork by the Greek poet Homer.
According to a civil lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission, Amazon customers were required to make their way through a four-page, six-click, 15-option process to stop paying for the service. One wrong click, and they were sent back to the beginning, the lawsuit said.
The FTC noted that Amazon AMZN, +3.69%
maintained the multistep process even though new subscribers in the U.S. to $14.99-a-month or $139-a-year Prime accounts needed only one or two clicks. And even though subscribers could sign up on a multitude of devices, they could only cancel using their desktop computer or mobile phone or by calling customer service.
The FTC suit also accused Amazon of manipulating millions of customers into inadvertently signing up for Prime and then hitting them with automatic renewals without warning.
Amazon has dismissed the charges as misguided, adding that the lawsuit is legally and factually inaccurate. It has vowed to fight the FTC.
The FTC said in court papers that Amazon created the complex “Iliad Flow” exit strategy in 2016 and kept it in place until April of this year, when it caught wind that the agency was preparing to file a lawsuit about the practice.
During that time frame, Amazon quadrupled the number of global Prime subscribers from around 50 million to more than 200 million. The program brings around $25 billion into Amazon’s coffers every year.
The suit described an allegedly maddening process for a customer to actually cancel a subscription.
To start, a subscriber first had to find the “Iliad Flow,” which was not made easy, the FTC suit said. A customer had to select the “accounts and list” dropdown menu, navigate to the third column and then select the eleventh option there: Prime Membership.
That would bring the customer to the Prime Central page. There, one would have to click the “manage membership” button to trigger options that finally included an “end membership” button. But that was only the beginning.
Only after clicking “end membership” would the customer enter the “Iliad Flow” process. From there, a customer would need to navigate three more pages, each with a multitude of options, to finally complete canceling the subscription.
This is one of several web pages a Prime customer would need to navigate in order to cancel the service, the FTC said.
Federal Trade Commission
On the first page, customers were forced to “take a look back at [their] journey with Prime” — a kind of greatest-hits reel of Prime services used over the years. The page was also loaded with marketing material for a multitude of Prime services, with links reading: “Start shopping today’s deals!” and “You can start watching videos by clicking here!” or “Start listening now!”
One wrong click would knock the subscriber out of the “Iliad Flow.”
If the subscriber managed to navigate to the bottom of the page, he or she would finally find a “continue to cancel” button. That would take them to Page 2.
According to the FTC, that page would present the customer with a number of discount options, such as switching from monthly to annual payments, or taking advantage of student discounts or discounts for people on government assistance. The page also included warning icons and links stating: “Items tied to your Prime membership will be affected if you cancel your membership,” and “By canceling, you will no longer be eligible for your unclaimed Prime exclusive offers.”
Clicking on any of those would take the subscriber out of the “Iliad Flow.”
At the bottom of that page was another “continue to cancel” button, which would take the user to Page 3.
If you managed to get to this page, you were only six options away from actually being able to quit Amazon’s Prime service, the FTC suit said.
Federal Trade Commission
On this final page, a customer was presented with five options, only the last of which — “end now” — would actually allow the subscription to be canceled. The other options included pausing the subscription or canceling its auto-renewal function. Pressing any of the four other choices would bring the user out of the “Iliad Flow.” They would have to start over if they wanted to continue.
Only after successfully navigating this maze of web pages would the customer be allowed to actually cancel the service.
The suit said this process caused cancellations to drop significantly.
A nascent category of mental health treatments is getting a major cash infusion.
Blake Mycoskie, founder of the canvas-footwear phenomenon TOMS Shoes, has committed to giving $100 million to support psychedelic research and access, Mycoskie told MarketWatch in an exclusive interview. The money will help fund academic institutions investigating psychedelics’ potential to treat anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental-health issues, as well as nonprofits helping to connect patients in need with psychedelic treatments.
Traditional psychedelics include hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms–recently legalized in Oregon and Colorado. Other drugs that can alter mood and perception–such as ketamine and MDMA, also known as ecstasy–aren’t classical psychedelics but are broadly included in the research and policy discussions generating a surge of interest in this class of treatments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, has granted psilocybin and MDMA “breakthrough therapy” status, a designation designed to expedite development and review of drugs for serious conditions, and could approve MDMA for treatment of PTSD as soon as next year.
Given the rapid developments in the field, ”we really need to get this right, and we really need to have these foundations and nonprofits funded properly,” therapists trained, and clinics open and running smoothly, Mycoskie said. “I felt a real sense of urgency,” he said, and asked his wealth manager, “what’s the most that I can give?”
