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  • The haunting Masters meltdown that changed Rory McIlroy’s career | CNN

    The haunting Masters meltdown that changed Rory McIlroy’s career | CNN

    Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in April 2023.



    CNN
     — 

    Slumped on his club, head buried in his arm, Rory McIlroy looked on the verge of tears.

    The then-21-year-old had just watched his ball sink into the waters of Rae’s Creek at Augusta National and with it, his dream of winning The Masters, a dream that had looked so tantalizingly close mere hours earlier.

    As a four-time major winner and one of the most decorated names in the sport’s history, few players would turn down the chance to swap places with McIlroy heading into Augusta this week.

    Yet on Sunday afternoon of April 10, 2011, not a golfer in the world would have wished to be in the Northern Irishman’s shoes.

    A fresh-faced, mop-headed McIlroy had touched down in Georgia for the first major of the season with a reputation as the leading light of the next generation of stars.

    An excellent 2010 had marked his best season since turning pro three years earlier, highlighted by a first PGA Tour win at the Quail Hollow Championship and a crucial contribution to Team Europe’s triumph at the Ryder Cup.

    Yet despite a pair of impressive top-three finishes at the Open and PGA Championship respectively, a disappointing missed cut at The Masters – his first at a major – served as ominous foreshadowing.

    McIlroy shot 74 and 77 to fall four strokes short of the cut line at seven-over par, a performance that concerned him enough to take a brief sabbatical from competition.

    But one year on in 2011, any lingering Masters demons looked to have been exorcised as McIlroy flew round the Augusta fairways.

    Having opened with a bogey-free seven-under 65 – the first time he had ever shot in the 60s at the major – McIlroy pulled ahead from Spanish first round co-leader Alvaro Quirós with a second round 69.

    It sent him into the weekend holding a two-shot cushion over Australia’s Jason Day, with Tiger Woods a further stroke behind and back in the hunt for a 15th major after a surging second round 66.

    And yet the 21-year-old leader looked perfectly at ease with having a target on his back. Even after a tentative start to the third round, McIlroy rallied with three birdies across the closing six holes to stretch his lead to four strokes heading into Sunday.

    McIlroy drives from the 16th tee during his second round.

    The youngster was out on his own ahead of a bunched chasing pack comprising Day, Ángel Cabrera, K.J. Choi and Charl Schwartzel. After 54 holes, McIlroy had shot just three bogeys.

    “It’s a great position to be in … I’m finally feeling comfortable on this golf course,” McIlroy told reporters.

    “I’m not getting ahead of myself, I know how leads can dwindle away very quickly. I have to go out there, not take anything for granted and go out and play as hard as I’ve played the last three days. If I can do that, hopefully things will go my way.

    “We’ll see what happens tomorrow because four shots on this golf course isn’t that much.”

    McIlroy finished his third round with a four shot lead.

    The truth can hurt, and McIlroy was about to prove his assessment of Augusta to be true in the most excruciating way imaginable.

    His fourth bogey of the week arrived immediately. Having admitted to expecting some nerves at the first tee, McIlroy sparked a booming opening drive down the fairway, only to miss his putt from five feet.

    Three consecutive pars steadied the ship, but Schwartzel had the wind in his sails. A blistering birdie, par, eagle start had seen him draw level at the summit after his third hole.

    A subsequent bogey from the South African slowed his charge, as McIlroy clung onto a one-shot lead at the turn from Schwartzel, Cabrera, Choi, and a rampaging Woods, who shot five birdies and an eagle across the front nine to send Augusta into a frenzy.

    Despite his dwindling advantage and the raucous Tiger-mania din ahead of him, McIlroy had responded well to another bogey at the 5th hole, draining a brilliant 20-foot putt at the 7th to restore his lead.

    The fist pump that followed marked the high-water point of McIlroy’s round, as a sliding start accelerated into full-blown free-fall at the par-four 10th hole.

    His tee shot went careening into a tree, ricocheting to settle between the white cabins that separate the main course from the adjacent par-three course. It offered viewers a glimpse at a part of Augusta rarely seen on broadcast, followed by pictures of McIlroy anxiously peering out from behind a tree to track his follow-up shot.

    McIlroy watches his shot after his initial drive from the 10th tee put him close to Augusta's cabins.

    Though his initial escape was successful, yet another collision with a tree and a two-putt on the green saw a stunned McIlroy eventually tap in for a triple bogey. Having led the field one hole and seven shots earlier, he arrived at the 11th tee in seventh.

    By the time his tee drive at the 13th plopped into the creek, all thoughts of who might be the recipient of the green jacket had long-since switched away from the anguished youngster. It had taken him seven putts to navigate the previous two greens, as a bogey and a double bogey dropped him to five-under – the score he had held after just 11 holes of the tournament.

    Mercifully, the last five holes passed without major incident. A missed putt for birdie from five feet at the final hole summed up McIlroy’s day, though he was given a rousing reception as he left the green.

    Mere minutes earlier, the same crowd had erupted as Schwartzel sunk his fourth consecutive birdie to seal his first major title. After starting the day four shots adrift of McIlroy, the South African finished 10 shots ahead of him, and two ahead of second-placed Australian duo Jason Day and Adam Scott.

    McIlroy’s eight-over 80 marked the highest score of the round. Having headlined the leaderboard for most of the week, he finished tied-15th.

    McIroy was applauded off the 18th green by the Augusta crowd after finishing his final round.

    Tears would flow during a phone call with his parents the following morning, but at his press conference, McIlroy was upbeat.

    “I’m very disappointed at the minute, and I’m sure I will be for the next few days, but I’ll get over it,” he said.

    “I was leading this golf tournament with nine holes to go, and I just unraveled … It’s a Sunday at a major, what it can do.

    “This is my first experience at it, and hopefully the next time I’m in this position I’ll be able to handle it a little better. I didn’t handle it particularly well today obviously, but it was a character-building day … I’ll come out stronger for it.”

    Once again, McIlroy would be proven right.

    Just eight weeks later in June, McIlroy rampaged to an eight-shot victory at the US Open. Records tumbled in his wake at Congressional, as he shot a tournament record 16-under 268 to become the youngest major winner since Tiger Woods at The Masters in 1997.

    McIlroy celebrated a historic triumph at the US Open just two months after his Masters nightmare.

    The historic victory kickstarted a golden era for McIlroy. After coasting to another eight-shot win at the PGA Championship in 2012, McIlroy became only the third golfer since 1934 to win three majors by the age of 25 with triumph at the 2014 Open Championship.

    Before the year was out, he would add his fourth major title with another PGA Championship win.

    And much of it was owed to that fateful afternoon at Augusta. In an interview with the BBC in 2015, McIlroy dubbed it “the most important day” of his career.

    “If I had not had the whole unravelling, if I had just made a couple of bogeys coming down the stretch and lost by one, I would not have learned as much.

    “Luckily, it did not take me long to get into a position like that again when I was leading a major and I was able to get over the line quite comfortably. It was a huge learning curve for me and I needed it, and thankfully I have been able to move on to bigger and better things.

    “Looking back on what happened in 2011, it doesn’t seem as bad when you have four majors on your mantelpiece.”

    A two-stroke victory at Royal Liverpool saw McIlroy clinch the Open Championship in 2014.

    McIlroy’s contentment came with a caveat: it would be “unthinkable” if he did not win The Masters in his career.

    Yet as he prepares for his 15th appearance at Augusta National this week, a green jacket remains an elusive missing item from his wardrobe.

    Despite seven top-10 finishes in his past 10 Masters outings, the trophy remains the only thing separating McIlroy from joining the ranks of golf immortals to have completed golf’s career grand slam of all four majors in the modern era: Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

    The Masters is the only major title to elude McIlroy.

    A runner-up finish to Scottie Scheffler last year marked McIlroy’s best finish at Augusta, yet arguably 2011 remains the closest he has ever been to victory. A slow start in 2022 meant McIlroy had begun Sunday’s deciding round 10 shots adrift of the American, who teed off for his final hole with a five-shot lead despite McIlroy’s brilliant 64 finish.

    At 33 years old, time is still on his side. Though 2022 extended his major drought to eight years, it featured arguably his best golf since that golden season in 2014.

    And as McIlroy knows better than most, things can change quickly at Augusta National.

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  • John Delaney Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    John Delaney Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of John Delaney, a businessman, former US representative from Maryland and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

    Birth date: April 16, 1963

    Birth place: Wood-Ridge, New Jersey

    Birth name: John Kevin Delaney

    Father: Jack Delaney, electrician

    Mother: Elaine (Rowe) Delaney, homemaker

    Marriage: April McClain-Delaney

    Children: Summer, Lily, Grace and Brooke

    Education: Columbia University, B.S., 1985; Georgetown University Law Center, J.D. 1988

    Religion: Roman Catholic

    Went to Columbia University on scholarships from his father’s trade union, the American Legion, the VFW and the Lions Club.

    Delaney was one of the wealthiest members of the US Congress when he served as a representative from Maryland, according to the 2018 Roll Call Wealth of Congress analysis, which placed him as the sixth-richest, with a calculated net worth of $93 million.

    The youngest CEO of a publicly traded company when his first company was listed on the stock exchange.

    He practiced law briefly at Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge in the late 1980s, after completing law school.

    1990-1992 – Co-owns and runs American Home Therapies, a health care firm, with Ethan Leder.

    1993 – Co-founds HealthCare Financial Partners, a lender to health care companies, with Leder and Edward Nordberg Jr.

    1993-1997 – Serves as chairman of the board, CEO and president of HealthCare Financial Partners.

    2000-2009 – Co-founds and acts as CEO/executive manager of CapitalSource, a lender to small- and medium-sized businesses.

    2010 -2012 – Serves as executive chairman of CapitalSource.

    April 6, 2012 – Resigns as executive chairman of CapitalSource after becoming the Democratic candidate in Maryland’s 6th District race.

    January 3, 2013-January 3, 2019 – US representative from Maryland’s 6th District.

    July 28, 2017 – Announces in a Washington Post opinion piece that he is running for president and will not run for reelection to the House of Representatives.

    May 29, 2018 – Delaney’s book, “The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation,” is published.

    January 31, 2020 – Delaney announces that he is ending his 2020 presidential campaign.

    September 21, 2021 – Delaney founds Forbright Inc. and becomes executive chairman of Forbright Bank, formerly Congressional Bank. Delaney purchased control of Congressional Bank in 2011.

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  • Samuel Alito Fast Facts | CNN

    Samuel Alito Fast Facts | CNN

    Here’s a look at the life of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

    Birth date: April 1, 1950

    Birth place: Trenton, New Jersey

    Birth name: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr.

    Father: Samuel Alito, a teacher

    Mother: Rose (Fradusco) Alito, a teacher

    Marriage: Martha-Ann (Bomgardner) Alito (1985-present)

    Children: Philip and Laura

    Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1972; Yale University, J.D., 1975

    Nicknamed “Scalito” as his views resemble those of the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

    Argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, the first in 1982.

    1976-1977 – Law clerk to Leonard I. Garth, judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

    1977-1981 – Assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey.

    1981-1985 – Assistant to the US solicitor general.

    1985-1987 – Deputy assistant to the US attorney general.

    1987-1990 – Named by President Ronald Reagan as the US attorney for the District of New Jersey.

    February 20, 1990 – Nominated by President George H.W. Bush to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

    April 27, 1990 – Confirmed unanimously by the Senate on a voice vote.

    April 30, 1990-2006 – Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Newark, New Jersey.

    1991 – Is the only dissenting voice in a Third Circuit ruling striking down a Pennsylvania law that required women to notify their husbands if they planned to get an abortion.

    1993 – Agrees with the majority that an Iranian woman seeking asylum could establish eligibility by showing that she has an abhorrence with her country’s “gender specific laws and repressive social norms,” or because of a belief in feminism or membership in a feminist group.

    1999 – Writes the opinion in a case that says a Christmas display on city property does not violate separation of church and state doctrines because it included a large plastic Santa Claus as well as a Menorah and a banner hailing diversity.

    2001 – Agrees with the majority that strikes down a public school district’s anti-harassment policy, saying the policy – which included non-vulgar, non-school-sponsored speech – violated the First Amendment.

    October 31, 2005 – President George W. Bush nominates Alito to be Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement on the Supreme Court.

    January 31, 2006 – Alito is confirmed as an associate justice to the Supreme Court. The US Senate votes 58-42. He is immediately sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts.

    February 1, 2006 – Sworn in as a Supreme Court justice a second time in a ceremony at the White House.

