Guests wear required face masks due to the Covid-19 pandemic on Main Street, U.S.A. in front of Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World Resort's Magic Kingdom on Wednesday, August 12, 2020, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
The Walt Disney Company said Wednesday it plans to terminate the employment of about 32,000 people in the first half of 2021, Variety reported.
"Due to the current climate ... the company has generated efficiencies in its staffing, including limiting hiring to critical business roles, furloughs, and reductions-in-force," the company said in an US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Disney sold roughly half as many theme park tickets in the 12 months to September as it did the year before.
COVID-19 has caused its income from its cruises, hotels, and theme parks to dive, but it has also lost revenus from its reduced television and film production, according to the filing.
The number includes Disney Parks' September announcement that 28,000 employees — around two-thirds of whom were part-time employees — would be laid off, Variety confirmed.
"Due to the current climate, including COVID-19 impacts, and changing environment in which we are operating, the company has generated efficiencies in its staffing, including limiting hiring to critical business roles, furloughs, and reductions-in-force," the company said in the SEC filing.
"As part of these actions, the employment of approximately 32,000 employees primarily at Parks, Experiences and Products will terminate in the first half of fiscal 2021," it said.
As Business Insider previously reported, Disney's theme parks division lost $2 billion in operating income in the quarter to June, making it the hardest-hit segment of the company.
The parks, including Florida's Walt Disney World and California's Disneyland, were forced to close at the start of the pandemic. Some were only beginning to slowly reopen over the summer, while others, like Disneyland in California, remain shuttered or have closed again.
The pain of the pandemic at Disney extends beyond its parks. The filing also referenced the temporary closure of its retail stores, the docking of its cruise ships, and the suspension of its stage plays.
Disney also had to halt television and film production for most of the year, and when it started filming again the process was both slower and more expensive due to COVID-19 safety measures, according to the filing.
This lack of new releases meant the company had fewer opportunities to generate income from merchandise, the filing said, and also caused its ad sales to drop.
"Collectively, our impacted businesses have historically been the source of the majority of our revenue," the company said.
Disney also warned that its income may continue to fall even after its operations restart because "the economic downturn caused by COVID-19" could cause customers to spend less money on its goods and services.
The revenue Disney makes from its theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, experiences, and theatrical releases also depends on how quickly demand for public and out-of-home entertainment experiences returns after the pandemic, it warned.
It also expects higher incremental costs associated with introducing health and safety measures, reopening its parks, and restarting halted construction projects, it said.
The entertainment company's operating income in the year to September 30 was $8.12 billion, a 45% drop year-on-year.
Revenue from its parks, experiences, and products division was down almost $7 billion compared to last year, and it sold roughly half as many theme park tickets.
Microsoft this month launched an analytics tool for employers called "Productivity Score."
The tool collects detailed data about how employees are using Microsoft's tools, including how much they use email and whether they turn their camera on during meetings.
Privacy experts have voiced concerns that the Microsoft tool is a serious invasion of privacy, as employers are able to view employees' activity individually.
Data privacy researcher Wolfie Christl said it "turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool."
Microsoft has a new tool that lets companies break down how much time employees are spending on work tools like email, Microsoft Teams, and Word — and privacy experts say it amounts to "workplace surveillance."
The tool, called Productivity Score, was first announced by the company in October and launched on November 17. It allows employers to gather granular data about how their employees are using Microsoft's suite of tools.
The system then assigns an organization a "productivity score" out of 800 over a 28-day period, which they can compare to scores from other companies in their industry.
The data points Productivity Score uses are incredibly detailed, and employers are able to focus on individual employees. For example, an employer is able to look at how much time a specific person has spent in Microsoft Outlook over the past 28 days, or how much time they've spent sending direct messages in Microsoft Teams.
The employer is also able to see how many of these messages contained "@" mentions.
The tool also collects more surprising data, for example how often an employee switches on their camera during a Teams meeting.
Privacy experts have raised concerns about the tool.
Data privacy researcher Wolfie Christl said it "turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool." He added that the tool may even be illegal to use in some EU countries with strict rules on data privacy and consent.
"This productivity suite lacks transparency and do not inform employees nor requires their consent. Companies such as Microsoft should not be giving incentives to employers to turn their office suites into surveillance machines violating employees' dignity," Eliot Bendinelli, a technology at Privacy International, told Business Insider.
Christl pointed out that although employers are able to turn off monitoring of individual employees, it's on by default when they first load it up.
"This normalizes extensive workplace surveillance in a way not seen before," he said.
Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the privacy advocacy Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Forbes tools like Productivity Score could permanently shift the power balance between employers and employees.