The $100 million answer to that question amounts to about a quarter of Mycoskie’s net worth and marks a major milestone in psychedelics’ delicate image transformation. Shedding some of their dangerous-party-drug reputation, psychedelics are gaining attention from top pharmacologists, the scientific community, biotech companies and investors who see them as a critical part of the solution to America’s mental health crisis.
Cracked open
Mycoskie, 46, said his interest in psychedelics dates back to 2017, when a friend returning from a trip to Central America described his incredible experience with ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic brewed into a tea. As an entrepreneur under intense pressure to perform, Mycoskie said, he decided to try it for himself. The experience “cracked me open, and it connected me more to my faith in God, made me feel that we were all connected and everything was fine and perfect,” he said. “I came back just feeling like, wow, that was more powerful than any therapy I’d ever done.” He later tried MDMA-assisted therapy, he said, which also helped him process issues that traditional talk therapy had left unresolved.
Realizing how many people could benefit from similar treatments, Mycoskie started giving money to academic groups and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, a nonprofit organization. He also got involved in last year’s Colorado ballot initiative, which legalized psilocybin and several other psychedelic substances, including ibogaine, which has shown potential to treat substance-use disorders. Mycoskie has already given about $10 million to psychedelic research and access, he said, and plans to give about $5 million annually for 18 more years.
Mycoskie was a bit squeamish at first, he acknowledges, about publicly backing research on drugs that are largely illegal. “Am I going to get held up at TSA every time I go through the airport?” he remembers thinking. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes LSD and MDMA alongside heroin as “schedule one” drugs, defined as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” But with growing public awareness and acceptance of the drugs’ potential as mental-health treatments, he said, he felt emboldened to make a big public commitment, and “the research has caught up,” he said. “It’s important that people like myself put their name out there and their money out there to show that this really is a path forward,” he said.
Mycoskie’s $100 million commitment “is the biggest that we’ve ever seen in the psychedelics space,” said Joe Green, president of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, a nonprofit supporting philanthropy in the field, and a MAPS board member. Now that research has made great strides to support use of the medicines as mental-health treatments, that money can help ensure that “these actually come to the world in a safe and beneficial way,” Green said. With certain treatments legalized in Oregon and Colorado, for example, “the system requires licensed guides, facilitators, licensed service centers,” he said. “It’s not like cannabis medical–you won’t be able to take the mushrooms outside the service center.”
Psychedelic therapeutics market could be worth more than $8.3 billion by 2028
Mycoskie plans to publicize his pledge at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ psychedelic science conference–billed as “the largest psychedelic conference in history”–this week in Denver. On the agenda: Sessions ranging from state policy and regulatory considerations to clinical trials of psilocybin- and MDMA-assisted therapy and “sex and psychedelics: weaving altered states for healing and pleasure.”
The news comes as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pushing for new funding for research into the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD in military service members as part of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which the House Armed Services Committee will consider Wednesday.
Already, public companies like Atai Life Sciences ATAI, -6.91%,
Compass Pathways CMPS, -3.37%
and Cybin CYBN, +6.81%
are developing therapies based on psychedelic substances. The psychedelic therapeutics market could be worth more than $8.3 billion by 2028, according to InsightAce Analytic. Even the federal government is throwing money at this niche, funding efforts to develop psychedelic mental-health treatments without the hallucinogenic side effects.
More than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and less than half of the roughly 58 million adults with any mental illness are receiving treatment. Suicide rates, which have been on a long upward trajectory, declined briefly between 2018 and 2020 before returning to peak levels in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nine out of 10 U.S. adults believe the country is suffering a mental health crisis, according to a survey last year by CNN and KFF, a health policy nonprofit. And commonly prescribed antidepressants, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) don’t work well for many patients.
Nushama, a New York City wellness center offering ketamine-based therapy.
Courtesy of Nushama and Costas Picadas
Mental illness “is truly an epidemic, and we are losing the fight,” said Dylan Beynon, CEO and founder of Mindbloom, which offers a telehealth ketamine treatment program. While there are some existing solutions that are helping to bend the curve, he said, more research and educational support for providers and patients is needed, he said.
Indeed, some substantial hurdles still separate psychedelic mental-health treatments from many of the patients they might benefit, including a lack of insurance coverage for the currently legal treatments and debate over how to administer them safely. In the case of ketamine, for example, which is FDA-approved as an anesthetic and used off-label as a mental-health treatment, some providers favor in-person guided sessions while others, like Beynon, advocate for telehealth prescribing–a model that boomed during the pandemic.