    May 29, 2007 – In a 5-4 ruling, the court dismisses a pay discrimination lawsuit, with Alito writing for the majority. The original suit was filed by a female worker, Lilly Ledbetter against her employer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. She claimed that she was underpaid due to gender discrimination. In the opinion, Alito writes that Ledbetter filed the claim after the federally-mandated 180-day time window, concluding that the “filing deadline protects employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions long past.”

    January 28, 2010 – During a State of the Union address by President Barack Obama, Alito is seen mouthing the words “not true” in response to the president’s criticism of the court’s 5-4 ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed long-established legal limits on campaign spending by corporations and unions.

    March 2, 2011 – Alito is the sole dissenter in the free speech case involving Westboro Baptist Church. In an 8-1 decision, the court rules that the First Amendment allows the church to carry out anti-gay protests, even at military funerals. Westboro had been sued by the family of a fallen Marine whose funeral was disrupted by church protesters. In his dissent, Alito writes, “Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case.”

    June 25, 2013 – Writes the majority opinion in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl where the question is, can an unwed non-custodial parent block an adoption using the Federal Indian Child Welfare Act. The court ruled, 5-4, in favor of the adoptive parents ruling that the ICWA did not apply when the parent had never had physical or legal custody of the child.

    June 30, 2014 – Writes the majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, with the court ruling 5-4 that family-owned corporations can be exempt from a federal mandate requiring the inclusion of contraception coverage in employee health plans based on religious objections.

    June 27, 2018 – The court issues a 5-4 ruling striking down an Illinois law requiring non-union public sector workers to pay fees for collective bargaining. The opinion, written by Alito, reads, “It is hard to estimate how many billions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public sector unions in violation of the First Amendment. Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.”

    February 1, 2019 – Alito temporarily blocks a Louisiana abortion law from going into effect, filing an order that says the justices need more time to review the filings in the case against a measure restricting access to clinics.

    November 25, 2019 – Writes the sole dissent in the court’s denial of National Review’s defamation suit petition. Climate scientist Michael Mann sued the conservative magazine in 2012 after two columnists wrote about his work and the “Hockey Stick” curve graph illustrating the rise in average global temperatures, accusing him of “misconduct” and data “manipulation.” Alito writes that the case brings up First Amendment concerns “that go to the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press: the protection afforded to journalists and others who use harsh language in criticizing opposing advocacy on one of the most important public issues of the day. If the Court is serious about protecting freedom of expression, we should grant review.”

    June 24, 2022 – The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, holding that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion. In his majority opinion, Alito says “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

    November 28, 2022 – In a letter, the Supreme Court legal counsel says there is no evidence that Alito violated ethics standards, in response to questions from congressional Democrats about allegations that Alito revealed the outcome of a 2014 decision before it was released.

    July 28, 2023 – Alito agrees to temporarily freeze a lower court order that bars the US government from regulating so-called ghost guns – untraceable homemade weapons – as firearms under federal law.

    October 6, 2023 – Alito freezes a lower court ruling that blocked the Biden administration from regulating so-called ghost guns.

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  • Jamie Dimon Fast Facts | CNN

    Jamie Dimon Fast Facts | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

    Birth date: March 13, 1956

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: James Dimon

    Father: Theodore Dimon, stockbroker

    Mother: Themis Dimon

    Marriage: Judith “Judy” (Kent) Dimon (May 1983-present)

    Children: Julia, Laura and Kara Leigh

    Education: Tufts University, B.A. 1978; Harvard University, M.B.A., 1982

    He has a twin brother, Theodore Dimon Jr., who is the founder of the Dimon Institute in New York.

    1982-1985 – Assistant to American Express president Sandy Weill.

    1996-1997 – Chairman and CEO of Smith Barney.

    1997-1998 – Co-chairman and co-CEO of Salomon Smith Barney Holdings.

    1998 – President of Citigroup. Dimon is forced out of the company after a falling-out with Weill.

    2000-2004 – Chairman and CEO of Bank One Corporation.

    2004 – Becomes president and chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. when it merges with Bank One Corporation.

    December 31, 2005 – Assumes title of chief executive officer and president at JPMorgan Chase & Co., effective January 1, 2006.

    December 31, 2006 – Named chairman of the board at JPMorgan Chase & Co., effective January 1, 2007.

    2011 – Earned $23.1 million in compensation as chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., making him the best paid bank CEO.

    May 10, 2012 – On a conference call, reveals that a trading portfolio that was designed to help JPMorgan Chase hedge its credit risk lost $2 billion and could lose $1 billion more.

    May 15, 2012 – Apologizes to JPMorgan Chase shareholders at the annual meeting. Shareholders approve Dimon’s $23 million pay package and preliminary results show that only 40% support a proposal that calls for the appointment of an independent chairman.

    May 17, 2012 – Senate Banking Committee announces Dimon has been invited to appear before the committee at hearings looking into the JP Morgan trading losses from a regulatory angle.

    June 13, 2012 – Dimon testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee telling senators that while he did not approve the trades that led to the multi-billion dollar loss, he was aware of it.

    June 19, 2012 – Dimon testifies before the House Financial Services Committee and says that he did not mislead shareholders.

    July 13, 2012 – JPMorgan announces that the trading loss originally believed to be $2 billion is now approximately $5.8 billion. JPMorgan later discloses that the loss increased to $6.2 billion in the third quarter.

    2012 – Due to the London Whale losses, Dimon’s pay package is reduced to $11.5 million, down from the previous year’s $23.1 million.

    January 23, 2013 – Dimon apologizes to the shareholders by stating that the “whale” trade that caused the $6 billion loss was a “terrible mistake.”

    May 21, 2013 – Approximately 68% of JPMorgan Chase stockholders vote to keep Dimon as chairman and CEO at the annual meeting, but three directors on the risk committee receive a narrow majority of only between 51% and 59% of votes.

    September 19, 2013 – JPMorgan Chase agrees to pay about $920 million in fines to US and UK regulators to settle charges related to the “London Whale” trading scandal.

    November 19, 2013 – Officials announce JPMorgan Chase has agreed to a $13 billion settlement to resolve several investigations into the bank’s mortgage securities business. According to the Justice Department, the deal is the “the largest settlement with a single entity in American history.”

    January 24, 2014 – Dimon gets a 74% pay hike for 2013, even though JPMorgan Chase & Co was forced to pay billions in fines and settlements last year. In a government filing, JPMorgan Chase says that Dimon will receive $18.5 million worth of restricted stock that will vest over the next three years as his 2013 bonus. That’s up from a $10 million bonus for 2012. His $1.5 million base salary remains unchanged.

    July 1, 2014 – Dimon releases a memo saying that he has been diagnosed with a curable throat cancer. He will receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment over the next eight weeks at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, but will remain working while undergoing treatment.

    February 11, 2016 – After the price of JPMorgan Chase shares drop 25% from their all-time high during the summer, Dimon purchases $26.6 million in stock.

    January 30, 2018 – Announces, along with Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos, a plan to “find a more efficient and transparent way to provide health care services” in order to tackle the rising cost of healthcare.

    March 5, 2020 – In a letter to employees, shareholders and clients, JPMorgan Chase’s co-COOs Gordon Smith and Daniel Pinto announce that Dimon is recovering after undergoing emergency heart surgery. Dimon required surgery after experiencing an “acute aortic dissection,” a tear in the inner lining of the aorta blood vessel.

    July 20, 2021 – According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, JPMorgan Chase awards Dimon 1.5 million stock options for him “to continue to lead the Firm for a further significant number of years.”

    February 22, 2024 – SEC filings show that Dimon has sold $150 million worth of JPMorgan Chase stock.

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  • 2023 In Review Fast Facts | CNN

    2023 In Review Fast Facts | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look back at the events of 2023.

    January 3 – Republican Kevin McCarthy fails to secure enough votes to be elected Speaker of the House in three rounds of voting. On January 7, McCarthy is elected House speaker after multiple days of negotiations and 15 rounds of voting. That same day, the newly elected 118th Congress is officially sworn in.

    January 7 – Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, is pulled over for reckless driving. He is hospitalized following the arrest and dies three days later from injuries sustained during the traffic stop. Five officers from the Memphis Police Department are fired. On January 26, a grand jury indicts the five officers. They are each charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. On September 12, the five officers are indicted by a federal grand jury on several charges including deprivation of rights.

    January 9 – The White House counsel’s office confirms that several classified documents from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president were discovered last fall in an office at the Penn Biden Center. On January 12, the White House counsel’s office confirms a small number of additional classified documents were located in President Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.

    January 13 – The Trump Organization is fined $1.6 million – the maximum possible penalty – by a New York judge for running a decade-long tax fraud scheme.

    January 21 – Eleven people are killed in a mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, as the city’s Asian American community was celebrating Lunar New Year. The 72-year-old gunman is found dead the following day from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    January 24 – CNN reports that a lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence’s Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI.

    January 25 – Facebook-parent company Meta announces it will restore former President Donald Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram in the coming weeks, just over two years after suspending him in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack.

    February 1 – Tom Brady announces his retirement after 23 seasons in the NFL.

    February 2 – Defense officials announce the United States is tracking a suspected Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental United States. On February 4, a US military fighter jet shoots down the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean. On June 29, the Pentagon reveals the balloon did not collect intelligence while flying over the country.

    February 3 – A Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derails in East Palestine, Ohio. An evacuation order is issued for the area within a mile radius of the train crash. The order is lifted on February 8. After returning to their homes, some residents report they have developed a rash and nausea.

    February 7 – Lebron James breaks the NBA’s all-time scoring record, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

    February 15 – Payton Gendron, 19, who killed 10 people in a racist mass shooting at a grocery store in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo last May, is sentenced to life in prison.

    February 18 – In a statement, the Carter Center says that former President Jimmy Carter will begin receiving hospice care at his home in Georgia.

    February 20 – President Biden makes a surprise trip to Kyiv for the first time since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago.

    February 23 – Disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly is sentenced to 20 years in prison in a Chicago federal courtroom on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a 30-year prison term for his 2021 conviction on racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a New York federal court. Nineteen years of the 20-year prison sentence will be served at the same time as his other sentence. One year will be served after that sentence is complete.

    February 23 – Harvey Weinstein, who is already serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York, is sentenced in Los Angeles to an additional 16 years in prison for charges of rape and sexual assault.

    March 2 – SpaceX and NASA launch a fresh crew of astronauts on a mission to the International Space Station, kicking off a roughly six-month stay in space. The mission — which is carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates — took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

    March 2 – The jury in the double murder trial of Alex Murdaugh finds him guilty of murdering his wife and son. Murdaugh, the 54-year-old scion of a prominent and powerful family of local lawyers and solicitors, is also found guilty of two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in the killings of Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and Paul Murdaugh on June 7, 2021.

    March 3 – Four US citizens from South Carolina are kidnapped by gunmen in Matamoros, Mexico, in a case of mistaken identity. On March 7, two of the four Americans, Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown, are found dead and the other two, Latavia McGee and Eric Williams, are found alive. The cartel believed responsible for the armed kidnapping issues an apology letter and hands over five men to local authorities.

    March 10 – The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announces that Silicon Valley Bank was shut down by California regulators. This is the second largest bank failure in US history, only to Washington Mutual’s collapse in 2008. SVB Financial Group, the former parent company of SVB, files for bankruptcy on March 17.

    March 27 – A 28-year-old Nashville resident shoots and kills three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville. The shooter is fatally shot by responding officers.

    March 29 – Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is detained by Russian authorities and accused of spying. On April 7, he is formally charged with espionage.

    March 30 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges. On April 4, Trump surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs.

    April 6 – Two Democratic members of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson, are expelled while a third member, Rep. Gloria Johnson, is spared in an ousting by Republican lawmakers that was decried by the trio as oppressive, vindictive and racially motivated. This comes after Jones, Pearson and Johnson staged a demonstration on the House floor calling for gun reform following the shooting at the Covenant School. On April 10, Rep. Jones is sworn back in following a unanimous vote by the Nashville Metropolitan Council to reappoint him as an interim representative. On April 12, the Shelby County Board of Commissioners vote to confirm the reappointment of Rep. Pearson.

    April 6-13 – ProPublica reports that Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, have gone on several luxury trips involving travel subsidized by and stays at properties owned by Harlan Crow, a GOP megadonor. The hospitality was not disclosed on Thomas’ public financial filings with the Supreme Court. The following week ProPublica reports Thomas failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal he made with Crow. On financial disclosure forms released on August 31, Thomas discloses the luxury trips and “inadvertently omitted” information including the real estate deal.