"I'm afraid that when Microsoft eases people into these employee monitoring dashboards, employees are getting used to living with this level of surveillance, and managers are going to get used to having a nice data feed about their employees and it'll be a boon for the industry," he said.
"All in all, this encourages employees to work for the algorithm to get a better score rather than for their employer, breaches trust between employee and employers, and constitutes an unwelcome invasion of privacy in a time where support and care is most needed," Bendinelli said.
Microsoft says Productivity Score is not a surveillance tool. "Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool," wrote Microsoft corporate vice president of 365 Jared Spataro when the company first announced the tool was on the way in October.
"Productivity score is an opt-in experience that gives IT administrators insights about technology and infrastructure usage," a Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider.
"Insights are intended to help organizations make the most of their technology investments by addressing common pain points like long boot times, inefficient document collaboration, or poor network connectivity. Insights are shown in aggregate over a 28-day period and are provided at the user level so that an IT admin can provide technical support and guidance," the spokesperson added.
Working from home during the pandemic has highlighted the problems of workplace surveillance. In March, downloads of a tool called Sneek, which took pictures of people every five minutes through their webcams, shot up tenfold.
Gartner analysis published in June found 16% of employers were deploying tools to do things like monitor emails and work computer usage.
As the weather cools and fall and winter holidays come in rapid succession, offices have traditionally transformed into festive environments. Whether workstations were adorned with faux spider webs, horns of plenty, or stockings hung on cubicles with care, these occasions were used to promote camaraderie amongst coworkers. However, in 2020, things look drastically different. Most companies have implemented remote working strategies for the majority of the year. Workspaces, once shared by coworkers, are now occupied by pets and family members. With so much change, the consistency of the holidays is more important than ever. 2600Hz Head of Marketing, Alisa Bartash, and Head of Product, Izabell Balash, provided some timely insight about how unified communications has played a part in maintaining company culture during these times.
How has COVID-19 changed company culture?
Alisa Bartash
Alisa Bartash: With the shift to remote work, people who are used to going onto an office and engaging with their co-workers around the water cooler, those in-person relationships don’t exist in the same way as they did pre-COVID. Companies are being forced to adapt their culture to this new way of doing everything remotely. They have to find ways to take established core company values and translate them for employees stuck at home.
Izabell Balash: The main changes are focused on keeping communications alive in the same way as when employees are in the office. It’s important to be available in the same way that someone can come up to your desk and ask a quick question. But at the same time, everyone is on computers all day, which adds a certain level of distraction. It has become more challenging to find that happy middle of remaining present and focused while accomplishing all of the day’s major tasks.
What adaptations have been made, and how have UC tools facilitated those changes?
Bartash: I feel the quote ‘work is something you do, not somewhere you go’ is very applicable to this situation. People think of work as a location, the office that they go into every day. The location for work has become irrelevant. The new focus is all about collaboration tools that people can utilise to facilitate the same level of communication they had in the office. A significant tool is video conferencing, which has become the primary way for people to continue face-to-face collaboration and still experience their work’s more personal aspects. Having to extend your culture through technology can counteract some of those feelings of isolation. Seeing someone is different from emailing them because you can see their facial expressions and hear their intonations, which is lost via text-based communication.
Balash: A tool we often use on the creative and product side is whiteboarding. Our designs and collaborations have now moved to the cloud so we can edit and update at a distance while gaining the ability to do so at different times without having to be on a conference call. When we are all on a call together, we can share screens, draw on screens, and immediately add elements for other team members to engage with to replicate that office environment as much as possible.
When we first moved to remote work, oftentimes conversations over text came off tense and were easily misinterpreted. We quickly came to the conclusion that it’s important to understand how you pass on your tone of voice to get ahead of any miscommunications. Even if you use a ton of smiley faces and emojis, a screen can’t portray most of the nonverbal communication that is considered crucial for healthy interactions.
How have UC tools helped with maintaining a sense of holiday?
Bartash: An example of something we did as a company for Halloween is that we had a pumpkin carving contest. Everyone that wanted to participate was on a video conference and carved their pumpkins together. Pictures were then sent to the entire company, and people got to vote for their favourite. In December, we’re having a remote holiday party.
Balash: The holiday party is really cool. We’ve been doing this for a while now since 2600Hz has been a half remote work company from conception. In previous years the main event would take place in the office, and remote employees would video conference to participate. Gift exchanges also took place live on camera, with gifts being sent out before the occasion. This year we’re extending that with games and quizzes using virtual tools to continue what we’ve done previously.
How have collaborative tools helped promote work-home balance when work is now home?