Some experts have lately warned that the practice of psychedelic medicine may be getting ahead of the science. Given the growing public and commercial interest, “there is the risk that use of psychedelics for purported clinical goals may outpace evidence-based research and regulatory approval,” the American Psychiatric Association said last year in a position statement on psychedelic and “empathogenic” agents–a category that includes MDMA.
Mycoskie has also made some investments in the psychedelics space, although he said profits aren’t his motivation. He has invested in Mind Medicine Inc. MNMD, -0.50%,
which says it is developing “psychedelic inspired medicines” that aim to treat the underlying causes of distress in the brain. And Mycoskie helped fund a public benefit corporation linked with MAPS, which is taking MDMA through the FDA approval process–an investment that will pay dividends when the treatment is commercialized, he said.
Providers currently offering ketamine treatments say they’re eager to expand into MDMA and other therapies in the category as soon as they’re legal. Mindbloom, for example, currently offers a ketamine treatment program that’s available through telehealth in several dozen states and aims to start offering MDMA-assisted therapy late next year after FDA approval is finalized, Beynon said. Psilocybin-assisted therapy could come a couple of years after that, he said.
Nushama, a New York City psychedelic wellness center that offers ketamine-based therapy, delivered through in-person IV infusions, also hopes to expand into MDMA when it’s approved, said co-founder Jay Godfrey.
Treatment without the trip
Still on the horizon: New treatments that could produce psychedelic medicines’ mental-health benefits without the trip. University of North Carolina School of Medicine pharmacology professor Dr. Bryan Roth is leading an effort to create new medications for depression, anxiety and substance abuse that work similarly to psychedelics but without the hallucinogenic, disorienting side effects. His effort is backed by a $27-million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Such treatments, Roth said, could help the many patients for whom such psychedelic effects are unappealing or ill-advised–such as military service members. “You would never want to give psilocybin or ketamine to somebody who has a gun,” Roth said.
Having worked with Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD while training as a psychiatrist earlier in his career, Roth said, he’s keenly aware of the need for safe and effective treatments. “There was nothing we could give them for their symptoms,” he said. “The most we could do was give them medications to stop their ability to have dreams, so they wouldn’t have nightmares. That was basically it.”
“Undoing 52 years of propaganda is a heavy lift,” said Nushama co-founder Jay Godfrey.
Costas Picadas
Roth’s team has already developed compounds that have shown antidepressant effects without psychedelic side effects in mice, he said. The team is now working to find a clinical candidate suitable for testing in humans, he said.
Treatments that can help “break bad emotional or psychological patterns without scary, high-friction psychedelic experiences would be a great thing for patients, providers and the healthcare system,” said Mindbloom’s Beynon.
Much more remains to be done to reduce the stigma associated with psychedelics, experts say. It has been 52 years since President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” and billions of dollars have been spent since then telling people that “these medicines are dangerous, that they’re addictive, and that they’ll fry your brains,” Godfrey said. “Undoing 52 years of propaganda is a heavy lift, but one thing I’m optimistic about is that the outcomes are starting to speak for themselves.”
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden had just six words to offer after his 53-year-old son Hunter pleaded guilty to federal tax offenses in a deal that is also likely to spare him time behind bars on a weapons charge.
“I’m very proud of my son,” he said.
That pride has been accompanied by pain, and for the president’s family, both have been on public display. Republicans have worked to use Hunter Biden’s actions — and his acknowledged struggle with addiction — as an anchor to try to drag down his father.
As a parent, Joe Biden has tried to keep his son close; they speak almost every day. Hunter was at his father’s side on a recent trip to Ireland, on the lawn of the White House with other family members for the Easter egg roll and in the bleachers with his mom and dad as his daughter graduated from college last month.
But out of public view, a five-year criminal investigation was coming to a conclusion, with a plea deal announced Tuesday that resolves the probe into the taxes and foreign business dealings of the president’s second son. The agreement with the Justice Department means Hunter Biden will plead guilty to a misdemeanor tax offense, and he’ll avoid a more serious felony charge of illegally possessing a firearm as a drug user, as long as he adheres to conditions agreed to in court.
As a president, Joe Biden has made of point of keeping his distance from the federal investigation into his son’s dealings.
The most fatherly of things he could do — advise a son going through a hard time — isn’t exactly available for a man whose administration commands the office that was investigating his son and his political rival simultaneously.