    April 7 – A federal judge in Texas issues a ruling on medication abortion drug mifepristone, saying he will suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s two-decade-old approval of it but paused his ruling for seven days so the federal government can appeal. But in a dramatic turn of events, a federal judge in Washington state says in a new ruling shortly after that the FDA must keep medication abortion drugs available in more than a dozen Democratic-led states.

    April 13 – 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard is arrested by the FBI in connection with the leaking of classified documents that have been posted online.

    April 18 – Fox News reaches a last-second settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, paying more than $787 million to end a two-year legal battle that publicly shredded the network’s credibility. Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in US history involving a media company.

    April 25 – President Biden formally announces his bid for reelection.

    May 2 – More than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) go on strike for the first time since 2007. On September 26, the WGA announces its leaders have unanimously voted to authorize its members to return to work following the tentative agreement reached on September 24 between union negotiators and Hollywood’s studios and streaming services, effectively ending the months-long strike.

    May 9 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    June 8 – Trump is indicted on a total of 37 counts in the special counsel’s classified documents probe. In a superseding indictment filed on July 27, Trump is charged with one additional count of willful retention of national defense information and two additional obstruction counts, bringing the total to 40 counts.

    June 16 – Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, is convicted by a federal jury on all 63 charges against him. He is sentenced to death on August 2.

    June 18 – A civilian submersible disappears with five people aboard while voyaging to the wreckage of the Titanic. On June 22, following a massive search for the submersible, US authorities announce the vessel suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing all five people aboard.

    June 20 – ProPublica reports that Justice Samuel Alito did not disclose a luxury 2008 trip he took in which a hedge fund billionaire flew him on a private jet, even though the businessman would later repeatedly ask the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf. In a highly unusual move, Alito preemptively disputed the nature of the report before it was published, authoring an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he acknowledged knowing billionaire Paul Singer but downplaying their relationship.

    June 29 – The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, a landmark decision overturning long-standing precedent.

    July 13 – The FDA approves Opill to be available over-the-counter, the first nonprescription birth control pill in the United States.

    July 14 – SAG-AFTRA, a union representing about 160,000 Hollywood actors, goes on strike after talks with major studios and streaming services fail. It is the first time its members have stopped work on movie and television productions since 1980. On November 8, SAG-AFTRA and the studios reach a tentative agreement, officially ending the strike.

    July 14 – Rex Heuermann, a New York architect, is charged with six counts of murder in connection with the deaths of three of the four women known as the “Gilgo Four.”

    August 1 – Trump is indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, in the 2020 election probe. Trump is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.

    August 8 – Over 100 people are killed and hundreds of others unaccounted for after wildfires engulf parts of Maui. Nearly 3,000 homes and businesses are destroyed or damaged.

    August 14 – Trump and 18 others are indicted by an Atlanta-based grand jury on state charges stemming from their efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 electoral defeat. Trump now faces a total of 91 charges in four criminal cases, in four different jurisdictions — two federal and two state cases. On August 24, Trump surrenders at the Fulton County jail where he is processed and released on bond.

    August 23 – Eight Republican presidential candidates face off in the first primary debate of the 2024 campaign in Milwaukee.

    September 12 – House Speaker McCarthy announces he is calling on his committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden, even as they have yet to prove allegations he directly profited off his son’s foreign business deals.

    September 14 – Hunter Biden is indicted by special counsel David Weiss in connection with a gun he purchased in 2018, the first time in US history the Justice Department has charged the child of a sitting president. The three charges include making false statements on a federal firearms form and possession of a firearm as a prohibited person.

    September 22 – New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is charged with corruption-related offenses for the second time in 10 years. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, are accused of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” in exchange for the senator’s influence, according to the newly unsealed federal indictment.

    September 28 – Dianne Feinstein, the longest-serving female US senator in history, dies at the age of 90. On October 1, California Governor Gavin Newsom announces he will appoint Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler to replace her. Butler will become the first out Black lesbian to join Congress. She will also be the sole Black female senator serving in Congress and only the third in US history.

    September 29 – Las Vegas police confirm Duane Keith Davis, aka “Keffe D,” was arrested for the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.

    October 3 – McCarthy is removed as House speaker following a 216-210 vote, with eight Republicans voting to remove McCarthy from the post.

    October 25 – After three weeks without a speaker, the House votes to elect Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

    October 25 – Robert Card, a US Army reservist, kills 18 people and injures 13 others in a shooting rampage in Lewiston, Maine. On October 27, after a two-day manhunt, he is found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

    November 13 – The Supreme Court announces a code of conduct in an attempt to bolster the public’s confidence in the court after months of news stories alleging that some of the justices have been skirting ethics regulations.

    November 19 – Former first lady Rosalynn Carter passes away at the age of 96.

    January 8 – Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro storm the country’s congressional building, Supreme Court and presidential palace. The breaches come about a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in a runoff election on October 30.

    January 15 – At least 68 people are killed when an aircraft goes down near the city of Pokhara in central Nepal. This is the country’s deadliest plane crash in more than 30 years.

    January 19 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden announces she will not seek reelection in October.

    January 24 – President Volodymyr Zelensky fires a slew of senior Ukrainian officials amid a growing corruption scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies.

    February 6 – More than 15,000 people are killed and tens of thousands injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes Turkey and Syria.

    February 28 – At least 57 people are killed after two trains collide in Greece.

    March 1 – Bola Ahmed Tinubu is declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election.

    March 10 – Xi Jinping is reappointed as president for another five years by China’s legislature in a ceremonial vote in Beijing, a highly choreographed exercise in political theater meant to demonstrate legitimacy and unity of the ruling elite.

    March 16 – The French government forces through controversial plans to raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64.

    April 4 – Finland becomes the 31st member of NATO.

    April 15 – Following months of tensions in Sudan between a paramilitary group and the country’s army, violence erupts.

    May 3 – A 13-year-old boy opens fire on his classmates at a school in Belgrade, Serbia, killing at least eight children along with a security guard. On May 4, a second mass shooting takes place when an attacker opens fire in the village of Dubona, about 37 miles southeast of Belgrade, killing eight people.

    May 5 – The World Health Organization announces Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency.

    May 6 – King Charles’ coronation takes place at Westminster Abbey in London.

    August 4 – Alexey Navalny is sentenced to 19 years in prison on extremism charges, Russian media reports. Navalny is already serving sentences totaling 11-and-a-half years in a maximum-security facility on fraud and other charges that he says were trumped up.

    September 8 – Over 2,000 people are dead and thousands are injured after a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits Morocco.

    October 8 – Israel formally declares war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas after it carried out an unprecedented attack by air, sea and land on October 7.

    November 8 – The Vatican publishes new guidelines opening the door to Catholic baptism for transgender people and babies of same-sex couples.

    November 24 – The first group of hostages is released after Israel and Hamas agree to a temporary truce. Dozens more hostages are released in the following days. On December 1, the seven-day truce ends after negotiations reach an impasse and Israel accuses Hamas of violating the agreement by firing at Israel.

    Awards and Winners

    January 9 – The College Football Playoff National Championship game takes place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The Georgia Bulldogs defeat Texas Christian University’s Horned Frogs 65-7 for their second national title in a row.

    January 10 – The 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards are presented live on NBC.

    January 16-29 – The 111th Australian Open takes place. Novak Djokovic defeats Stefanos Tsitsipas in straight sets to win a 10th Australian Open title and a record-equaling 22nd grand slam. Belarusian-born Aryna Sabalenka defeats Elena Rybakina in three sets, becoming the first player competing under a neutral flag to secure a grand slam.

    February 5 – The 65th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony takes place in Los Angeles at the Crypto.com Arena.

    February 12 – Super Bowl LVII takes place at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The Kansas City Chiefs defeat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35. This is the first Super Bowl to feature two Black starting quarterbacks.

    February 19 – Ricky Stenhouse Jr. wins the 65th Annual Daytona 500 in double overtime. It is the longest Daytona 500 ever with a record of 212 laps raced.

    March 12 – The 95th Annual Academy Awards takes place, with Jimmy Kimmel hosting for the third time.

    March 14 – Ryan Redington wins his first Iditarod.

    April 2 – The Louisiana State University Tigers defeat the University of Iowa Hawkeyes 102-85 in Dallas, to win the program’s first NCAA women’s basketball national championship.

    April 3 – The University of Connecticut Huskies win its fifth men’s basketball national title with a 76-59 victory over the San Diego State University Aztecs in Houston.

    April 6-9 – The 87th Masters tournament takes place. Jon Rahm wins, claiming his first green jacket and second career major at Augusta National.

    April 17 – The 127th Boston Marathon takes place. The winners are Evans Chebet of Kenya in the men’s division and Hellen Obiri of Kenya in the women’s division.

    May 6 – Mage, a 3-year-old chestnut colt, wins the 149th Kentucky Derby.

    May 8-9 – The 147th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show takes place at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York. Buddy Holly, a petit basset griffon Vendéen, wins Best in Show.

    May 20 – National Treasure wins the 148th running of the Preakness Stakes.

    May 21 – Brooks Koepka wins the 105th PGA Championship at Oak Hill County Club in Rochester, New York. This is his third PGA Championship and fifth major title of his career.

    May 22-June 11 – The French Open takes place at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. Novak Djokovic wins a record-breaking 23rd Grand Slam title, defeating Casper Ruud 7-6 (7-1) 6-3 7-5 in the men’s final. Iga Świątek wins her third French Open in four years with a 6-2 5-7 6-4 victory against the unseeded Karolína Muchová in the women’s final.

    May 28 – Josef Newgarden wins the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500.

    June 10 – Arcangelo wins the 155th running of the Belmont Stakes.

    June 11 – The 76th Tony Awards takes place.

    June 12 – The Denver Nuggets defeat the Miami Heat 94-89 in Game 5, to win the series 4-1 and claim their first NBA title in franchise history.

    June 13 – The Vegas Golden Knights defeat the Florida Panthers in Game 5 to win the franchise’s first Stanley Cup.

    June 18 – American golfer Wyndham Clark wins the 123rd US Open at The Los Angeles Country Club.

    July 1-23 – The 110th Tour de France takes place. Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard wins his second consecutive Tour de France title.

    July 3-16 – Wimbledon takes place in London. Carlos Alcaraz defeats Novak Djokovic 1-6 7-6 (8-6) 6-1 3-6 6-4 in the men’s final, to win his first Wimbledon title. Markéta Vondroušová defeats Ons Jabeur 6-4 6-4 in the women’s final, to win her first Wimbledon title and become the first unseeded woman in the Open Era to win the tournament.

    July 16-23 – Brian Harman wins the 151st Open Championship at Royal Liverpool in Hoylake, Wirral, England, for his first major title.

    July 20-August 20 – The Women’s World Cup takes place in Australia and New Zealand. Spain defeats England 1-0 to win its first Women’s World Cup.

    August 28-September 10 – The US Open Tennis Tournament takes place. Coco Gauff defeats Aryna Sabalenka, and Novak Djokovic defeats Daniil Medvedev.

    October 2-9 – The Nobel Prizes are announced. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

    November 1 – The Texas Rangers win the World Series for the first time in franchise history, defeating the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-0 in Game 5.

    November 5 – The New York City Marathon takes place. Ethiopia’s Tamirat Tola sets a course record and wins the men’s race. Kenya’s Hellen Obiri wins the women’s race.

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  • No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to a natural enemy of bacteria to save her husband's life | CNN

    No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to a natural enemy of bacteria to save her husband's life | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    In February 2016, infectious disease epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee was holding her dying husband’s hand, watching him lose an exhausting fight against a deadly superbug infection.

    After months of ups and downs, doctors had just told her that her husband, Tom Patterson, was too racked with bacteria to live.

    “I told him, ‘Honey, we’re running out of time. I need to know if you want to live. I don’t even know if you can hear me, but if you can hear me and you want to live, please squeeze my hand.’

    “All of a sudden, he squeezed really hard. And I thought, ‘Oh, great!’ And then I’m thinking, ‘Oh, crap! What am I going to do?’”

    What she accomplished next could easily be called miraculous. First, Strathdee found an obscure treatment that offered a glimmer of hope — fighting superbugs with phages, viruses created by nature to eat bacteria.

    Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents. The impossible goal: quickly find the few, exquisitely unique phages capable of fighting a specific strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria literally eating her husband alive.