Izabell Balash
Balash: I definitely had more work-life balance before, but it’s still nice not to commute for an hour and a half to work. At the end of the day, you can turn off your devices and communication channels because people realise it’s important to set those boundaries.
Bartash: I would say that by working remotely, people can work when it’s more convenient for them. If they have kids that need to get ready for school, mobile communication can help parents stay engaged with work. We offer the capability to use your cell phone as your business phone with our CallThru.us app. It places your work phone on your cellphone, so people don’t have to manage multiple devices for access. But it’s still important to realise when you’ve put in your eight to nine hours and turn everything off and go live the rest of your life.
Travelers walk through a nearly empty terminal at Boston's Logan Airport on November 20.
AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
The White House is considering lifting the travel ban on non-US citizens coming from Europe and Brazil, Reuters reported.
President Trump has not made up his mind yet, but the plan is supported by members of the White House coronavirus task force and other agencies, according to Reuters.
The US barred entry to travellers from Europe in March as the outbreak surged there, but the US outbreak has now spent months as the world's worst-affected country.
Currently, non-US residents who have been in European nations or Brazil in the previous 14 days can't enter the US, though some travellers are considered exceptions.
The White House is considering lifting its travel ban on inbound travel to the US from Europe and Brazil, Reuters reported early Wednesday.
It comes as the US's coronavirus outbreak continues to be the worst in the world.
Reuters cited five US and airline officials saying that an end to the ban was close.
It reported that the plan is supported by members of the White House's coronavirus task force and other federal agencies.
But it said that President Donald Trump has not yet decided whether he supports it. There is currently no date for when an easing may take place.
The US banned travellers from Europe in March in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, and added Brazil in May.
But the US outbreak has spiralled since, and the US has now spent months as the country with the highest number of virus cases and deaths in the world.
Not long after the US put its ban in place, much of Europe likewise banned entry from the US.
More than 12.5 million people in the US have now been infected by the coronavirus, and more than 259,000 people have died from it. The US is currently in the middle of a third surge, with its cases at an all-time high.
Europe's cases rose rapidly in the last few months after the virus was brought under control over the summer. But the continent's cases have started falling after countries implemented lockdowns and new restrictions.
Here's how the US's outbreak looks:
The US's new daily coronavirus cases as of November 24.
Worldometer
And here's the outbreak across Europe, where cases have started falling again:
The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the EU/EEA and the UK, as of November 25.
ECDC
The lower infection rate in Europe may prompt Trump to decide against lifting the ban, Reuters reported.
Currently, non-US residents who have been in the European countries or Brazil over the last 14 days can't enter, though there are some travellers that are considered exceptions.
Reuters reported that many officials say the ban on Europe and Brazil doesn't make sense because travellers from other countries with similarly severe outbreaks are not banned from coming to the US.
The White House, Department of Homeland Security and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not comment to Reuters about the potential lifting of the ban.
Tech giant IBM plans to cut around 1 in 5 jobs across Europe, sources close to the matter told Bloomberg on Wednesday.
About 10,000 jobs face the axe, they said.
The UK and Germany will see the most job cuts, the sources said, and roles in its legacy managed-infrastructure IT services business are most at risk.
An IBM spokesperson told the publication that its staffing decisions "are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities."
The cuts will affect around 1 in 5 staff in the region, sources close to the matter told the publication.
The UK and Germany will see the most job cuts, but staff in Poland, Slovakia, Italy, and Belgium will also lose their job, they said.
The jobs cuts will lower costs at IBM's services unit, which has seen sluggish growth, they added.
Roles in IBM's legacy managed-infrastructure IT services business are most at risk from the cuts, the sources said. In October, IBM announced plans to spin off the unit by the end of 2021 so it can focus on building its cloud and AI division.
IBM announced the cuts during a meeting with European labor representatives in November, a union officer told Bloomberg.
The job cuts should be completed by the mid-2021, one of the sources told Bloomberg.
An IBM spokesperson told the publication that its staffing decisions "are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities."
"We also continue to make significant investments in training and skills development for IBMers to best meet the needs of our customers," the spokesperson added.
IBM did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
In the quarter to September 30, IBM recorded $17.6 billion in total revenue, a drop of around 2.5% year-on-year.
by ijibilian@businessinsider.com (Isabella Jibilian)
Comcast sign logo in the wall of a building at Universal Studios.
Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images
Comcast is planning on adding data caps to its home-internet plans, starting in January.
In 14 states and the District of Columbia, customers with Xfinity internet plans that aren't unlimited will be constrained to 1.2 TB of data per month, or face overage charges.
Comcast has had data caps in other parts of the country since 2016.
