The White House is set to announce that the Dutch semiconductor company that paused shipments weeks ago and risked upending global car production will resume sending chips under a framework agreement reached during talks between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, people familiar with the plans said.
The new policy on the Dutch chips is part of a forthcoming document from the White House laying out the details of the U.S.-China trade deal signed this week, according to the people.
Germany’s Munich Airport grounded flights overnight after several drone sightings, the latest in a string of interruptions in European airspace that have spurred NATO members to retune defenses. The airport reopened and flights resumed on Friday morning.
Air traffic was suspended Thursday night after the drones were spotted, grounding 17 departing flights and affecting nearly 3,000 passengers, the airport said. Additionally, 15 incoming flights were diverted to other airports in Germany and Austria.
LOS ANGELES — Leaders of the screenwriters union declared their nearly five-month-old strike over Tuesday after board members approved a contract agreement with studios, bringing Hollywood at least partly back from a historic halt in production.
The governing boards of the eastern and western branches of the Writers Guild of America and their joint negotiating committee all voted to accept the deal, two days after the tentative agreement was reached with a coalition of Hollywood’s biggest studios, streaming services and production companies. After the vote they declared that the strike would be over and writers would be free to start on scripts at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.
Late-night talk shows — the first to go dark when writers walked out on May 2 — are likely the first shows that will resume. Scripted shows will take longer to return, with actors still on strike and no negotiations yet on the horizon.
The writers still have to vote to ratify the contract themselves in early October, but lifting the strike will allow them to work during that process, the guild told members in an email.
After Tuesday’s board votes, the contracts were released for the first time to the writers, who had not yet been given any details on the deal, which their leaders called “exceptional.”
The three-year agreement includes significant wins in the main areas writers had fought for — compensation, length of employment, size of staffs and control of artificial intelligence — matching or nearly equaling what they had sought at the outset of the strike.
The union had sought minimum increases in pay and future residual earnings from shows of between 5% and 6%, depending on the position of the writer. The studios had wanted between 2% and 4%. The compromise deal was a raise of between 3.5% and 5%.
The guild also negotiated new residual payments based on the popularity of streaming shows, where writers will get bonuses for being a part of the most popular shows on Netflix NFLX, -1.44%,
Max and other services, a proposal studios initially rejected. Many writers on picket lines had complained that they weren’t properly paid for helping create heavily watched properties.
The writers also got the requirement they sought that shows intended to run at least 13 episodes will have at least six writers on staff, with the numbers shifting based on the number of episodes. They did not get their desire for guaranteed staffs of six on shows that had not yet been ordered to series, settling instead for a guaranteed three.
Writers also got a guarantee that staffs on shows in initial development will be employed for at least 10 weeks, and that staffs on shows that go to air will be employed for three weeks per episode.
On artificial intelligence, the writers got the regulation and control of the emerging technology they had sought. Under the contract, raw, AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material” — a term in their contracts for scripts and other story forms a screenwriter produces. This means they won’t be competing with computers for screen credits. Nor will AI-generated stories be considered “source” material, their contractual language for the novels, video games or other works that writers may adapt into scripts.
Writers have the right under the deal to use AI in their process if the company they are working for agrees and other conditions are met. But companies cannot require a writer to use AI.
Still-striking members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists returned to the picket lines earlier Tuesday for the first time since the writers struck their tentative deal, and they were animated by a new spirit of optimism.
“For a hot second, I really thought that this was going to go on until next year,” said Marissa Cuevas, an actor who has appeared on the TV series “Kung Fu” and “The Big Bang Theory.” “Knowing that at least one of us has gotten a good deal gives a lot of hope that we will also get a good deal.”
Writers’ picket lines had been suspended, but they were encouraged to walk in solidarity with actors, and many were on the lines Tuesday, including “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, who picketed alongside friend and “ER” actor Noah Wyle as he has throughout the strikes.