    Next, the US Food and Drug Administration had to greenlight this unproven cocktail of hope, and scientists had to purify the mixture so that it wouldn’t be deadly.

    Yet just three weeks later, Strathdee watched doctors intravenously inject the mixture into her husband’s body — and save his life.

    Their story is one of unrelenting perseverance and unbelievable good fortune. It’s a glowing tribute to the immense kindness of strangers. And it’s a story that just might save countless lives from the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs — maybe even your own.

    “It’s estimated that by 2050, 10 million people per year — that’s one person every three seconds — is going to be dying from a superbug infection,” Strathdee told an audience at Life Itself, a 2022 health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN.

    “I’m here to tell you that the enemy of my enemy can be my friend. Viruses can be medicine.”

    sanjay pkg vpx

    How this ‘perfect predator’ saved his life after nine months in the hospital

    During a Thanksgiving cruise on the Nile in 2015, Patterson was suddenly felled by severe stomach cramps. When a clinic in Egypt failed to help his worsening symptoms, Patterson was flown to Germany, where doctors discovered a grapefruit-size abdominal abscess filled with Acinetobacter baumannii, a virulent bacterium resistant to nearly all antibiotics.

    Found in the sands of the Middle East, the bacteria were blown into the wounds of American troops hit by roadside bombs during the Iraq War, earning the pathogen the nickname “Iraqibacter.”

    “Veterans would get shrapnel in their legs and bodies from IED explosions and were medevaced home to convalesce,” Strathdee told CNN, referring to improvised explosive devices. “Unfortunately, they brought their superbug with them. Sadly, many of them survived the bomb blasts but died from this deadly bacterium.”

    Today, Acinetobacter baumannii tops the World Health Organization’s list of dangerous pathogens for which new antibiotics are critically needed.

    “It’s something of a bacterial kleptomaniac. It’s really good at stealing antimicrobial resistance genes from other bacteria,” Strathdee said. “I started to realize that my husband was a lot sicker than I thought and that modern medicine had run out of antibiotics to treat him.”

    With the bacteria growing unchecked inside him, Patterson was soon medevaced to the couple’s hometown of San Diego, where he was a professor of psychiatry and Strathdee was the associate dean of global health sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

    “Tom was on a roller coaster — he’d get better for a few days, and then there would be a deterioration, and he would be very ill,” said Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley, a leading infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego who was a longtime friend and colleague. As weeks turned into months, “Tom began developing multi-organ failure. He was sick enough that we could lose him any day.”

    Patterson's body was systemically infected with a virulent drug-resistant bacteria that also infected troops in the Iraq War, earning the pathogen the nickname

    After that reassuring hand squeeze from her husband, Strathdee sprang into action. Scouring the internet, she had already stumbled across a study by a Tbilisi, Georgia, researcher on the use of phages for treatment of drug-resistant bacteria.

    A phone call later, Strathdee discovered phage treatment was well established in former Soviet bloc countries but had been discounted long ago as “fringe science” in the West.

    “Phages are everywhere. There’s 10 million trillion trillion — that’s 10 to the power of 31 — phages that are thought to be on the planet,” Strathdee said. “They’re in soil, they’re in water, in our oceans and in our bodies, where they are the gatekeepers that keep our bacterial numbers in check. But you have to find the right phage to kill the bacterium that is causing the trouble.”

    Buoyed by her newfound knowledge, Strathdee began reaching out to scientists who worked with phages: “I wrote cold emails to total strangers, begging them for help,” she said at Life Itself.

    One stranger who quickly answered was Texas A&M University biochemist Ryland Young. He’d been working with phages for over 45 years.

    “You know the word persuasive? There’s nobody as persuasive as Steffanie,” said Young, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics who runs the lab at the university’s Center for Phage Technology. “We just dropped everything. No exaggeration, people were literally working 24/7, screening 100 different environmental samples to find just a couple of new phages.”

    While the Texas lab burned the midnight oil, Schooley tried to obtain FDA approval for the injection of the phage cocktail into Patterson. Because phage therapy has not undergone clinical trials in the United States, each case of “compassionate use” required a good deal of documentation. It’s a process that can consume precious time.

    But the woman who answered the phone at the FDA said, “‘No problem. This is what you need, and we can arrange that,’” Schooley recalled. “And then she tells me she has friends in the Navy that might be able to find some phages for us as well.”

    In fact, the US Naval Medical Research Center had banks of phages gathered from seaports around the world. Scientists there began to hunt for a match, “and it wasn’t long before they found a few phages that appeared to be active against the bacterium,” Strathdee said.

    Dr. Robert

    Back in Texas, Young and his team had also gotten lucky. They found four promising phages that ravaged Patterson’s antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a test tube. Now the hard part began — figuring out how to separate the victorious phages from the soup of bacterial toxins left behind.

    “You put one virus particle into a culture, you go home for lunch, and if you’re lucky, you come back to a big shaking, liquid mess of dead bacteria parts among billions and billions of the virus,” Young said. “You want to inject those virus particles into the human bloodstream, but you’re starting with bacterial goo that’s just horrible. You would not want that injected into your body.”

    Purifying phage to be given intravenously was a process that no one had yet perfected in the US, Schooley said, “but both the Navy and Texas A&M got busy, and using different approaches figured out how to clean the phages to the point they could be given safely.”

    More hurdles: Legal staff at Texas A&M expressed concern about future lawsuits. “I remember the lawyer saying to me, ‘Let me see if I get this straight. You want to send unapproved viruses from this lab to be injected into a person who will probably die.’ And I said, “Yeah, that’s about it,’” Young said.

    “But Stephanie literally had speed dial numbers for the chancellor and all the people involved in human experimentation at UC San Diego. After she calls them, they basically called their counterparts at A&M, and suddenly they all began to work together,” Young added.

    “It was like the parting of the Red Sea — all the paperwork and hesitation disappeared.”

    The purified cocktail from Young’s lab was the first to arrive in San Diego. Strathdee watched as doctors injected the Texas phages into the pus-filled abscesses in Patterson’s abdomen before settling down for the agonizing wait.

    “We started with the abscesses because we didn’t know what would happen, and we didn’t want to kill him,” Schooley said. “We didn’t see any negative side effects; in fact, Tom seemed to be stabilizing a bit, so we continued the therapy every two hours.”

    Two days later, the Navy cocktail arrived. Those phages were injected into Patterson’s bloodstream to tackle the bacteria that had spread to the rest of his body.

    “We believe Tom was the first person to receive intravenous phage therapy to treat a systemic superbug infection in the US,” Strathdee told CNN.

    “And three days later, Tom lifted his head off the pillow out of a deep coma and kissed his daughter’s hand. It was just miraculous.”

    Patterson awoke from a coma after receiving an intravenous dose of phages tailored to his bacteria.

    Today, nearly eight years later, Patterson is happily retired, walking 3 miles a day and gardening. But the long illness took its toll: He was diagnosed with diabetes and is now insulin dependent, with mild heart damage and gastrointestinal issues that affect his diet.

    “He isn’t back surfing again, because he can’t feel the bottoms of his feet, and he did get Covid-19 in April that landed him in the hospital because the bottoms of his lungs are essentially dead,” Strathdee said.

    “As soon as the infection hit his lungs he couldn’t breathe and I had to rush him to the hospital, so that was scary,” she said. “He remains high risk for Covid but we’re not letting that hold us hostage at home. He says, ‘I want to go back to having as normal life as fast as possible.’”

    To prove it, the couple are again traveling the world — they recently returned from a 12-day trip to Argentina.

    “We traveled with a friend who is an infectious disease doctor, which gave me peace of mind to know that if anything went sideways, we’d have an expert at hand,” Strathdee said.

    “I guess I’m a bit of a helicopter wife in that sense. Still, we’ve traveled to Costa Rica a couple of times, we’ve been to Africa, and we’re planning to go to Chile in January.”

    Patterson’s case was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in 2017, jump-starting new scientific interest in phage therapy.

    “There’s been an explosion of clinical trials that are going on now in phage (science) around the world and there’s phage programs in Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, India and China has a new one, so it’s really catching on,” Strathdee told CNN.

    Some of the work is focused on the interplay between phages and antibiotics — as bacteria battle phages they often shed their outer shell to keep the enemy from docking and gaining access for the kill. When that happens, the bacteria may be suddenly vulnerable to antibiotics again.

    “We don’t think phages are ever going to entirely replace antibiotics, but they will be a good adjunct to antibiotics. And in fact, they can even make antibiotics work better,” Strathdee said.

    In San Diego, Strathdee and Schooley opened the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, or IPATH, in 2018, where they treat or counsel patients suffering from multidrug-resistant infections. The center’s success rate is high, with 82% of patients undergoing phage therapy experiencing a clinically successful outcome, according to its website.

    Schooley is running a clinical trial using phages to treat patients with cystic fibrosis who constantly battle Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a drug-resistant bacteria that was also responsible for the recent illness and deaths connected to contaminated eye drops manufactured in India.

    And a memoir the couple published in 2019 — “The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband From a Deadly Superbug” — is also spreading the word about these “perfect predators” to what may soon be the next generation of phage hunters.

    VS Phages Sanjay Steffanie

    How naturally occurring viruses could help treat superbug infections

    “I am getting increasingly contacted by students, some as young as 12,” Strathdee said. “There’s a girl in San Francisco who begged her mother to read this book and now she’s doing a science project on phage-antibiotic synergy, and she’s in eighth grade. That thrills me.”

    Strathdee is quick to acknowledge the many people who helped save her husband’s life. But those who were along for the ride told CNN that she and Patterson made the difference.

    “I think it was a historical accident that could have only happened to Steffanie and Tom,” Young said. “They were at UC San Diego, which is one of the premier universities in the country. They worked with a brilliant infectious disease doctor who said, ‘Yes,’ to phage therapy when most physicians would’ve said, ‘Hell, no, I won’t do that.’

    “And then there is Steffanie’s passion and energy — it’s hard to explain until she’s focused it on you. It was like a spiderweb; she was in the middle and pulled on strings,” Young added. “It was just meant to be because of her, I think.”

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  • Screen Actors Guild Fast Facts | CNN

    Screen Actors Guild Fast Facts | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the Screen Actors Guild. In 2012, a merger was completed between the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). The SAG-AFTRA labor union has more than 160,000 members.

    June 30, 1933 – Articles of incorporation are filed. The guild is formed to get better working conditions for actors.

    1935 – Granted an American Federation of Labor charter.

    May 1937 – In order to prevent a strike, producers sign a contract with the guild ensuring minimum pay and recognizing the guild.

    1943 – Actress Olivia de Havilland sues Warner Brothers studio for extending her contract. She later wins her case.

    1945 – The US Supreme Court hands down the “de Havilland decision,” which declares that studios may no longer hold contract players for more than seven years. This breaks up the system of the studio maintaining control over an actor’s career.

    1952 – The Guild signs its first contracts for filmed television programs.

    December 1, 1952-February 18, 1953 – The first SAG strike is over filmed television commercials. The strike ends with a contract that covers all work in commercials.

    August 5-15, 1955 – SAG holds its second strike. This time for increased television show residuals.

    March 7, 1960-April 18, 1960 – Third strike over residuals for feature films sold, licensed, or released to television.

    December 19, 1978-February 7, 1979 – SAG strikes for better residuals on television advertisements.

    July 21, 1980-October 23, 1980 – SAG strikes with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). This strike centers on the distribution of profits from pay television and video cassette production.

    March 21, 1988-April 15, 1988 – SAG and AFTRA television commercials strike. The strike is over payment for commercials appearing on cable TV.

    February 25, 1995 – The first annual Screen Actors Guild Awards show is held.

    May 1, 2000-October 30, 2000 – SAG and AFTRA strike against the advertising industry over commercial work compensation for basic cable and internet.

    July 1, 2008 – SAG’s TV/theatrical agreement expires.

    November 22, 2008 – Talks between SAG and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) end after federal mediation fails to jumpstart a five-month stalemate.

    January 26, 2009 – SAG chief negotiator Doug Allen is fired in a bid by the union’s moderate faction to re-enter contract talks with the studios.

    April 19, 2009 – SAG leadership split 53% – 47% to accept a new two-year contract with AMPTP.

    June 9, 2009 – Members ratify the two-year contract covering television and motion pictures.

    January 29, 2012 – Ken Howard, president of the guild, announces during the SAG Awards, that the merger between SAG and AFTRA has been approved by both groups.