Comcast is adding a data cap for some of its home-internet plans starting in January. The telecommunications giant recently confirmed it's introducing a limit of 1.2 TB on Xfinity Internet plans in 14 states and the District of Colombia.
If customers that don't have unlimited plans go over that cap, they must pay $10 for each additional 50 GB of data. The extra charges max out at $100. Although the plan changes start in January, Comcast said that customers won't face extra charges for January and February. Instead, they'll get a "credit" for those two months, and one more free pass for another month over the course of the rest of the year. News of the cap was first reported by advocacy group Stop the Cap.
The change comes at a time when customers are increasingly reliant on internet access, for everything from remote work, to school, to socializing. In June of 2019, Americans used about 271 GB of data per month on average. In June of 2020, that number spiked to 380 GB, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The cap is especially of interest to cord-cutters, who stream television over the internet rather than watching cable, and gamers. Blockbuster games like "Madden" and "Assassin's Creed" can range from 50 to 100 GB to download, and many games get updates that use data too. Online multiplayer play, on games like "Call of Duty" or "Fortnite," rely on data too.
Data from The Wall Street Journal on data usage for different devices shows that people use the most data on streaming players, gaming consoles, and connected TVs each day, with streaming players clocking in at 5.4 GB, gaming consoles at 4.4 GB, and connected TVs at 3.6 GB. Computers trail those platforms at under 2 GB a day, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"This is why monopolies are bad. Comcast can exploit us for profit during a pandemic just because it feels like it," consumer advocacy group Public Citizen wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. "Comcast should be broken up."
Comcast did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, but addressed customer concerns on Twitter.
"About 95 percent of our customers use less than 1.2 TB and are not impacted by this plan – even with the spike in usage as customers are educating and working from home during COVID-19," Comcast wrote on Twitter Tuesday.
"1.2 TB is a massive amount of data and you can do a lot with it in one month. Stream about 500 hours of HD video a month or spend nearly 3,500 hours of videoconferencing (Zoom, FaceTime, Google Duo, Houseparty, etc.), enough to video conference for nearly 4 months straight," it added.
"This data plan is based on a principle of fairness. Those who use more Internet data, pay more. And those who use less Internet data, pay less," Comcast wrote.
The change will affect customers in states throughout the Northeast, including Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, according to screenshots of Comcast's website published by Stop the Cap. Verizon is a competitor in these regions.
Outside of the Northeast, customers in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and the District of Columbia may also be affected. In other parts of the country, customers without unlimited plans have had data caps since 2016, according to The Verge.
Bitcoin could surge to $100,000 by the end of 2021, according to the crypto investor Anthony Pompliano.
Pompliano, a cofounder of Morgan Creek Digital, told CNBC on Wednesday that demand for Bitcoin was rapidly exceeding supply and that the macroeconomic environment of low interest rates was "rocket fuel" for the cryptocurrency's price.
"I don't think it's that crazy to see a $100,000 bitcoin price by the end of 2021," Pompliano said. "And if we continue to get bigger and bigger buyers ... if this kind of tips over and all of the sudden it becomes kind of a consensus trade, it wouldn't surprise me to see something even higher than $100,000."
Pompliano, a cofounder of Morgan Creek Digital, told CNBC on Wednesday that demand for the coin was rapidly outpacing supply, especially after its "halving" in May, when the number of bitcoins awarded to miners was cut in half. This occurs roughly every four years and serves to limit the supply of bitcoin coming into the market.
Bitcoin is "the winner of a supply-and-demand exercise," Pompliano said.
Pompliano added that the macroeconomic environment right now was "rocket fuel" for Bitcoin. Low interest rates, money printing, and the Federal Reserve's average inflation target of 2% have driven retail and institutional investors into Bitcoin, he said.
"I don't think it's that crazy to see a $100,000 bitcoin price by the end of 2021," Pompliano said. "And if we continue to get bigger and bigger buyers ... if this kind of tips over and all of the sudden it becomes kind of a consensus trade, it wouldn't surprise me to see something even higher than $100,000."
Bitcoin has surged by roughly 160% this year as more major investors and institutions acknowledge the cryptocurrency's legitimacy as a store of value. The billionaire hedge-fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller told CNBC earlier this month that he owned a "tiny bit" of bitcoin as a hedge against inflationary pressure, while the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said in February that every citizen should hold 1% of their assets in bitcoin because it's a "fantastic hedge."
Despite his bullish view, Pompliano shared two potential risks he sees for Bitcoin.