“President Biden has always impressed me as someone who puts his family first,” said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a close friend of the family. “In this case involving Hunter Biden, he has drawn a clear line. He has not been involved in or interfered in the Department of Justice in their five-year-long investigation, which is now coming to a close. I can only imagine the relief they may feel in being able to move forward.”
But Republicans are hardly satisfied with the outcome, particularly as the Justice Department indicted former President Donald Trump in an unrelated case where he is accused of mishandling classified documents. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., compared the outcome of Hunter Biden’s case to the Trump documents case now heading toward federal court and said, “If you are the president’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.”
Though Hunter Biden is a private citizen, he factors heavily into notable political moments over the past five years: surfacing as a central character in the first impeachment case against Trump, who tried to get Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation into the younger Biden related to his position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Hunter Biden had joined the board in 2014, around the time his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, was helping conduct U.S. foreign policy with Ukraine. Trump and his allies have long argued, without evidence, that Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine influenced the Obama administration’s policies toward the East European nation.
Hunter Biden’s descent into drugs and alcohol following the 2015 death of his brother Beau Biden from cancer led to some troubling decisions and interventions that Republicans have seized on as proof of his shady tactics, but he also doesn’t always help himself.
In 2020, the contents of a laptop that he’d left at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved made their way to Republicans and were publicly leaked, revealing personal messages about his work and his life.
Addiction is still very much seen as a moral failing instead of a disease, said Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman who is now a leading voice on mental health and addiction, was himself an addict and also the son of a famous lawmaker, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Kennedy said Biden could use this as a teachable moment for the nation to shift how addiction is viewed, even if Hunter is being used as a tool to attack his father.
“The benefit of this president is that his policies are the most progressive of any president to date in terms of treating them as the medical issues they are,” Kennedy said. “In a sense, he is like my father was, from an old school. They kept this under wraps, it was shameful. They didn’t talk about it. But you know, to his credit, his policies reflect an enlightened approach.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said of Hunter Biden’s situation that he “felt very sorry for him and for his family. I respect the president for saying he loves his son. That’s a good thing even if your son does embarrassing things.”
There were questions as well about a White House arrangement in the early days of Biden’s presidency that allowed Hunter to sell his artwork without knowing the identity of the purchaser. Officials said it would avoid any potential ethical entanglements with the sales but Republicans have raised questions and are seeking an interview with the gallery owner.
Hunter Biden also has been tangled up in an ongoing child support dispute in Arkansas after a DNA test proved he was the father of a now 4-year-old. The Biden family hasn’t publicly acknowledged the child, and Hunter Biden initially objected to an effort by the woman to change the girl’s last name to Biden.
His recent trip to Ireland with his dad came up in court testimony when his lawyers said Hunter slept on a cot in his dad’s hotel room, part of an accounting of how he had been spending money.
And still, photos of Hunter Biden in the throes of addiction routinely circulate online. Biden said in his memoir he can shrug them off because he’s come out the other end thanks to the support of his family.
“I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
In many ways the same could be said of President Biden’s political career, which was nearly cut short after the death of his wife and daughter in 1972 just days before Biden was sworn in to the Senate at age 30.
Sons Beau and Hunter, who were just about to turn 4 and 3 at the time, were seriously injured. The two brothers spent months together in the hospital, a bond that Hunter wrote was unbreakable. Even if they argued later in life, he wrote, they’d always close with an “I love you.”
Beau was the one who sought public life, a decorated Iraq war veteran and Delaware attorney general. The president has said many times that it should have been Beau on the stage as president rather than himself.
Hunter said he was content to have it be Beau in the spotlight. But when his brother died, Hunter came unglued. At one point, he wrote, he was living in a motel completely removed from his family in a haze of drug use.
“Dad saved me,” he wrote. “Left on my own, I’m certain I would not have survived.”
___ Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
BEIJING — Foreign companies are shifting investments and their Asian headquarters out of China as confidence plunges following the expansion of an anti-spying law and other challenges, a business group said Wednesday.
The report by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China adds is one of many signs of growing pessimism despite the ruling Communist Party’s efforts to revive interest in the world’s No. 2 economy following the end of anti-virus controls.
Companies are uneasy about security controls, government protection of their Chinese rivals and a lack of action on reform promises, according to the European Chamber. They also are being squeezed by slowing Chinese economic growth and rising costs.
Business confidence in China is “pretty much the lowest we have on record,” the European Chamber president, Jens Eskelund, told reporters ahead of the report’s release.
“There’s no expectation that the regulatory environment is really going to improve over the next five years,” Eskelund said.