“We would never have had the leverage we had if SAG had not gone out,” Weiner said. “They were very brave to do it.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios in negotiations, chose to deal with the longer-striking writers first, and leaders of SAG-AFTRA said they had received no overtures on resuming talks. That’s likely to change soon.
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists announced the move late Monday, saying that 98% of its members voted to go on strike against videogame companies if ongoing negotiations are not successful. The announcement came ahead of more talks planned for Tuesday.
Acting in videogames can include a variety of roles, from voice performances to motion capture work as well as stunts. Video game actors went on strike in 2016 in a work stoppage that lasted nearly a year.
Some of the same issues are at play in the video game negotiations as in the broader actors strike that has shut down Hollywood for months, including wages, safety measures and protections on the use of artificial intelligence. The companies involved include gaming giants Activision Blizzard ATVI, -0.05%,
Electronic Arts EA, -1.13%,
Epic Games, Take 2 Productions TTWO, -0.99%
as well as Disney DIS, -1.19%
and Warner Bros.′ WBD, +0.28%
videogame divisions.
“It’s time for the videogame companies to stop playing games and get serious about reaching an agreement on this contract,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement.
Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for videogame producers, said they are “continuing to negotiate in good faith” and have reached tentative agreements on more than half of the proposals on the table.
So far this year, U.S. consumers have spent $34.9 billion on videogames, consoles and accessories, according to market research group Circana.
The threat of a videogame strike emerged as Hollywood writers were on the verge of getting back to work after months on the picket lines.
The alliance of studios, streaming services and producers has chosen to negotiate only with the writers so far, and has made no overtures yet toward restarting talks with SAG-AFTRA. That will presumably change soon.
SAG-AFTRA leaders have said they will look closely at the writers’ agreement, which includes many of the same issues, but it will not effect their demands.
Netflix Inc. has teased the U.S. rollout of a password-sharing crackdown, but one analyst wonders if the ongoing writers’ strike is delaying the company’s plans.
The streaming-media company has already started to clamp down on account sharing in other markets by limiting who can use accounts and charging more for additional access. JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth wondered if Netflix NFLX, +0.78%
was rethinking a broader rollout at the moment, given the prospect of content interruptions.
“Paid sharing is effectively a price increase, w/paid members sharing their password receiving less value for the same price, or potentially paying more to add an extra member. And for borrowers who currently do not pay, paid sharing means either activating their own subscription or being added as an extra member, or losing access to NFLX,” he wrote in a note to clients.
For that reason, “it’s possible that NFLX may not like the optics of implementing paid sharing while 11,500 WGA writers are on strike, w/production suspended or writing paused across at least a handful of NFLX titles including Stranger Things S5 & Emily in Paris S4, among others,” Anmuth continued.
Netflix didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment asking when paid sharing will roll out in the U.S., why it hasn’t rolled out yet, and if the delay was at all due to the writers’ strike.
The paid-sharing rollout is a critical element of Netflix’s financial story these days. Netflix estimates that some 100 million people were freeloading off of others’ paid Netflix subscribers, and Anmuth expected that Netflix would be able to get at least 30 million of those to start paying up, whether by becoming add-on members for existing accounts or new subscribers in their own right.
For that reason, a continuation of the writers’ strike “could further postpone revenue & subscriber acceleration,” he wrote.
The writers’ strike also threatens to impact Netflix’s other hot initiative: its advertising tier. Anmuth noted that the company’s upfront presentation to advertisers, its first-ever, was turning into a prerecorded event, presumably because the company fears “heavy picketing and protesting” and “less availability of star talent.”
“[U]ltimately, advertising is closely tied to paid sharing, w/borrowers likely viewing a $6.99 Standard w/Ads plan as a compelling low-priced option,” Anmuth wrote. “Therefore, ramp of the ad tier is also delayed if paid sharing is delayed.”
President Joe Biden rolled out a plan on Monday that targets how airlines handle flight cancellations and significant delays that are within a carrier’s control.
Biden said his administration will propose a new regulation later this year that would require airlines to provide cash compensation in addition to refunds and amenities for stranded passengers.