"The first thing's a self-inflicted wound, right, if there's a bug introduced into the code or something like that," he said. "The second thing would be some sort of geopolitical risk where we saw a really aggressive coordinated kind of action by multiple nation-states.
"But again, I think that those things are very low probability of occurring, so it doesn't really kind of seem like that's going to happen in the short term."
Pompliano's Morgan Creek Digital is an investment firm that helps public pensions, university endowments, and private foundations invest in blockchain technology.
Forcing a top-down approach to gratitude can backfire.
Mixetto/Getty Images
Scott Dust is the chief research officer at Cloverleaf, a technology platform for integrated performance management, and a professor at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
As the holiday season begins this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Dust says there's a right and wrong way to encourage gratitude with your coworkers.
Leaders shouldn't remind employees to be grateful they are employed during the pandemic; instead, thank your colleagues for continuing to put their best foot forward despite uncertainty and constant changes.
As Thanksgiving approaches, we're reminded to be grateful for what we have. But for many workers, 2020 has been rough.
The pandemic-induced economic challenges have cost many employees their jobs or have forced them to accept less pay and more work. Many of those still employed are doing double-duty as they manage the remote learning of their children. And most importantly, many employees risk their health while being physically present at work to keep the economy moving.
Should we buck up and be grateful?
Gratitude is indeed a positive character trait. It's hard to argue with that. I would caution, however, that gratitude is like a dangerous weapon. It's a form of self-defense with protective qualities. But when mishandled, the result is less than ideal.
Using gratitude as a coping mechanism
When something bad happens, whether it be big or small, being grateful is a great way to stop sulking. There is always something in our lives to be thankful for. There's always a silver lining.
Keep in mind, though, that gratitude is only helpful when used as a form of "emotion-focused" coping — it helps us regroup and maintain productive levels of emotional well-being. Alternatively, gratitude does not help with "problem-focused" coping — where we pinpoint the obstacles and develop a plan for making things better.
It's critical to not confuse the two, and remember that we need both. Gratitude should give you perspective, but it should not be a pathway for accepting sub-par circumstances.
It's also important to consider where the gratitude prime is coming from. Research consistently illustrates that self-prescribed gratitude interventions, through activities like gratitude journaling, are beneficial for our well-being.
But what about when someone else reminds us to be grateful? I've heard employees in a variety of different industries grumble about several well-intentioned, but misguided organizational communique.
Terminating employees is a valid way to maintain cash flow. But reminding those who remain that at least they still have a job will fall flat. That's not empathy. You could even argue that that insinuates they weren't being grateful in the first instance.
Organizations should let employees be grateful on their own terms. Further, organizations should be talking about their plans for making things better. For example, they could acknowledge employee sacrifices, outline plans for making employees whole in the future, and discuss their plans for how to get there.
Thanksgiving is here — gratitude reminders galore. Being grateful is quite easy when life is humming along just fine. When life is not so easy, like in 2020, that's when gratitude gets tricky.
But don't let gratitude allow you to be stagnant. It's important to continue to work towards improving your life, and more importantly, the lives of others.
And yes, our colleagues and employees should be grateful that they are gainfully employed, even if their current arrangement is less than what they originally agreed to. But bite your tongue, and let them come to that conclusion on their own.
The best organizational leaders don't remind others to be grateful. Instead, they role model gratitude by expressing how much they appreciate the efforts of their employees.
Members of the Gwinnett County adjudication review panel look over remaining scanned ballots at the Gwinnett Voter Registrations and Elections office on November 8, 2020, in Lawrenceville, Georgia. | Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
It is, in fact, illegal — unless you’re actually moving to the state to stay.
In the days after two Georgia Senate races went to a runoff, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman went on CNN and seemingly encouraged people to move to the state to vote in the races.
“I hope everybody moves to Georgia, you know, in the next month or two, registers to vote, and votes for these two Democratic senators,” Friedman said, referring to Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, running against Georgia Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Friedman’s comment — in addition to a tweet from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang that he and his wife were moving to Georgia to help organize for Ossoff and Warnock — had people on social media talking about traveling to the state ahead of the election. Most wanted to know how they could volunteer, but a smaller number of people replying to Yang’s tweet floated the possibility of voting in the state.
There’s one major problem: It’s illegal to move to Georgia temporarily just to vote in an election and then leave. Georgia state officials are strongly urging prospective out-of-state voters to stay home, warning them they’ll face steep penalties if they vote fraudulently.
“Make no mistake about it, I will seek to prosecute those who try to undermine our elections to the fullest extent of the law,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a recent statement. “Outside groups who seek to interfere with democracy in Georgia should be forewarned that the consequences will be severe.”