President Xi Jinping’s government, trying to shore up economic growth that sank to 3% last year, is trying to encourage foreign companies to invest and bring in technology. But they are uneasy about security rules and plans to create competitors to global suppliers of computer chips, commercial jetliners and other technology. That often involves subsidies and market barriers that Washington and the European Union say violate Beijing’s free-trade commitments.
Two-thirds of the 570 companies that responded to the European Chamber’s survey said doing business in China has become more difficult, up from less than half before the pandemic. Three out of five said the business environment is “more political,” up from half the previous year.
Companies are on edge after police raided offices of two consultancies, Bain & Co. and Capvision, and a due diligence firm, Mintz Group, without public explanation. Authorities say companies are obliged to obey the law but have given no indication of possible violations.
Companies also are uneasy about Beijing’s promotion of national self-reliance. Xi’s government is pressing manufacturers, hospitals and others to use Chinese suppliers even if that raises their costs. Foreign companies worry they might be shut out of their markets.
Last month, the government banned using products from the biggest U.S. maker of memory chips, Micron Technology Inc., in computers that handle sensitive information. It said Micron had unspecified security flaws but gave no explanation.
One in 10 companies in the European Chamber survey said they have shifted investments out of China. Another 1 in 5 are delaying or considering shifting investments. In aviation and aerospace, 1 in 5 companies plan no future investment in China.
China has long been a top investment destination due to its huge and growing consumer market, but companies complain about market access restrictions, pressure to hand over technology and other irritants. The ruling party has tightened control since Xi took power in 2012, pressing foreign companies to give the party board seats and a direct say in hiring and other decisions.
The European Chamber noted it wasn’t just foreign companies that are moving: 2 out of 5 in its survey reported Chinese customers or suppliers are shifting investments out of the country.
A separate group, the British Chamber of Commerce in China, said last month its members were waiting for “greater clarity” about anti-spying, data security and other rules before making new investments.
The biggest concern is the ruling party’s sweeping expansion of its definition of national security to include the economy, food, energy and politics, Eskelund said.
“What does qualify as a state secret? Where does politics begin and the commercial world stop?” Eskelund said. That “creates uncertainty” about “where we can operate as normal businesses.”
In the European Chamber survey, the top destination for companies moving their Asian headquarters out of China was Singapore, with 43% of companies that moved, followed by Malaysia. Only 9% went or plan to go to Hong Kong.
Leaders including Premier Li Qiang, China’s top economic official, have promised to improve operating conditions, but businesses say they see few concrete changes.
“Our members are not really convinced that we are going to see tangible results,” Eskelund said.
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BEIJING (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, as the top U.S. diplomat wrapped up a high-stakes two-day visit to Beijing aimed at easing soaring tensions between the countries.
The 35-minute meeting at the Great Hall of the People had been expected and was seen as key to the success of the trip, but neither side confirmed it would happen until a State Department official announced it just an hour beforehand.
In footage of the meeting released by state broadcaster CCTV, Xi is heard to say “The two sides have agreed to follow through on the common understandings President Biden and I have reached in Bali.”
In earlier meetings between Blinken and senior Chinese officials, the two sides expressed willingness to talk but showed little inclination to bend from hardened positions on disagreements ranging from trade, to Taiwan, to human rights conditions in China and Hong Kong, to Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea, to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Xi said that they had made progress and reached agreements on “some specific issues” without elaborating. “This is very good,” Xi said.
“I hope that through this visit, Mr. Secretary, you will make more positive contributions to stabilizing China-US relation,” Xi added.
Despite Blinken’s presence in China, he and other U.S. officials had played down the prospects for any significant breakthroughs on the most vexing issues facing the planet’s two largest economies.
Instead, these officials have emphasized the importance of the two countries establishing and maintaining better lines of communication.
Blinken is the highest-level U.S. official to visit China since President Joe Biden took office, and the first secretary of state to make the trip in five years. His visit is expected to usher in a new round of visits by senior U.S. and Chinese officials, possibly including a meeting between Xi and Biden in the coming months.
Blinken met earlier Monday with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi for about three hours, according to a U.S. official.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement that Blinken’s visit “coincides with a critical juncture in China-U.S. relations, and it is necessary to make a choice between dialogue or confrontation, cooperation or conflict,” and blamed the “U.S. side’s erroneous perception of China, leading to incorrect policies towards China” for the current “low point” in relations.