Southwest Airlines continued to extract itself from sustained scheduling chaos Thursday, cancelling another 2,350 flights after a winter storm overwhelmed its operations days ago.
The Dallas carrier acknowledged it has inadequate and outdated operations technology that can leave flight crews out of position when adverse weather strikes.
Southwest LUV, +3.70%
was the only airline unable to recover from storm-related delays that began over the weekend when snow, ice and high winds raked portions of the country.
As has been the case every day this week, the vast majority of flight cancellations nationwide, are Southwest flights.
There were 2,451 flights cancelled before noon Thursday in the U.S., and 2,357 were Southwest routes, or about 58% of its entire schedule, according to the FlightAware tracking service.
The airline has warned that cancellations will continue for days.
The federal government is investigating what happened at Southwest with total cancellations soaring past 10,000 early in the week.
Southwest added a page to their website specifically for travelers who were stranded, but thousands of customers remain unable to reach the airline.
DALLAS — Travelers who counted on Southwest Airlines to get them home suffered another wave of canceled flights Wednesday, and pressure grew on the federal government to help customers get reimbursed for unexpected expenses they incurred because of the airline’s meltdown.
Exhausted Southwest LUV, -5.16%
travelers tried finding seats on other airlines or renting cars to get to their destination, but many remained stranded. The airline’s CEO said it could be next week before the flight schedule returns to normal.
Adontis Barber, a 34-year-old jazz pianist from Kansas City, Missouri, had camped out in the city’s airport since his Southwest flight was canceled Saturday and wondered if he would ever get to a New Year’s gig in Washington, D.C.
“I give up,” he said. “I’m starting to feel homeless.”
By early afternoon on the East Coast, about 90% of all canceled flights Wednesday in the U.S. were on Southwest, according to the FlightAware tracking service.
Other airlines recovered from ferocious winter storms that hit large swaths of the country over the weekend, but not Southwest, which scrubbed 2,500 flights Wednesday and 2,300 more on Thursday.
The Dallas airline was undone by a combination of factors including an antiquated crew-scheduling system and a network design that allows cancellations in one region to cascade throughout the country rapidly. Those weaknesses are not new — they helped cause a similar failure by Southwest in October 2021.
The federal government is now investigating what happened at Southwest, which carries more passengers within the United States than any other airline.
In a video that Southwest posted late Tuesday, CEO Robert Jordan said Southwest would operate a reduced schedule for several days but hoped to be “back on track before next week.”
Jordan blamed the winter storm for snarling the airline’s “highly complex” network. He said Southwest’s tools for recovering from disruptions work “99% of the time, but clearly we need to double down” on upgrading systems to avoid a repeat of this week.
“We have some real work to do in making this right,” said Jordan, a 34-year Southwest veteran who became CEO in February. “For now, I want you to know that we are committed to that.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has criticized airlines for previous disruptions, said that “meltdown” was the only word he could think of to describe this week’s events at Southwest. He noted that while cancellations across the rest of the industry declined to about 4% of scheduled flights, they remained above 60% at Southwest.
From the high rate of cancellations to customers’ inability to reach Southwest on the phone, the airline’s performance has been unacceptable, Buttigieg said. He vowed to hold the airline accountable and push it to reimburse travelers.
“They need to make sure that those stranded passengers get to where they need to go and that they are provided adequate compensation,” including for missed flights, hotels and meals, he said Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
On its website, Southwest told customers affected by canceled or delayed flights between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2 to submit receipts. The airline said, “We will honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel, and alternate transportation.”
Navy physician Lt. Cmdr. Manoj Mathew said after spending hours on hold over two days Southwest reimbursed him for the first leg of his family’s trip from Washington to Houston — they drove through terrible weather after the Dec. 23 flight was canceled. Now he is worried whether Southwest will operate the return flight Sunday.
“I’m trying to reach other airlines,” he said. “There are no flights, plus it’s very expensive for us.”