    March 30, 2012 – The merger of SAG and AFTRA is completed with more than 80% approval from both unions. The one union is named SAG-AFTRA.

    January 27, 2013 – The first SAG Awards are held under the union banner “SAG-AFTRA One Union.”

    March 23, 2016 – SAG-AFTRA President Ken Howard dies. Executive Vice President Gabrielle Carteris assumes his duties until the regularly scheduled national board meeting April 9.

    April 9, 2016 – Carteris is elected president. She will serve the balance of Howard’s unexpired term, which ends in 2017.

    August 24, 2017 – Carteris is elected to a two-year term as president.

    February 10, 2018 – SAG-AFTRA introduces new guidelines for members, called “Four Pillars of Change,” aimed at fighting sexual harassment in the workplace.

    September 2, 2021 – Actress Fran Drescher is elected to a two-year term as president.

    July 14, 2023 – SAG-AFTRA goes on strike after talks with major studios and streaming services have failed. It is the first time its members have stopped work since 1980. On November 8, SAG-AFTRA and the studios reach a tentative agreement, officially ending the strike.

    Ralph Morgan 1933, 1938-1940
    Eddie Cantor 1933-1935
    Robert Montgomery 1935-1938, 1946-1947
    Edward Arnold 1940-1942
    James Cagney 1942-1944
    George Murphy 1944-1946
    Ronald Reagan 1947-1952, 1959-1960
    Walter Pidgeon 1952-1957
    Leon Ames 1957-1958
    Howard Keel 1958-1959
    George Chandler 1960-963
    Dana Andrews 1963-1965
    Charlton Heston 1965-1971
    John Gavin 1971-1973
    Dennis Weaver 1973-1975
    Kathleen Nolan 1975-1979
    William Schallert 1979-1981
    Ed Asner 1981-1985
    Patty Duke 1985-1988
    Barry Gordon 1988-1995
    Richard Masur 1995-1999
    William Daniels 1999-2001
    Melissa Gilbert 2001-2005
    Alan Rosenberg 2005-2009
    Ken Howard 2009-2016
    Gabrielle Carteris-2016-2021
    Fran Drescher 2021-present

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  • What we know about the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot accused of trying to shut off a plane’s engines mid-flight | CNN

    What we know about the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot accused of trying to shut off a plane’s engines mid-flight | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    An off-duty pilot who was riding in the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines flight en route to San Francisco on Sunday is facing dozens of attempted murder charges after he tried to shut down the plane’s engines mid-flight, authorities say.

    The suspect, identified as Alaska Airlines pilot Joseph D. Emerson, 44, attempted to cut off fuel to the engines but the quick action of the aircraft’s captain and first officer kept the engines from failing completely, the airline said, adding Emerson was subdued by the flight crew.

    The flight was forced to divert to Portland, Oregon, where the suspect was taken into custody by the Port of Portland police, the port said in a statement.

    Emerson has been charged in Oregon with 83 felony counts of attempted murder, 83 counts of reckless endangerment and one count of endangering an aircraft, booking records show.

    Authorities do not believe the incident was an act of terrorism or ideologically motivated violence, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CNN’s Josh Campbell. The source noted the suspect may face additional federal charges.

    Here’s what we know.

    After taking off from Everett, Washington, on Sunday, Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 – operated by regional carrier Horizon Air – reported a “security threat related to an off-duty Alaskan Airlines pilot, identified as Captain Joseph Emerson, who was traveling in the flight deck jump seat,” the airline said in a statement.

    Pilots will sometimes ride in a cockpit “jump seat” when traveling in their official capacity or commuting between airports.

    While in the cockpit, Emerson had tried to shut down both of the Embraer 175’s engines by pulling its fire extinguisher handles, the airline said.

    “The fire suppression system consists of a T-handle for each engine; when pulled, a valve in the wing closes to shut off fuel to the engine,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement to CNN. “After they are pulled, some residual fuel remains in the line.”

    The airline said the quick reaction of the crew to reset both handles helped restore the flow of fuel and prevent the engines from cutting out.

    “Our crew responded without hesitation to a difficult and highly unusual situation, and we are incredibly proud and grateful for their skillful actions,” the airline said in a statement.

    The plane was at cruise altitude when the incident occurred, Capt. Mike Karn, senior manager of flight security for American Airlines, said in a memo circulated at his airline.

    The flight crew detained the suspect and the plane was diverted to Portland International Airport, the Port of Portland said in a statement.

    “I think he’s subdued,” one of the plane’s pilots can be heard saying in air traffic control audio recorded by LiveATC.net. “Other than that, we want law enforcement as soon as we get on the ground and are parked.”

    Once the flight landed in Portland around 6:30 p.m., the suspect was taken into custody by Port of Portland police officers, the port said.

    No injuries were reported on the flight, the FBI said.

    All passengers were later able to fly to San Francisco with a new crew and aircraft, the airline said, noting it is “reaching out to each of them individually to discuss their experience and check-in on their well-being.”

    Emerson has been detained at the Multnomah County Detention Center as both the FBI and the Port of Portland police investigate the incident, authorities said.

    The FBI’s Portland field office confirmed its investigation in a statement Monday and assured travelers there is “no continuing threat related to this incident.”

    The Federal Aviation Administration also said it is supporting local law enforcement in the investigation.

    The FAA said it has briefed other airlines on preliminary details of the incident and informed carriers the incident is not related to “current world events” – apparently referring to the war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas.

    Passengers describe their emergency landing

    Two passengers on the flight told CNN that the airline crew maintained a calm environment on the plane as the incident played out.

    Aubrey Gavello, one of the passengers, said she didn’t realize something was wrong until a flight attendant announced over the loudspeaker that the plane needed to land immediately.

    “We didn’t know where we were landing and we didn’t know what was wrong. But (the flight attendant) assured us we were safe,” Gavello said on “Laura Coates Live” Monday night.

    Later, the pilot informed passengers through the loudspeaker that there had been a “disturbance in the cockpit,” said Alex Wood, who was seated at the front of the plane. Wood said he was wearing headphones and slept through the incident.

    “I was right by the cockpit, but nothing woke me up. Nothing was loud enough, nothing was rambunctious enough to wake me up,” Wood said.

    After the plane landed, about five police officers boarded the plane and escorted the suspect off the aircraft, Gavello recalled. She noted the suspect was calm and cooperative and had his hands secured by zip ties.

    “Props to the Alaska crew for keeping everyone calm,” Gavello said.

    “It was all handled super well,” said Wood.

    The pair said they didn’t realize the gravity of the situation Monday, when they woke to news headlines about the suspect trying to shut down the plane engines.

    “I’m honestly grateful that we didn’t know anything when they rebooked us and got us on a second plane,” Gavello said. “I don’t know if I would have felt comfortable doing that if we had all the information.”

    Emerson’s neighbor, Ed Yee, told CNN it was “very shocking” to hear of the suspect’s alleged actions.

    “He seems like a really nice guy. Nothing abnormal about him,” Yee said.

    Emerson has worked in aviation for at least two decades, according to information shared by Alaskan Airlines.

    He first joined the Alaska Air Group in 2001 as a first officer with Horizon. In 2012, Emerson left Horizon and joined Virgin America as a pilot.

    After Alaska Airlines acquired Virgin America in 2016, Emerson became a first officer with Alaska and worked about three more years to become a pilot for the airline, according to the airline statement.

    “Throughout his career, Emerson completed his mandated FAA medical certifications in accordance with regulatory requirements, and at no point were his certifications denied, suspended or revoked,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement.

    FAA records show Emerson held an Airline Transport Pilot certification with ratings to fly the Airbus A320, Boeing 737, Canadair Regional Jet, and De Havilland Dash 8. He did not hold a certification to fly the ERJ 175, those records indicate, the type of airplane in use during Sunday’s incident.

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  • Chris Evans says he’s ‘enjoying life’ as a newlywed after marrying Alba Baptista | CNN

    Chris Evans says he’s ‘enjoying life’ as a newlywed after marrying Alba Baptista | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Chris Evans has traded in his Captain America shield for a more sentimental accessory.

    The Marvel actor was sporting a wedding band on Saturday during an appearance at New York Comic-Con (NYCC), where he publicly confirmed for the first time that he recently wed actress Alba Baptista.

    “I got married,” the Marvel star told the audience, adding that his recent nuptials were “really, really great.”

    He shared that he and Baptista had two ceremonies – one in Portugal, where Baptista is from, and another ceremony on the East Coast, which reportedly took place last month in Cape Cod.

    “They were wonderful and beautiful,” he said of the dual ceremonies, later adding that since then, he and Baptista have “been relaxing and enjoying life and reflecting” as newlyweds.

    Evan admitted that he felt the weight of planning a wedding, joking, “It’s a lot.”

    “For those of you who are married, it takes a lot out of you but now that we’re through that, we’ve kind of just been enjoying life,” he said.

    Evans and Baptista have been romantically linked since 2021.

    The actor’s appearance at NYCC comes just days after contract negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the major studios and streamers were suspended amid the ongoing strike. The union supporting actors and performers has been on strike since July.

    Hollywood writers in the Writers Guild of America, who had been on strike since May, agreed upon a new contract with the studios and streamers in September. The new contract was ratified last week, putting thousands of people back to work.

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  • ‘Pony up’: In strategic shift, UAW says added strikes could come “at any time” | CNN Business

    ‘Pony up’: In strategic shift, UAW says added strikes could come “at any time” | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    UAW President Shawn Fain said the union would not expand its strike against the Big Three automakers on Friday, but that the UAW stood ready to add more workers to the picket lines at any time as its labor action enters a new phase.

    “We are prepared at any time to call on more locals to stand up and walk out,” Fain said in a livestream update on negotiations. He later added: “We changed the rules. Now there is only one rule – pony up.”

    The announcement marks a tactical shift, Fain said. Previously the UAW had announced strike expansions on Fain’s weekly Friday updates. But now, as part of the union’s strategy to keep the automakers off balance, Fain said strike expansions could come at any day of the week, at any time.

    This past Wednesday for the first time it announced an expansion midweek, and without warning, when 8,700 UAW members went on strike suddenly at Ford’s largest factory, the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville.

    “We’re entering a new phase of this strike, and it demands a new approach,” Fain said. “We’re done waiting until Fridays to escalate our strike.”

    Fain said that the companies had started to wait until Fridays to make progress in their bargaining positions, and that the union is changing it strategy in order to speed up progress in negotiations.

    “A negotiation requires both sides making movement. If they’re not ready to move, we’re going to give them a push in a language they understand – dollars and cents,” he said.

    This is the first time that the union has gone on strike against GM, Ford and Stellantis at the same time. But rather than shut down any of the companies’ US operations completely, the union has targeted its strike against specific facilities, and then expanded the strike gradually in order to increase pressure at the bargaining table.

    The Kentucky Truck Plant is a key money maker for Ford, assembling heavy duty pickup trucks and full-size SUVs and producing $25 billion in annual sales, or about one-sixth of its revenue. It also produced an estimated $150 million in profits a week, according to an estimate from Colin Langan, auto analyst at Wells Fargo.

    Ford officials told reporters Thursday that the company has gone as far as it can on the additional money it can offer members.

    “We have reached our limit. We’ve actually stretched ourselves to get to this point,” said Kumar Galhotra, president of Ford Blue, which is the unit that sells most of Ford’s gasoline-powered cars to consumers. “We are still working to get this done. We’re open to moving some money around within the deal that might fit the union’s needs better, but in terms of cost of deal, we’re there. We have been very clear, we’re at the limit. Going further will hurt our ability to invest in the business as we need to invest.”

    Fain mocked that statement from Ford, saying that while Ford has recovered well since the Great Recession, its workers have seen only modest pay increases, which were outweighed by rising prices.

    “I found a pathetic irony in that statement,” he said on Friday. “You know who stretched themselves? The Ford workers who didn’t get a single raise for a decade.”

    Fain said the union is in a strong bargaining position and has already achieved a lot in negotiations, but not enough to make up for past concessions by workers.

    “We’re at the point in this process where we’re looking for one thing only – a deal,” Fain said. “We’re not giving these companies an extra hour, or an extra day. They know what needs to happen, and they know how to get it done. Taking out Kentucky Truck sent a very clear message not only to Ford, but to GM and Stellantis as well. Don’t you dare slow walk us or low ball us. We will take out whatever plants you force us to.”

    The companies are on record as offering members an immediate 10% raise to union members and additional raises totaling 10 percentage points or more during the life of the contracts, which are likely to run through the spring of 2028.