It said the U.S. had a responsibility to halt “the spiraling decline of China-U.S. relations to push it back to a healthy and stable track” and that Wang had “demanded that the U.S. stop hyping up the ‘China threat theory’, lift illegal unilateral sanctions against China, abandon suppression of China’s technological development, and refrain from arbitrary interference in China’s internal affairs.”
The State Department said Blinken “underscored the importance of responsibly managing the competition between the United States and the PRC through open channels of communication to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.”
In the first round of talks on Sunday, Blinken met for nearly six hours with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang after which both countries said they had agreed to continue high-level discussions. However, there was no sign that any of the most fractious issues between them were closer to resolution.
Both the U.S. and China said Qin had accepted an invitation from Blinken to visit Washington but Beijing made clear that “the China-U.S. relationship is at the lowest point since its establishment.” That sentiment is widely shared by U.S. officials.
Blinken’s visit comes after his initial plans to travel to China were postponed in February after the shootdown of a Chinese surveillance balloon over the U.S.
A snub by the Chinese leader would have been a major setback to the effort to restore and maintain communications at senior levels.
Biden and Xi had made commitments to improve communications “precisely so that we can make sure we are communicating as clearly as possible to avoid possible misunderstandings and miscommunications,” Blinken said before leaving for Beijing.
And Biden said over the weekend that he hoped to be able to meet with Xi in the coming months to take up the plethora of differences that divide them.
In his meetings on Sunday, Blinken also pressed the Chinese to release detained American citizens and to take steps to curb the production and export of fentanyl precursors that are fueling the opioid crisis in the United States.
Since the cancellation of Blinken’s trip in February, there have been some high-level engagements. CIA chief William Burns traveled to China in May, while China’s commerce minister traveled to the U.S. And Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Wang Yi in Vienna in May.
But those have been punctuated by bursts of angry rhetoric from both countries over the Taiwan Strait, their broader intentions in the Indo-Pacific, China’s refusal to condemn Russia for its war against Ukraine, and U.S. allegations from Washington that Beijing is attempting to boost its worldwide surveillance capabilities, including in Cuba.
And, earlier this month, China’s defense minister rebuffed a request from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for a meeting on the sidelines of a security symposium in Singapore, a sign of continuing discontent.
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority on Friday said it has cleared Amazon.com’s proposed $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot Corp.
The regulator, which had launched an initial formal investigation in April into the takeover of the Roomba maker, concluded that the deal wouldn’t lead to competition concerns in the U.K.
The deal remains under regulatory review in other jurisdictions. In September, iRobot said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission formally requested documents from both companies explaining the deal’s purpose and rationale. A securities filing by iRobot said both companies would cooperate with the FTC’s investigation.
After an investigation, which typically takes up to a year, the FTC can sue to block a merger, seek concessions such as divestitures or decline to take action, allowing a deal to close.
“We’re working cooperatively with the relevant regulators in their review of the merger,” an Amazon spokesperson said at the time.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has filed an application for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
There are currently no such products in the U.S. The SEC approved several bitcoin BTCUSD futures-based ETFs in the past, but has yet to greenlight anything that is backed by bitcoin itself.
A federal judge late Tuesday approved a request by the Federal Trade Commission to temporarily block Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order in order to “maintain the status quo,” and set a evidentiary hearing to be held June 22-23 on whether a preliminary injunction should be issued.
The deal was set to be finalized as soon as this Friday. Tuesday’s order said the deal may not close until at least five days after the court’s preliminary injunction ruling.
The acquisition has raised antitrust concerns that Microsoft MSFT, +0.74%,
with its Xbox gaming console, could withhold hit Activision Blizzard ATVI, +1.17%
videogame franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “Overwatch” from competing console platforms.
“This loss of competition would likely result in significant harm to consumers in multiple markets at a pivotal time for the industry,” the FTC said in its filing Monday.
In a statement Tuesday evening, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Accelerating the legal process in the U.S will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the gaming market. A temporary restraining order makes sense until we can receive a decision from the court, which is moving swiftly.”
ABUJA, Nigeria — Nigeria’s central bank chief has been arrested hours after being suspended from office by the country’s new president, authorities said Saturday.
Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, is in “custody for some investigative reasons,” Nigeria’s secret police said in a statement without providing further details.
The country’s new president, Bola Tinubu, suspended Emefiele as the central bank governor on Friday night, nine years after he was appointed to office to oversee the monetary policy affairs of Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country.
Emefiele’s suspension “is sequel to the ongoing investigation of his office and the planned reforms in the financial sector of the economy,” according to a statement from the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. Folashodun Adebisi Shonubi, a deputy governor at the bank, immediately took over as acting governor.