Leaders of Southwest’s labor unions have warned for years that the airline’s crew-scheduling system, which dates to the 1990s, was inadequate, and the CEO acknowledged this week that the technology needs to be upgraded.
The other large U.S. airlines use “hub and spoke” networks in which flights radiate out from a few major or hub airports. That helps limit the reach of disruptions caused by bad weather in part of the country.
Southwest, however, has a “point to point” network in which planes crisscross the country during the day. This can increase the utilization and efficiency of each plane, but problems in one place can ripple across the country and leave crews trapped out of position.
Those issues don’t explain all the complaints that stranded travelers made about Southwest, including no ability to reach the airline on the phone and a lack of help with hotels and meals.
Teal Williams, a 48-year-old active-duty Army reservist from Utah, was stuck at the Denver airport with her husband and two teenage kids on Christmas Day after their flight to Des Moines, Iowa, was canceled. She said Southwest employees had no information about flights and didn’t offer food vouchers while elderly passengers sat in wheelchairs for hours and mothers ran out of formula for their infants.
“It was just imploding, and no one could tell you anything,” Williams said. The airline employees “were desperately trying to help, but you could tell they were just as clueless as everybody else … it was scary.”
Unable to find plane, train or bus seats, Williams and her family felt lucky to score a rental car. They drove 12 hours to Iowa.
Barber, the musician from Kansas City, already missed a performance Sunday in Dallas but had hoped to make it to Washington in time for a New Year’s performance near the National Mall.
Southwest Airlines Co. canceled more than two-thirds of its flights Monday and plans to slash its schedules Tuesday and Wednesday, in a meltdown that stranded thousands of customers and that worsened while other airlines began to recover from the holiday winter storm.
“We had a tough day today. In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,” Chief Executive Bob Jordan said in an interview Monday evening. “This is the largest scale event that I’ve ever seen.”
Southwest LUV, +1.78%
plans to operate just over one-third of its typical schedule in the coming days to give itself leeway for crews to get into the right positions, he said, adding that the reduced schedule could be extended.
Southwest’s more than 2,800 scrapped flights Monday, the highest of any major U.S. airline, came as the Dallas-based airline proved unable to stabilize its operations amid the past week’s storm. Between Thursday and Monday, the airline canceled about 8,000 flights, according to FlightAware.
On Monday, the Department of Transportation called Southwest’s rate of cancellations “disproportionate and unacceptable” and said it would examine whether the cancellations were controllable and whether the airline is complying with its customer service plan.
Ryan Green, Southwest’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview the airline is taking steps such as covering customers’ reasonable travel costs—including hotels, rental cars and tickets on other airlines, and will be communicating the process for customers to have expenses reimbursed. He also said customers whose flights are being canceled as the airline recovers are entitled to refunds if they opt not to travel.
The troubles at Southwest intensified Monday despite generally improving weather conditions and warming temperatures throughout much of the eastern half of the country, which had been pummeled by snow, wind and subfreezing temperatures in recent days.
China’s strict zero-COVID policy was making headlines Monday after Apple and iPhone manufacturer Foxconn said over the weekend that restrictions are crimping production and will delay shipments of the high-end iPhone 14.
“We continue to see strong demand for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models,” Apple AAPL, -0.82% announced in a Sunday evening press release. “However, we now expect lower iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max shipments than we previously anticipated and customers will experience longer wait times to receive their new products.”
Foxconn, meanwhile, which trades as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. 2317, -0.50%,
lowered its fourth-quarter guidance and said anti-COVID measures were affecting some of its operations in Zhengzhou, China, as Dow Jones Newswires reported.
Foxconn said that the Henan provincial government had made it clear that it would fully support the company. Foxconn’s most advanced iPhone plant, located in the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, has been battling a COVID outbreak.
Foxconn said it is working with the government to halt the outbreak and resume production at full capacity as quickly as possible.