    The companies are also agreeing to some kind of return of the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to union pay scales to protect workers from rising prices. The union gave up the COLA in 2007, as well as traditional pension plans and health care coverage for retirees for workers hired after the concession contracts reached that year.

    In addition, a week ago, Fain announced that GM had agreed to a major union demand to place workers at new and planned EV battery plants under the national master agreement at the company.

    GM, Ford and Stellatis have all announced plans to shift from traditional gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles, or EVs. That would end the need for the jobs in their current plants that build engines and transmissions.

    All three are in the process of building at least three plants each, almost all in joint ventures with Asian battery makers, that will be used to power EVs. All are expected to pay significantly less than UAW members at those engine and transmission plants are now paid.

    Going into negotiations, the companies had insisted the battery plant workers would be employees of the joint ventures, not the companies themselves, and that their pay scale would not be included in this contract.

    Details of what GM has agreed upon in relation to workers battery plant workers is not yet known, as GM has not confirmed the tentative agreement on the issue. Ford officials have said they also have been negotiating with the union on the battery plant issue and that progress had been made, without giving details.

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  • GM settles strike at Canadian plants | CNN Business

    GM settles strike at Canadian plants | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A strike at General Motors’ Canadian plants is over less than a day after it started, according Unifor, the union that represents more than 4,000 autoworkers at the company.

    The strike had begun 11:59 pm Monday when Unifor said GM had refused to agree to a deal similar to the one the union previously reached with Ford. That kind of deal is known as a pattern agreement.

    The union said the company quickly gave in to union demands once the strike started.

    “When faced with the shutdown of these key facilities General Motors had no choice but to get serious at the table and agree to the pattern,” said Unifor National President Lana Payne. “The solidarity of our members has led to a comprehensive tentative agreement that follows the pattern set at Ford to the letter.”

    The union said strike actions are on hold to allow the membership to vote on the tentative agreement. The strike could resume if the rank-and-file members fail to ratify the deal.

    But it’s uncertain whether it will win approval of membership. Only 54% of Unifor members at Ford voted in favor of the deal.

    The Unifor strike occurred while GM as well as rivals Ford and Stellantis were already dealing with strikes by the United Auto Workers union. That strike had started September 15 against targeted facilities of each company. More than 25,000 UAW members are now on strike at the three companies, with nearly 10,000 of those at GM.

    “This record agreement, subject to member ratification, recognizes the many contributions of our represented team members with significant increases in wages, benefits and job security while building on GM’s historic investments in Canadian manufacturing,” said GM’s statement.

    Details of the Unifor deal were not immediately available. But the deal with Ford included a wage increase of 10% in the first year of the agreement, followed by a 2% and 3% increase over the next two years of the contract. It also restored the cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) to protect workers from rising prices.

    The Ford agreement also returned to a pension plan — rather than just 401(k)-style retirement accounts — for Unifor members hired at Ford in recent years. And it converted temporary staff who work full-time shifts into permanent employees.

    Autoworkers in both Canada and the United States used to all have COLA clauses in their contracts as well as traditional pension plans that pay retirees a set amount every month as long as they live. But the automakers got unions on both sides of the border to give up the COLA for all members and traditional pensions for new hires when the companies were in financial distress in 2007 through 2009.

    Restoring those concessions have been a major negotiation demand of both Unifor and the UAW.

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  • John Oliver returns to his HBO show, urging more workers to unionize | CNN Business

    John Oliver returns to his HBO show, urging more workers to unionize | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Comedian John Oliver returned to his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday, becoming the latest late night host to air a new program following the end of the writers’ strike.

    “We missed so much that it would take a whole new version of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ to cover it,” Oliver joked following a 15-minute recap of everything his show missed since going off air in April. (Oliver’s show airs on HBO, which like CNN, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.)

    “I wish so much that I could have told you these jokes at the time, but I couldn’t because our writers — the people who wrote those jokes — were forced to strike for a fair contract for the last five months, and it was an immensely difficult time,” he said. “Not just for them, but for everyone else working on this show and many others who could no longer do their jobs.”

    Oliver said that the strike happened for “good reasons” and said the writers “thankfully won” after being “severely squeezed in recent years” referencing reports that some writers don’t make enough for health insurance.

    “So the writers’ guild went on strike and thankfully won, but it took a lot of sacrifices from a lot of people to achieve that, and while I am happy that they eventually got a deal, and I’m proud of what our union accomplished, I’m also furious that it took the studios 148 days to achieve a deal that they could have offered on day f–king one.”

    He continued that he hopes the success of the writers strike encourages others, including auto workers and Starbucks employees, to “find power in each other.” Oliver said that actors, who are also currently on strike, are “able to take what the writers achieved and leverage it to win fair contracts too because the truth is it takes many people working really hard to make film and TV, all of whom deserve a piece of the pie.”

    “For the actors guild, in particular, they can not come back to work soon enough, especially as we’ve all now seen what happens when non-professionals are trusted with the written word,” he said.

    Last week, the Writers Guild of America unanimously voted to authorize its members to return to work following a 148-day strike with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that paralyzed the industry and halted production of several shows, including Oliver’s. Bill Maher returned to his show last Friday and the network hosts, such as Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, will air new programs Monday.

    The contract, which will expire in May 2026, includes pay increases, better benefits, protections against the studios’ use of artificial intelligence, guarantees for streaming compensation, longer-duration employment terms and other perks.

    Now the focus turns to negotiations between SAG-AFTRA, the union representing about 160,000 actors, and the AMPTP. The two sides are expected to begin negotiating again Monday and hopefully get closer to ending their strike, which has been happening since mid-July.

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  • How to choose the best student loan repayment plan | CNN Politics

    How to choose the best student loan repayment plan | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Millions of borrowers are required to make their monthly student loan payment for the first time in three-plus years in October, but there are several repayment plans available that could make the transition easier.

    Borrowers will be on the same payment plan they were before the pandemic pause started in March 2020, but they may want to consider switching to a different plan if their financial situation has changed.

    Plus, there’s also a new repayment plan, known as SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education), that launched this summer and could potentially lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers.

    Borrowers can use Federal Student Aid’s online “Loan Simulator” to compare their estimated payments under different repayment plans. They can switch plans at any time, for free, by contacting their student loan servicer or by submitting an application to Federal Student Aid.

    Here are some things to consider when exploring your payment options:

    Standard 10-year plan: When entering repayment for the first time, borrowers are automatically enrolled in the Standard Repayment Plan. These payments are based on how much debt a borrower has and sets a fixed monthly amount to ensure it’s all paid off, with interest, in 10 years.

    Income-driven plans: If a borrower is struggling to afford monthly payments, an income-driven plan – of which there are four types, including the new SAVE plan – may be a good option. These plans calculate monthly payments based on a borrower’s income and family size and are meant to keep payments affordable for low-income borrowers. Monthly bills could be as low as $0.

    Other non-income-related plans: The extended and graduated repayment plans could also lower a borrower’s monthly payment without calculating the amount based on income. They could be a good option for people who will eventually earn high salaries. The extended plan will spread payments over as many as 25 years. The graduated plan usually has a 10-year term, but payments start small and grow over time.

    Income-driven repayment plans could be good options for borrowers who feel as though their monthly payment is too high on the 10-year standard plan or on the extended and graduated plans. The four plans are called SAVE, Pay As You Earn, Income-Based Repayment and Income-Contingent Repayment.

    Under these income-driven plans, a borrower is required to pay a certain portion of their discretionary income, or what income is left after paying for family necessities such as rent, food and clothes.

    Generally, monthly payments under an income-driven plan go up when a borrower’s income goes up – or payments go down when a borrower has less discretionary income. Borrowers are required to recertify every year, which means payments will adjust if their income or family size has changed.

    The newest income-driven plan, SAVE, offers the most generous terms when it comes to lowering a borrower’s monthly bill. Once fully phased in next year, it will require some borrowers with undergraduate loans to pay just 5% of their discretionary income, down from the 10% required by most income-driven plans. SAVE also includes an interest subsidy so that debts don’t grow while a borrower makes payments.

    Borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans may also see their remaining student loan debt forgiven after making enough qualifying payments. The time to forgiveness varies by borrower and plan but won’t be longer than 25 years’ worth of payments.

    Eligibility for the income-driven repayment plans depends on what kind of federal student loans a borrower has, their income and when the loans were taken out. Most federal student loan borrowers are eligible for SAVE.

    Borrowers enrolled in the Standard Repayment Plan will usually pay the least amount over time. That’s because they will be finished paying in 10 years, leaving less time for interest to accrue.

    Borrowers may pay even less over time if they “prepay.” They are allowed to pay an extra amount, in addition to what’s required, at any time. Because of interest, this could also lower the total amount they end up paying under the Standard Repayment Plan.

    Parents who borrow to help finance their child’s education may have federal Parent PLUS loans, which are not eligible for all of the repayment plans.

    Like with other loans, borrowers with Parent PLUS loans are enrolled in the Standard Repayment Plan by default and are eligible to switch into the graduated and extended plans.

    Parent PLUS loans are not eligible for income-driven plans – but there is a workaround. If borrowers first consolidate their Parent PLUS loans into a Direct Consolidation Loan, they are then allowed to enroll in one type of income-driven plan – the Income-Contingent Repayment Plan – according to the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit that offers free student loan assistance.

    Parent PLUS borrowers will not be able to enroll in the newest income-driven plan, SAVE, even if they consolidate.

    It’s worth noting that the Income-Contingent Repayment Plan will close next year to new borrowers, except to those with consolidation loans that repaid a Parent PLUS loan, according to Department of Education rules.

    Marriage could result in a significant increase for borrowers enrolled in an income-driven plan because a spouse’s income will be included in the payment calculation.

    But some married borrowers who file taxes separately can shield their spouse’s income to get a lower monthly student loan payment. This is true under the SAVE, Income-Based Repayment and Income-Contingent Repayment plans.

    Borrowers enrolled in the 10-year standard plan won’t see a change after getting married.

    The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program could be a great option for borrowers with a lot of student loan debt who work for a nonprofit organization or the government.

    Qualifying borrowers will see their remaining student debt canceled after making 120 monthly payments. But they must be enrolled in the SAVE, Pay as You Earn, Income-Based or Income-Contingent plans.

    Borrowers with older, federally owned Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) are not normally eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. But under a one-time waiver, those borrowers could get credit for past payments if they consolidate their FFEL loans by the end of 2023.

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  • Fran Drescher ‘looking forward’ to talks resuming between actors’ union and Hollywood studios next week | CNN

    Fran Drescher ‘looking forward’ to talks resuming between actors’ union and Hollywood studios next week | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher is gearing up to resume negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers next week.

    Talks will resume between the actors’ union and studio representatives on Monday, two and a half months after the more than 160,000 members of the guild went on strike and one week after the Writers Guild of America and the AMPTP reached a tentative contract agreement.

    “We’re happy WGA came to an agreement but one size doesn’t fit all,” Drescher told CNN on Thursday. “We look forward to resuming talks with the AMPTP.”

    SAG-AFTRA negotiators will meet with several executives from AMPTP member companies to work out new television and theatrical contracts, according to the union.

    SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have both sought contract changes related to streaming residuals and artificial intelligence. Actors are also asking for better relocation expenses for actors working out of state or country and limited long breaks between television seasons in order to give actors more stability while under contract.

    The WGA has voted to authorize its members to return to work following the tentative agreement reached this week.

    SAG-AFTRA has been on strike since July 14.

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  • Want to live in London or New York? Good luck if you’re renting | CNN Business

    Want to live in London or New York? Good luck if you’re renting | CNN Business


    London
    CNN
     — 

    In May, Viveca Chow hurriedly transferred $3,700 over her phone while standing in the lobby of a building in Queens, New York. She made the upfront payment to secure an apartment minutes after seeing it.

    It was a moment the 28-year-old lifestyle influencer — forced to leave her previous accommodation after the landlord increased her monthly rent by $1,000 — described to CNN as “dystopian.”

    Yet it is something that Chow, along with millions of renters in big cities, has come to expect as part of the fight for affordable housing. Her realtor urged her to pay the holding deposit on the spot to secure the one-bedroom unit.

    In many urban centers, an influx of workers and students after the pandemic has collided with a lack of accommodation for rent, high levels of inflation, and rising interest rates that are trapping some people in the rental market when they would otherwise be buying a home.