Emefiele’s arrest culminates months of investigation into his office by Nigeria’s Department of State Services, whose bid to arrest him in December was declined by a local court. The secret police had accused him of terrorism financing and economic crimes, but a judge ruled that it couldn’t provide evidence to support the allegations. It wasn’t immediately clear if new findings were made in the investigation.
Analysts, however, said Emefiele’s removal from office didn’t come as a surprise, pointing to some policies he introduced in recent months which were seen as controversial. Abiola Gbemisola, a Lagos-based financial analyst, identified some of those policies as the bank’s currency swap program as well as its decision to continuously print and lend money to the Nigerian government.
“The central bank governor was very powerful” in office, Gbemisola said.
“I wasn’t expecting him to stay under the new administration, especially given the fact that he was not so kind in his policies leading up to the (February presidential) election. Rather than focusing on reducing inflation, he contributed to Nigeria’s high inflation by giving money to the federal government, printing money essentially to give loans,” added Gbemisola.
Under Emefiele, Nigeria’s economy struggled with a weakened currency caused by the foreign exchange crisis as well as a surging inflation rate, which was at a near-two-decade high of 22.2% in April.
The bank’s move to replace the local naira currency with newly designed ones caused economic hardship for so many Nigerians that it affected the turnout in the February election while authorities were forced to reintroduce the old bank notes being replaced.
“The fact that he has been removed is a positive thing for the (financial) market and we can now expect to see something different,” Gbemisola said.
LOS ANGELES — Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed Thursday amending the U.S. Constitution to harden federal gun laws amid a surge of mass killings across the nation, his latest step onto the national stage amid the unfolding 2024 White House campaign.
With the U.S. bitterly divided over gun rights and the 2nd Amendment, the chances of recasting the Constitution to enshrine universal background checks, a waiting period to buy firearms and other restrictions into law appeared remote. A new amendment has not been added since 1992.
Newsom has denied any interest in a presidential run and is supporting President Joe Biden’s reelection bid. But his proposal marked his latest maneuver in what has taken on the look of a shadow campaign as he injects himself into the national discussion on guns, abortion, immigration and other contentious issues.
He’s been in a running dispute with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, and traveled to Florida in April to criticize what he said are GOP efforts to tread on LGBTQ+ rights, weaken civil and voting rights, ban abortion and marginalize people of color. They’ve recently clashed after Florida picked up asylum-seekers on the Texas border and took them by private jet to California — Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man.”
Newsom — positioning himself as a liberal counterweight to national Republicans — has argued that Democrats have been too passive in the country’s culture wars and warned that the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority could unravel decades of court rulings that could redefine what it means to live in America.
Indeed, Newsom told NBC’s “The Today Show” in an interview that his proposal was crafted in response to federal courts rolling back several gun safety laws. In 2022, for example, the Supreme Court rejected a century-old New York law that made it difficult to obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun.
“The gun lobby says we can’t stop the carnage America now experiences every day without violating the 2nd Amendment — that thoughts and prayers are the best we can do … that’s a lie,” Newsom said in a statement. “In this country, we do have the power to change things. That power is written into the Constitution, and today we’re using it to end America’s gun violence crisis.”
During a walkover re-election last year in the heavily Democratic state and into 2023, Newsom has appeared eager to test the traditional role of a governor. He’s been seeking out the national spotlight, formed a political action committee with surplus campaign money to support Democratic candidates in Republican-led states and traveled the country to criticize GOP policies and promote California as a haven for what he calls fundamental rights, including same-sex marriage, freedom of speech and abortion.
During his re-election campaign, he spent money on ads in Florida and Texas to poke at the policies of two of his political foils, DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott.
Speaking in Austin, Texas, in September, he warned that Democrats needed a more aggressive strategy with critical rights on the line, saying of Republicans, “These guys are ruthless on the other side.”
Veteran Democratic consultant Roger Salazar said Newsom was “going on offense” in hopes of influencing federal policies that impact California and the nation. But it also has the benefit of elevating his national profile and potentially increasing his fundraising clout, with speculation about his political ambitions.
Should he decide to seek national office in the future, “this is a great way to set himself up for it,” Salazar said. “All these activities and actions are ones he can put in his political piggy bank, so to speak, and use them down the road.”
“Five years is not that long,” he added, referring to the 2028 presidential campaign.