Workers at the world’s biggest assembly site for Apple’s iPhones walked out last week as Foxconn struggled to contain a COVID-19 outbreak. The chaos highlighted the tension between Beijing’s rigid pandemic controls and the need to keep production on track. Photo: Hangpai Xinyang/Associated Press
Investors have been closely watching China for signs that its government would start to lift the tough pandemic restrictions that have been in place for almost three years. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the country’s leaders are considering steps but have not yet set a timeline.
Chinese officials have become concerned about the costs of their zero-tolerance approach to COVID, which has resulted in lockdowns of cities and whole provinces, crushing business activity and confining hundreds of millions of people to their homes for weeks and sometimes months on end.
But they are weighing those concerns against the potential costs of reopening on public health and on support for the Communist Party. On Saturday, officials from China’s National Health Commission again reaffirmed their commitment to a firm zero-COVID strategy, which they described as essential to “protect people’s lives.”
Still, there are plans in Beijing to further cut the number of days incoming travelers must quarantine in hotels from 10 to seven, followed by three days of home monitoring, the paper reported, citing people involved in the discussions.
And officials have told retail businesses that they intend to reduce the frequency of PCR testing as soon as this month, partly because of the cost.
In the U.S., known cases of COVID and hospitalizations are climbing again for the first time in a few months.
The daily average for new cases stood at 39,954 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, up 6% compared with two weeks ago. But cases are sharply higher in several states, led by Nevada, where they are up 96% from two weeks ago, followed by Tennessee, where they are up 69%; Louisiana, where they are up 68%; Utah, where they have climbed 61%; and New Mexico, where they are up 56%.
Cases are climbing in 30 states and in Washington, D.C.
The daily average for hospitalizations was up 2% to 27,419, while the daily average for deaths was down 11% to 320.
Physicians are reporting high numbers of respiratory illnesses like RSV and the flu earlier than the typical winter peak. WSJ’s Brianna Abbott explains what the early surge means for the winter months. Photo illustration: Kaitlyn Wang
The two variants accounted for 52.3% of all cases in the New York region, which includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, up from 42.5% the previous week. That was more than the BA.5 omicron subvariant, which accounted for 24.9% of new cases in the New York area in the latest week.
The BA.5 omicron subvariant accounted for 39.2% of all U.S. cases, the data show.
BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 were still lumped in with BA.5 variant data as recently as three weeks ago, because at that time, their numbers were too small to break out. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places.
• BioNTEch SE BNTX, +2.84%,
the German biotech that has partnered with Pfizer PFE, -0.53%
on a COVID vaccine, posted earnings early Monday, showing a roughly 50% drop in profit that sent its stock lower, despite beating consensus estimates. The Mainz-based company said it had invoiced about 300 million doses of its bivalent vaccine, which targets the omicron variant as well as the original virus. The company chalked up €564.5 million ($563.9 million) in direct COVID vaccine sales in the quarter, down from €1.351 billion a year ago. BioNTech raised the lower end of its full-year COVID vaccine revenue range to €16 billion to €17 billion, from a previous €13 billion to €17 billion.
• Thousands of runners took to the streets of the Chinese capital on Sunday for the return of Beijing’s annual marathon after a two-year hiatus, the Associated Press reported. However, the good news was offset by anger about another death related to COVID restrictions, this time of a 55-year-old woman in a sealed building. An investigation report released Sunday in Hohhot, the capital of China’s Inner Mongolia region, blamed property management and community staff for not acting quickly enough to prevent the death of the woman after being told she had suicidal tendencies.
• The U.S. flu season is off to an unusually fast start, contributing to an autumn mix of viruses that have patients filling hospitals’ and physicians’ waiting rooms, the AP reported separately. Reports of flu are already high in 17 states, and the hospitalization rate hasn’t been this high this early since the 2009 swine flu pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, there have been an estimated 730 flu deaths, including at least two children. The winter flu season usually ramps up in December or January.
The U.S. leads the world with 97.7 million cases and 1,072,598 fatalities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 227.3 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.5% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.
So far, just 26.3 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 8.4% of the overall population.