    Average rents in New York and Sydney grew by an inflation-busting 4.7% and 6.9% respectively in the year to August, according to real estate firm Knight Frank. While growth in rental costs in both cities has slowed compared with its pandemic peaks, average rents are still at all-time highs.

    In other places, rents are rising even faster. In London, the average annual rise in the cost of a rental property exceeded 17% in April and again last month, the biggest jumps since real estate agency Hamptons started collecting the data in 2014.

    That runaway growth far exceeds both inflation and pay raises in the United Kingdom.

    Many are struggling to meet the costs.

    According to property website Realtor.com, affordability in the New York metropolitan area deteriorated the most out of the 50 largest US metro areas in the year to July. The share of median household income in the New York area eaten up by the median rent rose from 35% to 37% in that time.

    Based on one approach, housing costs are judged affordable if they account for no more than 30% of the typical household income, Realtor.com said. This is also the benchmark used by the UK Office for National Statistics when assessing private rents.

    In London, the destination for many UK college students looking for work after graduating, renting has become “entirely unaffordable” for that cohort, said SpareRoom, the UK’s biggest room search site, in a recent analysis.

    The platform used the ONS’s measure of affordability in its study and the average graduate starting salary of £29,000 ($36,000) a year. According to SpareRoom’s latest Quarterly Rental Index, average monthly room rent reached £971 ($1,190) in the second quarter, up by almost a fifth compared with the same period in 2022.

    Barnaby Scudds is feeling the pain. The public relations executive moved to London in March after graduating last year and now pays £975 ($1,195) a month to rent a room, which gobbles up more than half of his monthly paycheck.

    “I’m paid well for the work that I do, and yet it’s still difficult,” he told CNN.

    Even at those prices, rooms get snapped up fast.

    “It is very difficult because properties come on at about six o’clock in the morning generally, and they are normally gone by six o’clock in the evening,” he said.

    A property for rent in London, seen in August.

    Matt Hutchinson, communications director at SpareRoom, told CNN that the UK’s chronic lack of supply of rental properties was to blame.

    Beyond problems afflicting most global cities, such as a proliferation of short-term rentals offered through platforms like Airbnb, the shortage of places for long-term rent in London is exacerbated by local factors.

    Since 2016, the UK government has increased taxes on purchases of second homes and cut the amount of tax landlords can claim back. Put simply, being a landlord in the UK isn’t as lucrative as it used to be.

    “[It] is a much more tight-margin experience than it was six, seven years ago. And a lot of people are just selling up and leaving the market,” Hutchinson said, adding that rising interest rates, as well as higher costs for labor and materials, had discouraged many from investing in rental properties.

    In a recent note about rental markets in 10 cities worldwide, Liam Bailey, global head of research at Knight Frank, concluded: “Affordability of housing is set to become the leading political issue within the next 12 months.”

    London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, last month reiterated his call for rent control, urging the UK government to impose a two-year rent freeze for the capital’s 2.7 million private tenants. It is a version of a policy proposed by politicians and campaigners over the years as a way out of the affordability crisis.

    But rental caps, while instinctively appealing, are generally “a bad idea,” Nikodem Szumilo, director of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute at University College London, told CNN.

    “It benefits people who live in the rent control unit and maybe the politicians who impose the policy, but nobody else,” Szumilo said, noting that rental caps discouraged home builders from investing in new units, which in turn limited supply growth in places where demand might be rising.

    A better way, Szumilo argues, is to simply make it easier to build more homes. Tokyo, the world’s most populous city, housing more than 37 million people, has a “very deregulated market” where rents are “relatively stable,” he said.

    Lifestyle influencer Viveca Chow feels lucky to have found a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City.

    Policies that help people become homeowners — for example, offering subsidies on down payments or on mortgages for first-time buyers, as the UK government has done — are also effective, Szumilo said, because they help ease demand in the rental market.

    Still, Chow in New York is grateful for rent control.

    She and her partner live in one of the city’s coveted rent-stabilized units, which means the $3,700 they pay each month can’t increase by more than 3.75% if they renew the lease for another year. That’s below the 4.7% annual increase in rental costs in the city recorded by Knight Frank at the start of August.

    That “doesn’t necessarily mean it’s cheap,” Chow said, but the cap provides a welcome safety net after the instabilities — and indignities — of her last place.

    “We didn’t even have a kitchen, a proper kitchen. It was like a kitchen nailed to the wall. So I was like, you’re not raising $1,000 on me!”

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  • Biden unveils a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention | CNN Politics

    Biden unveils a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden on Friday unveiled a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a step he said was part of an effort “to send a clear message about how important this issue is to me and the country.

    In a speech in the White House Rose Garden, the president detailed his experience traveling to the sites of mass shootings across the country, including after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 as vice president.

    “Anyone who doesn’t think that these kinds of engagements have a permanent effect on young children … these were hardened, tough cops, asking me, could I get them psychiatric help?” he asked, raising his voice.

    An official told reporters on a call Thursday previewing the announcement that the office’s mandate will be twofold – it will be tasked with implementing and expediting last year’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the president’s signature gun legislation, and with finding additional actions within the president’s purview to stem the flow of gun violence.

    The announcement comes just days after a group of congressional Democrats in a letter called on Biden to leverage “the full power of the executive branch” to combat gun violence. In March, a day after a mass shooting left six dead in Nashville, Biden told reporters, “I have gone the full extent of my executive authority to do, on my own, anything about guns.”

    Biden on Friday took the opportunity to tout the steps his administration had taken to address the scourge of gun violence.

    “To date my administration has announced dozens of executive actions to reduce gun violence – more than any of my predecessors at this point in their presidencies, and they include everything from cracking down on ghost guns, breaking up gun trafficking, and so much more,” he said.

    “And last year with the help – with your help I signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant gun safety law in almost 30 years. It expanded background checks, expands the use of red flag laws, improves access to mental health services and so much more. This historic law will save lives. It’s a really important first step.”

    Vice President Kamala Harris will head the new office, Biden said.

    Biden said Harris “understands this more than any vice president ever – no, really. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact. She’s been on the front lines of this her entire career as a prosecutor, as an attorney general and as a United States senator. Her deep experience will be invaluable for this office.”

    And he thanked the gun safety advocates assembled in the Rose Garden for their work.

    “We’re never going to forget your loved ones, we’re never going to get there unless we remember. You know, I know we will do this because I know you – heroes, heroes proving that even with heavy hearts, you have unbreakable spirits,” he said.

    CORRECTION: This headline and story have been updated to reflect the correct name of the office.

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  • Contract negotiations: UAW strike puts the four-day workweek back in focus | CNN Business

    Contract negotiations: UAW strike puts the four-day workweek back in focus | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    When the United Auto Workers called a strike last week against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, one of their demands focused on an idea circulating on the periphery of labor reform circles.

    In addition to calling for a 36% pay raise and increased job security, union members want a 32-hour, four-day workweek with no pay cuts.

    Proposals to shorten the workweek have gained traction in recent years, with the flexibility of pandemic-era remote work fueling many of these calls. The accelerating use of artificial intelligence in the workplace has also pushed some workers to question the necessity of a 40-hour week.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders has long been a vocal proponent of a shortened workweek.

    “We are looking at an explosion in this country of artificial intelligence and robotics. And that means that the average worker is going to be much more productive,” the Vermont Independent told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “The question as a nation that we have to ask ourselves is: Who is going to benefit from this productivity? We should begin a serious discussion — and the UAW is doing that — about substantially lowering the workweek.”

    Several countries have conducted trials of four-day workweeks, with the largest held in the United Kingdom last year. The trial lasted six months and encompassed about 2,900 workers across 61 companies. Participants reported better sleep, more time spent with their children and lower levels of burnout.

    “It would be an extraordinary thing to see people have more time to spend with their kids, with their families, to be able to do more cultural activities, get a better education,” said Sanders. “People in America are stressed out for a dozen different reasons, and that’s one of the reasons why life expectancy in our country is actually in decline.”

    A separate study conducted in Iceland between 2015 and 2019 found reducing the number of work days a week did not lower productivity. A similar program in the United States and Canada, composed of dozens of businesses, found none of the companies planned to return to the five-day standard after the trial ended.

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  • Why some of Biden’s problems may be overblown at this time | CNN Politics

    Why some of Biden’s problems may be overblown at this time | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. He’s under an impeachment inquiry, his son was indicted in Delaware, inflation seems to be tilting back up, the United Auto Workers went on strike after Biden said they wouldn’t, and the chattering class is talking about him not running for reelection.

    Some of these factors explain why my colleague Zach Wolf wrote that “Biden’s two worst weaknesses were exposed” this past week, and it’s also why I’ve written about the president’s difficulties heading into next year.

    But while Biden clearly has problems – no president with an approval rating hovering around 40% is in good shape – some of his issues appear to be overblown at this time. Here are three reasons why:

    A Washington Post op-ed by columnist David Ignatius that called on Biden not to run for reelection got a lot of play this past week.

    Putting aside whether Biden should or shouldn’t run, the fact is that he is running. A lot of people will point to polls (like those from CNN) showing that a majority of Democrats don’t think the party should renominate him.

    But these surveys only tell you so much. They’re matching Biden against himself and not anyone else. When asked in the CNN poll to name a preferred alternative to Biden, only a little more than 10% wanted someone else and could name a specific person.

    When matched up against the announced Democratic opposition (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson), Biden is crushing it. He’s over 70%, on average, in recent polling.

    Moreover, Biden’s job approval rating with Democrats hovers around 80%. That is well above the level at which past incumbents have faced strong primary challenges. Those challenges (such as when Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980) came at a time when the president had an approval rating in the 50s or 60s among his own party members.

    It is worth analyzing whether the fact that a lot of Democrats don’t think Biden should be renominated masks a larger problem he could face in a general election.

    But Biden’s pulling in more than 90% of Democrats in Fox News and Quinnipiac University general election polling released this past week. In both polls, his share slightly exceeded former President Donald Trump’s among Republicans (though within the margin of error).

    The fact is Biden’s got problems, but worrying about renomination is not one of them.

    From a political point of view, Biden’s connections to his son Hunter have caused the president nothing but heartache. Most voters think Biden did something inappropriate related to his son’s business dealings.

    So, it might naturally follow that House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president’s ties to his son’s foreign business deals would be harmful to his political future.

    About 40% of voters, on average, think Joe Biden did something illegal. Most voters don’t.

    Some Republicans are no doubt hoping that Biden’s own troubles will make their likely nominee (Trump), who is under four indictments, look less bad by comparison. A majority of voters, however, think that Trump committed a crime.

    The public doesn’t see the Biden and Trump cases the same way.

    A Wall Street Journal poll from the end of August found that a majority of Americans (52%) did not want Biden to be impeached.

    Republicans will have to prove their case in the court of public opinion.

    It’s conceivable that Republicans will overshoot the mark like they have in the past. The impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton in 1998 preceded one of the best performances by a president’s party in a midterm election. Clinton’s Democratic Party picked up seats in the House, which has happened three times for the president’s party in midterms over the last century.

    To see how impeachment could turn things upside down for the GOP this cycle, consider independent voters. While the vast majority of independents disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president (64%) in our latest CNN poll, only 39% think he did something illegal.

    An election about a potentially unpopular impeachment would be better for Biden than one about an issue that really hurts him (such as voters seeing him as too old).

    Stop me if you heard this one before: Biden is the president heading into an election, voters are unhappy with the state of the economy, and his party does much better in the elections than a lot of people thought.

    That’s what happened in the 2022 midterms.

    The inflation rate is lower now than it was then, but it’s on the uptick. Voters, both now and then, overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy. They even say the economy matters more than any other issue, like they did in 2022.

    What none of this data takes into account is that Americans almost always call the economy the top issue, according to Gallup.

    Believe it or not, fewer Americans say the economy is the top problem facing the country now (31%) than they have in either the median (40%) or average (45%) presidential election since 1988.

    If you think about recent presidential elections in which the economy was the big issue (1992, 2008 and 2012), the state of the economy dominated the headlines.

    But as mentioned above, right now, there are a lot of other things going on in the country, as was also the case during the 2022 midterms.

    It’s not as if the economy is helping Biden. I’m just not sure it’s hurting him.

    After all, there’s a reason why Democrats have consistently outperformed the 2020 presidential baseline in special elections this year.

    If things were really that bad for Biden and the Democrats, they’d most likely be losing elections all over the country. That simply isn’t happening at this point.