The Georgia Senate elections on January 5 are indeed consequential. They will determine whether Republicans or Democrats hold the Senate chamber — and the makeup of the Senate will have a massive impact on President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda.
But ultimately, voters in Georgia are the ones who will decide that election.
What does Georgia law say about who can vote there?
The deadline to register as a voter ahead of the runoffs is December 7, and in Georgia, state law allows anyone with a legal primary residence in the state to register. However, the secretary of state’s office has been very clear that moving to the state with the sole purpose of voting and then moving away is considered fraudulent — and could carry a felony sentence.
Georgia state law requires that those who register be “a resident of this state and of the county or municipality in which he or she seeks to vote.” The law adds that “the residence of any person shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any present intention of removing therefrom.”
In a recent press release, the Georgia secretary of state’s office confirmed that “this would include individuals who move to Georgia solely for the sake of casting a ballot in an election with no intention of remaining in the state.”
False registration — or someone registering to vote knowing they don’t qualify in Georgia — is a state felony and carries a pretty stiff punishment: between one and 10 years in prison, and/or up to a $100,000 fine.
What is legal is registering to vote if you were already planning to move to Georgia for a longer time and establish residency there. In other words, if you’re moving to Georgia for a new job or to be closer to family, say, and intend to stay there for a longer time, it’s well within your rights to register to vote in an election in your new state.
It’s also legal to move to Georgia temporarily to volunteer on a campaign, or to help other Georgia residents register to vote. A lot of Democrat and Republican operatives and activists in other states are looking for ways to help out their candidates, but some are actively discouraging volunteers from traveling to the state, in large part because Covid-19 cases are spiking around the country.
“We are overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, but please do not — I repeat, do not — book plane tickets or gas up your car and make plans to travel to Georgia,” Stacey Abrams’s spokesperson Seth Bringman recently told the HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel, citing the coronavirus pandemic.
For legal voters in Georgia, absentee ballots started to be mailed to those who requested them beginning on November 18, while in-person early voting starts on December 14 and continues until Election Day on January 5.
How did this notion about voting in another state start?
It’s tough to tell exactly how this idea of moving to Georgia just to vote started spreading on social media. One high-profile case is a CNN interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
Here’s what Friedman said in full in his interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, in the context of talking about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell potentially obstructing Biden’s agenda if he keeps the Senate majority:
I hope everybody moves to Georgia, you know, in the next month or two, registers to vote, and votes for these two Democratic senators, running against incidentally two Georgia senators, both of whom were investigated for what? For getting a briefing on the coronavirus and then selling stocks before the public was aware of that information, both of them were investigated for that.
There are a few things wrong with what Friedman said. First of all, there aren’t two Democratic senators — both of the senators up for reelection in Georgia are Republican incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Second, even though a Snopes fact-check pointed out that Friedman “did not, however, specifically urge Democrats to move to Georgia temporarily just long enough to vote there, or to commit voter fraud by faking their residency status,” what he said was vague enough and suggestive enough to possibly be interpreted that way.
Yang’s tweet, on the other hand, said nothing explicit about voting in Georgia. Yang said he and his wife planned to move to Georgia in order to volunteer, and encouraged others to do the same.
Still, Democrats in Georgia are hoping that out-of-state volunteers keep their efforts out of the state for now, as Covid-19 cases enter their worst peak thus far.
Bitcoin soared above $19,000 on Tuesday for the first time in nearly three years, bringing the cryptocurrency within spitting distance of its 2017 record.
The price of Bitcoin jumped as much as 3.3%, to $19,272.21, through the morning.
Cryptocurrencies have garnered new interest from both Wall Street and Main Street in recent weeks as companies and traditional investors embrace digital tokens.
The rally lifted other popular cryptocurrencies including Ethereum and Ripple.
Bitcoin jumped above $19,000 on Tuesday for the first time since 2017 as Wall Street and Main Street rekindled their interest in cryptocurrencies and extended the digital token's rally.
The world's most popular cryptocurrency surged as much as 3.3% through the morning to an intraday high of $19,272.21. The gains brought Bitcoin just a hair below its all-time high of $19,783 reached in December 2017.
Cryptocurrencies have garnered attention in recent weeks as companies and traditional investors accept their uses. Square bought $50 million worth of bitcoins in October, saying it sees potential for the token to become "a more ubiquitous currency." Soon after, PayPal announced it would soon let its users buy and sell cryptocurrencies. The news pushed Bitcoin above $13,000 and sparked speculation about whether the coin's latest rally had the legs to bring it to new highs.