Newsom’s proposed 28th Amendment has four prongs: It would institute what he called a “reasonable” waiting period for all gun purchases, ban so-called assault rifles throughout the country, require universal background checks and raise the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21.
Amending the Constitution requires either approval from two-thirds of the members of Congress or for 33 states to support the effort and call for holding a constitutional convention. Newsom said he plans to try to win approval from other states rather than Congress, though Republicans hold more power in statehouses across the country.
As of early May, the U.S. was on a record pace for mass killings, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University. The database counts killings involving four or more fatalities, not including the perpetrator, the same standard as the FBI, and tracks a number of variables for each.
There have been 26 mass killing incidents so far this year, the most in any year so far during the period for which data has been compiled. Those incidents left 131 people dead.
“There’s not a parent out there, not one parent, you included, that doesn’t think about these things when you send your kids to school,” Newsom told NBC.
Newsom said he will work with supporters, elected and civic leaders and diverse coalitions to push for resolutions on the amendment to be passed in other state legislatures. He said he believes he can be successful because a majority of Americans say they want stricter gun laws.
Newsom said he will run his efforts through his new political committee, Campaign for Democracy. He ended his last campaign with more than $16 million left in his political account, some of which will be spent on his new effort.
___
Associated Press writer Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority on Thursday said that firms marketing crypto assets will have to abide by new advertising rules that alert consumers to the risks of investing in high-risk assets and protect them from making hasty decisions.
The FCA said the measures are part of a package to help buyers of crypto assets understand that they could lose all of the invested money when purchasing these largely unregulated assets. The measures will become effective on October 8.
They include the introduction of a 24 hour cooling-off period for first-time investors before they’re able to make transactions and will ban incentives to invest such as ‘refer a friend’ or new-joiner bonuses, it added.
The regulator is pushing for the advertisements of crypto promoters to be clear, fair and not misleading, it said.
“The crypto industry needs to prepare now for this significant change. We are working on additional guidance to help them meet our expectations,” Sheldon Mills, executive director, consumers and competition, said.
YouTube will stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other past U.S. presidential elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches,” the platform announced Friday.
The change is a reversal for the Google-owned video service, which said a month after the 2020 election that it would start removing new posts that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud or errors changed the outcome.
YouTube said in a blog post that the updated policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”
“In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the blog post said.
The updated policy, which goes into effect immediately, won’t stop YouTube from taking down content that tries to deceive voters in the upcoming 2024 election, or other future races in the U.S. and abroad. The company said its other existing rules against election misinformation remain unchanged.
This could prove difficult to enforce, said John Wihbey, an associate professor at Northeastern University who studies social media and misinformation.
“It doesn’t take a genius if you’re on the disinformation ‘we were wronged in 2020’ side to say, ‘wait a minute, let’s just claim that voting just generally is not worth it. And 2020 is our example,” he said. “I don’t know how you disentangle rhetoric that both refers to past wrongs and to forward possibilities. The content moderation team, which is going to try to do this, is going to tie themselves in knots trying to figure out exactly where that line is.”
The announcement comes after YouTube and other major social media companies, including Twitter and the Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, have come under fire in recent years for not doing more to combat the firehose of election misinformation and disinformation that spreads on their platforms.
The left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters said the policy change is not a surprise, as it was one of the “last major social media platforms” to keep the policy in place.
“YouTube and the other platforms that preceded it in weakening their election misinformation policies, like Facebook, have made it clear that one attempted insurrection wasn’t enough. They’re setting the stage for an encore,” said its vice president Julie Millican in a statement.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Department of Justice has informed former Vice President Mike Pence ‘s legal team that it will not pursue criminal charges related to the discovery of classified documents at his Indiana home.
The department sent a letter to Pence’s attorney on Thursday informing him that, after an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information, no criminal charges will be sought.
The U.S. Senate voted 63-36 in favor of a crucial debt-ceiling bill on Thursday night, sending the measure to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the Republican-run House of Representatives approved on Wednesday night in a 314-117 vote, raises the ceiling for federal borrowing and avoids a market-shaking government default while imposing some limits on spending.
AstraZeneca said Thursday that its and MSD’s Lynparza cancer treatment had been approved in the U.S. for the treatment of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, or mCRPC.
The Anglo-Swedish pharma giant said Lynparza, in combination with abiraterone and prednisone, reduced the risk of disease progression or…
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 314-117 in favor of a crucial debt-ceiling bill on Wednesday night, keeping Washington on track to meet the Treasury Department’s Monday deadline.
There were 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats voting for the measure, while 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voted against it.