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  • Autoworkers strike deadline nears as negotiators rush to avoid historic walkout | CNN Business

    Autoworkers strike deadline nears as negotiators rush to avoid historic walkout | CNN Business


    Detroit
    CNN
     — 

    With just hours to go before labor contracts expire at America’s three unionized automakers, thousands of autoworkers could walk off the job.

    Those limited, targeted strikes could be enough to grind production to a halt at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, which builds vehicles under the Jeep, Ram, Dodge and Chrysler brands for North America.

    But the uncertainty and confusion underscore the high stakes, with a possible historic strike at all three major automakers, disruptions to the local and national economies, and, perhaps more than anything, a hint at the future of manufacturing jobs in America.

    The union and the automakers continued to negotiate down to the wire on Thursday. GM made a new offer on Thursday afternoon, including a 20% raise, matching Ford’s offer.

    “We don’t want there to be a strike. We’re ready to work until the deadline,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told CNN. “We’d like to make history by making a historic deal, not having a historic strike,” he said.

    And President Joe Biden himself spoke to leaders of the union and the automakers, as a strike could be politically costly for him, as well.

    UAW President Shawn Fain on Wednesday evening announced plans for those targeted strikes at any company that fails to reach a labor deal with the union before contracts expire at 11:59 pm Thursday. Fain suggested the strategy, including the possibility of ramping up strikes as negotiating continues, would give the UAW more leverage. “We have the power to keep escalating and keep taking plants out,” he said.

    But Farley said on CNN Thursday that striking plants that make critical parts could affect workers at downstream assembly plants.

    “We can’t make a vehicle without an engine or transmission or stamping. So those people will, you know, basically be furloughed,” Farley said.

    Slowing or stopping the production of a few engine or transmission plants at each company could be as effective at stopping operations as a full strike at all plants, according to industry experts.

    One engine or transmission location per company might be enough to shut down nearly three-quarters of the US assembly plants, said Jeff Schuster, global head of automotive for GlobalData, an industry consultant.

    “Two plants per company, you can pretty much idle North America,” he said.

    Halting the companies’ assembly lines would likely happen in less than a week that way, Schuster said.

    One advantage for the union of a targeted strike is the potential to save resources and extend a possible walkout. Striking union members are eligible for $500 a week from the union’s strike fund.

    If all 145,000 UAW members among the three automakers were to strike at the same time, it could cost the fund more than $70 million a week, draining the $825 million fund.

    If the companies shut down operations and lay off members who are not technically on strike, those workers could be eligible to receive state unemployment benefits rather than strike benefits, which could preserve the union’s resources.

    Strikers are not eligible for unemployment benefits, but workers on temporary layoff can receive the benefits, which differ by state but would be less than the union’s $500 strike pay. There also are legal questions in different states about qualifying for unemployment.

    An official with Ford told reporters Thursday that under state law, workers in Michigan and Ohio were not eligible to receive unemployment benefits if they were laid off due to lack of parts at their plant caused by a strike. There are some other states, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, where they would be able to receive unemployment benefits, according to the officials.

    But they said none of the Ford UAW members would be eligible for so-called “sub-pay,” which they typically receive during temporary layoffs. Sub pay is far more lucrative, covering most of the gap between unemployment benefits, typically less than $300 a week, and normal company pay, which can be close to $1,300 a week.

    GM CEO Mary Barra sent a letter to employees Thursday saying the company’s latest offer now includes a 20% raise, with an immediate 10% pay hike. The lower paid temporary employees would get $20 an hour, which represents a 20% raise from the current $16.67 an hour they receive. She called the offer “historic.”

    “We are working with urgency and have proposed yet another increasingly strong offer with the goal of reaching an agreement tonight. Remember: we had a strike in 2019 and nobody won,” she said in the letter.

    Farley told CNN the offer from Ford of a 20% raise over the life of the contract is the most lucrative offer the company has made to the union in the 80 years it has been there. But he said meeting the union’s demands of close to a 40% raise, along with a four-day work week and other benefit improvements, would have been unaffordable.

    Farley blamed the union for the lack of progress in negotiations. But the union has blamed the companies for waiting until the end of August or early September to make their first counteroffers.

    The union came up with the 40% raise request based on the increase in the pay of CEOs at the three automakers over the last four years. Ford CEO pay rose 21%, from $17 million for Farley’s predecessor Jim Hackett in 2019, to $21 million for Farley last year. (Farley is the lowest compensated of the three CEOs.)

    Asked why the union workers shouldn’t get the same increases, Farley responded, “We’re really open to huge increases.” As to the 40% increases for CEOs, Farley responded, “I wasn’t CEO four years ago, but we have put on the table huge increases, double digit increases.”

    Ford has not had a strike since 1978; it has more UAW workers than the other two automakers.

    President Joe Biden spoke with Fain and leaders of the major auto companies “to discuss the status of ongoing negotiations,” the White House said Thursday.

    The White House declined to say Wednesday that Biden would support UAW workers if they chose to strike.

    “I’m gonna leave it at, [Biden] believes the auto workers deserve a contract that sustains middle class jobs and wants the parties to stay at the table, to work round the clock to get a win-win agreement,” Council of Economic Advisors Chair Jared Bernstein told reporters during Wednesday’s White House press briefing.

    Biden became directly involved in 11th hour negotiations a year ago to stop engineers and conductors at the nation’s major freight railroad from going on strike and was credited by both sides with a deal being reached at that time. But Biden and Congress had power under a different labor law to keep workers on the job by imposing a contract, a power he used later in the year when rank-and-file rail workers rejected the deal he brokered and again threatened to strike

    The autoworkers fall under a different labor law, one that leaves Biden with no power to stop a walkout. And he has limited influence with the UAW, which has been critical of his push to have the industry convert to electric vehicles, a move that could cost members jobs in the long run.

    In a statement midday Thursday, GM said it remains in “good faith negotiations” with the UAW but cautioned that a strike would be disruptive to its business.

    “Any disruption would negatively impact our employees and customers, and would have an immediate ripple effect across our communities,” a company spokesperson said.

    One sticking point in negotiations is that wages are only part of the gap between the two sides. In some ways it might be the least difficult problem to solve, said Patrick Anderson, CEO of Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan research firm.

    “The difference between the automakers and the unions on wages is a gap that could be closed,” said Anderson. “The differences involving non-wage demands are a gulf, not a gap.”

    The union is attempting to reverse deep concessions that go back as far as 2007. At the time, years of losses had left Ford nearly out of cash, and GM and Chrysler were on their way to bankruptcy and federal bailouts.

    The number one concession the union wants to end is a lower tier of wages and benefits for workers hired since 2007. While top pay for those newer hires, who today make up a majority of membership, is the same as the $32.32 paid to more senior members, it takes many more years to reach that level.

    The union also wants to restore traditional pension plans for those hired since 2007, as the more senior workers now receive, as well as the same retiree health care coverage. And to protect members from rising prices, it wants a return of the cost-of-living adjustments to pay that all employees lost in 2007.

    Even Fain calls those demands “ambitious,” but he said they’re driven by record or near record profits at the automakers.

    Pandemic supply chain disruptions and shortages of some parts, particularly computer chips, have led to record car prices. The average purchase price of a new car in August was nearly $48,000, according to Edmunds. That’s up 30% from August of 2019.

    Automakers have used their limited supply of parts to build vehicles loaded with options to maximize profits. That’s produced a strong bottom line. General Motors reported record profits in 2022, and Ford posted near-record profits as well. Stellantis, a European-based automaker formed in 2021 by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA Group, had 2022 profits up 26% compared to its first year of combined operations.

    A strike that halts production nationwide could also be costly for the automakers at a time of strong demand by car buyers and strong competition from nonunion automakers such as Tesla and foreign brands. GM said it lost $2.9 billion during its 2019 strike.

    While the automakers have done their best to build up inventory at dealerships, car buyers could have trouble finding some of the models they want and could have to wait longer for their choice of colors and options. And limited supplies could put upward pressure on some vehicle prices.

    – CNN’s DJ Judd contributed to this report

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  • Autoworkers strike: What to watch for as the clock ticks down | CNN Business

    Autoworkers strike: What to watch for as the clock ticks down | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Time is running out to avert a strike that could shut down America’s unionized auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities.

    The United Auto Workers contracts with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis expire at 11:59 pm Thursday. The contracts cover 145,000 UAW members at the three companies.

    If there’s no new deal by the contract expiration, the union has said it will start targeted strikes against a undisclosed number of facilities at each company.

    Here’s what to watch as the clock ticks down:

    It might not take much to virtually shut down the output from all the companies.

    The companies operate a complex network of plants that depend on getting parts from different facilities.

    Slowing or stopping the production of a few engine or transmission plants at each company could be as effective at stopping operations as a full strike at all plants, according to industry experts.

    One engine or transmission location per company might be enough to shut down nearly three-quarters of the US assembly plants, said Jeff Schuster, global head of automotive for GlobalData, an industry consultant.

    “Two plants per company, you can pretty much idle North America,” he said.

    Halting the companies’ assembly lines would likely happen in less than a week that way, Schuster said.

    One advantage of a targeted strike for the union is the potential to save resources and extend a possible walkout. Striking union members are eligible for $500 a week from the union’s strike fund.

    If all 145,000 UAW members among the three automakers were to strike at the same time, it could cost the fund more than $70 million a week, draining the $825 million fund.

    With targeted strikes, it’s possible that the companies will shut down operations and lay off members who are not technically on strike. That could make them eligible to receive state unemployment benefits rather than strike benefits, which could preserve the union’s resources. But there are legal questions about qualifying for unemployment.

    UAW President Shawn Fain told his members in a Facebook Live appearance Wednesday evening that if they are not in one of the plants that the union picks to go on strike, they should stay on the job. He said in that case they would be working under an expired contract, rather than on an extended contract.

    Fain said he would announce at 10 pm Thursday which plants have been selected to go on strike. Among the likely targets, Schuster said, are a Stellantis transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana, a GM transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, and a Ford transmission plant in Livonia, Michigan. Those three plants have just over 6,000 UAW members on staff, according to figures available from the companies’ websites.

    But there is still a chance no plants will go on strike and no operations will be disrupted. While Fain warned members that a strike appeared likely – “We’re likely going to have to take action,” he said during his remarks Wednesday – he also said there had been movement at the bargaining tables.

    Fain said that all the automakers had boosted the amount they were offering to raise wages, with Ford now offering a 20% raise during the life of the contract, GM is offering 18% and Stellantis is offering 17.5%, although Fain cautioned that still did not meet the union members’ needs, which had started with a demand for an immediate 20%, and four additional raises of 5% each over the course of a four-year deal.

    And all the automakers issued statements saying they want to reach tentative labor deals before the deadline that would avoid a strike. Despite the difference, there is a chance for an 11th hour settlement or settlements.

    There are separate union contracts at each of the traditional Big Three. That means there could be a tentative labor deal reached at Ford and GM that keeps those workers on the job, while the employees at Stellantis could go out on strike.

    Ford has not had a national strike since 1976 and has not had a strike of any kind at its US plants since 1978.

    In contrast, experts say Stellantis, which builds vehicles under the Jeep, Ram, Dodge and Chrysler brands, could see workers walk off.

    “I think there’s a 99% chance of a strike at Stellantis,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations school in Buffalo.

    If the two sides are close to a deal at the deadline, they could agree to a temporary contract extension for hours or even days. That extension could even go on for months, as with the West Coast ports during negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union last year and earlier this year.

    Fain has repeatedly said that the 11:59 pm contract expiration is a “deadline, not a reference point.” In past negotiations, the union has sometimes chosen only one automaker to strike, while staying on the job at the other two. Once a deal was reached, the union moved to get the other automakers to accept that “pattern” as the basis for their own contract.

    But Fain insists the union will not follow that playbook this time.

    Sometimes one or both sides will walk away before the final minute before a contract expiration. Although the strike might not start until after the deadline, a breakdown of talks could kill the chance for an 11th-hour deal.

    That’s what happened in bargaining in May between the Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,000 writers, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents major studios and streaming services in the contract negotiations. While the contract was due to end at midnight PDT, the talks ended about three hours earlier.

    Sometimes after talks break down, the parties can return to the table and reach a deal without a strike. That happened in July at UPS, as talks between the company and the Teamsters union ended after a marathon negotiating session in the early hours of July 5. Official talks did not resume for nearly three weeks. But when the two sides met again on July 25, they quickly reached a deal that averted an August 1 strike.

    But a break in talks at any of the automakers at this late date would not be a good sign.

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