Some of Wall Street's biggest names have also backed the rally. Rick Rieder, BlackRock's chief investment officer, said Friday that Bitcoin was "here to stay" because of millennials' interest in digital payments. Stanley Druckenmiller said on November 9 that he had "warmed up to the fact that bitcoin could be an asset class that has a lot of attraction."
Others are skeptical about the run. Ray Dalio said last week that he "might be missing something about bitcoin," adding that its volatility diminishes its use as a store of wealth and a medium of exchange.
Even if Bitcoin maintains its lofty value, it can't replace central-bank currencies, because governments are likely to ban the token "and make it too dangerous to use," Dalio tweeted.
The Tuesday surge lifted other popular cryptocurrencies. Ether gained as much as 4.3%, to $622.73. XRP spiked 54.7%, to $0.79, at intraday highs.
Bitcoin traded at $19,235.79 at 8:25 a.m. ET, up 166% year-to-date.
Now read more markets coverage from Markets Insider and Business Insider:
Even if you're working from home, you can still have an unhealthy work environment.
Maskot/Getty Images
It can be easy to experience burnout when you work in a toxic environment, especially as many people spend a majority of their waking hours in the workplace.
If you're a "Sensitive Striver" — someone who feels emotions intensely and is easily hurt by criticism or harsh behavior — you might be more vulnerable to toxic work habits more than others.
Signs like a controlling boss, dysfunctional policies and regulations, issues with drama, attitudes, and communication, and a lack of growth opportunities might mean you need to make changes or leave.
Trust your intuition and don't tolerate mistreatment from anyone, including your coworkers, managers, or boss.
For many people, work can be like a second home. You spend the majority of your waking hours dedicated to your work. Your coworkers and team may likely be the people you interact with most in your life, after family or a spouse.
Yet it's impossible to be effective and feel fulfilled in a toxic workplace environment. Even if you work from home, a negative work environment can transcend physical walls. The intangible qualities that make work a healthy or unhealthy place can impact everything from your personal life and health to your self-esteem.
The increased stress of working in a dysfunctional office can lead directly to job burnout, particularly for Sensitive Strivers.
Why toxic workplaces affect Sensitive Strivers more
Your deeper sensory perception means you can sense — and more bothered — when things are "off"
You feel things intensely and can be easily hurt by criticism or harsh behavior from toxic people
You put a lot of pressure on yourself to perform and assume a sense of responsibility to make sure everyone around you likes you and is happy
You're attuned to everything happening (including people's reactions), which can lead to constant vigilance that is emotionally draining
You may have been told you're "too sensitive" or take things "too personally" so now you're afraid to speak up and assert yourself
You become overworked and overstressed, which further burdens you're already overloaded nervous system
How can you identify if you're trapped in a hostile workplace? Here are eight telling signs you may be working in a toxic office environment.
1. You're told to feel "lucky you have a job"
If you've ever heard this statement from your boss, it's a major red flag. This scare tactic is a means of threatening you into staying in a marginalized position and is symptomatic of an organization that thrives on bullying behavior and control.
2. Poor communication
Do you feel like you're left out of the loop regarding important information? A pervasive lack of communication characterizes most toxic workplaces. You may get little to no feedback about your performance, and when you do, it's negative and harsh — not the constructive type.
You may be doing the work of two, three, or four people, yet it's not unusual for your boss or colleagues to take credit for your accomplishments.
3. Everyone has a bad attitude
If you walk into work and everyone around you is miserable a la "Office Space," then you may be trapped in a hostile environment. In this type of office, there is no enthusiasm; no one coming in with smiles on their faces and no one ever says "I love working here." A high turnover rate among employees is a good sign that people are fleeing very quickly, most likely because of their unhappiness and poor morale at the office.
4. There's always office drama
If cliques dominate your office, it can feel as if you're back in high school all over again. You may be anxious and paranoid that your colleagues are talking about you. Toxic, cliquey coworkers are most likely to be found hovering around the water cooler whispering in each other's ears. They make what should be friendly workplace competition seem hostile and dog-eat-dog. There's always rumors or gossip floating around the office; misunderstanding, favoritism, and infighting are the norm.
Do meetings feel like a waste of time, inevitably blowing up into disorganized chaos where nothing is accomplished? Are the company's operations disjointed and failing? Toxic workplaces are full of confusion, arbitrary deadlines, lack of focus, and a general malaise that "this is the way it's always been done." If new policies or regulations are constantly getting added, or if management is never around to help solve problems, these are symptoms of a larger problem stemming from poor leadership and low morale.
6. You have a tyrannical boss
This type of boss is always trying to control your every move and you feel as if he or she is just waiting to pounce on you for messing up. Toxic bosses usually seem unwilling to listen to others and feel as if their way is always the right way. Your boss loves wielding his or her power and showing others that they're in charge. He or she probably isn't willing to lend a hand to help in tasks or give you credit for a job well done. If you feel as if your boss would expect you to come to work even if you were on your deathbed, you might be experiencing a tyrannical and toxic boss.
7. There's no growth
If you've approached management or HR several times regarding a lack of recognition and growth opportunities (such as promotions, raises, and challenging assignments), and have seen no changes, it may be time to leave.
8. You feel in your gut something is off
When your intuition says something is amiss, trust it. Physical symptoms you develop, such as sleepless nights or a racing heartbeat, can be your sensitive nervous system alerting you of danger.
While many countries are not allowing US travelers during the coronavirus crisis, some nations are open to Americans.
The United Kingdom, Caribbean countries, and select international locales are allowing tourists from the US.
Many countries require you to show a negative COVID-19 test and airline schedules are severely reduced, limiting options on how to get to the newly-opened destinations.
The world is re-opening, and Americans have more travel options for travel destinations than they've had since March.
The problem is that the American passport has significantly lost its power since the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.
Rising cases of the virus and the US government's ongoing travel restrictions barring entry for non-citizens into the country have turned the world against hosting American visitors, despite the economic benefit they bring. As a result, US passport holders can visit just a fraction of the world's countries, and are largely bound to North America for travel.
Central American and Caribbean countries were the most receptive to Americans over the summer, while most of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and Oceania remain closed off. Every continent has a handful of countries willing to accept US visitors, but most require mandatory quarantine upon arrival, or a negative COVID-19 test for entry.
Another problem: getting to some of the countries that are letting in Americans isn't as easy as hopping on the first flight. Even those who can show a recent negative COVID-19 test must deal with the fact that airlines have greatly scaled back their schedules, with some countries not allowing US citizens to transfer through their airports at all.
Travelers seeking to journey to these countries should opt for non-stop flights to minimize potential disruptions. If connecting through a third country is required, Americans should check with their airline and the local US embassy to ensure they'll be granted passage.
Here's where Americans can travel in the age of coronavirus and how to get there.
Albania — no test required
Tourists on the beach of Llaman in Albania in 2019.
GENT SHKULLAKU/AFP via Getty Images
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival.
How to get there: Tirana International Airport in Albania's capital serves as the primary point of entry for foreign arrivals. US passengers can utilize European airlines to get to there including British Airways, Air Serbia, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, and Lufthansa, which all allow US passengers to transit to third-countries through their hubs.
Antigua and Barbuda — test within seven days of travel required
A catamaran sits on the beach in Dickenson Bay, Antigua in 2008.
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Restrictions: Antigua and Barbuda requires a negative COVID-19 test within seven days of travel.
How to get there: All international flights to Antigua and Barbuda utilize V.C. Bird International Airport in St John's as the main point of entry. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, and United Airlines all serve St John's from their East Coast hubs.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Armenia — test required upon arrival
The view on "Geghard Monastery" on November 17, 2018 in Goght, Armenia. Geghard is a medieval monastery in the Kotayk province of Armenia, being partially carved out of the adjacent mountain, surrounded by cliffs. It is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Maja Hitij/Getty Images
Restrictions: Travelers will need to take a COVID-19 test upon arrival in Armenia, or may choose to self-quarantine for 14 days.
How to get there: Zvartnots International Airport in the capital of Yerevan serves as the main point of entry for foreigners entering the country. European airlines serving the country include Brussels Airlines, Aeroflot, Air France, Austrian Airlines, and LOT Polish Airlines, all of which offer one-stop connections from the US and allow transfers through their hubs.
Qatar Airways also serves Yerevan through its Doha hub where US citizens are allowed to transit.
Restrictions: Travelers will need to upload a COVID-19 test 72 hours prior to departure as part of a required entry card submitted online. Americans from states deemed lower risk by Aruba have the option of taking a test upon arrival for $75.
How to get there: Queen Beatrix International Airport in Oranjestad serves as the primary point of entry for international arrivals to the island nation. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines, and Sun Country Airlines all serve Aruba from cities across the US.
Bangladesh – test within 72 hours of travel required
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Mohd Firdaus Zulkefili/EyeEm/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel and undergo temperature screening upon arrival.
How to get there: Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka is the country's primary international gateway. Middle Eastern airlines including Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines, and Emirates offer one-stop connections from cities across the US.
Passengers transiting through the United Arab Emirates on Emirates will need to present a negative COVID-19 test from a maximum of 96 hours before departure.
Barbados — test within 72 hours of travel required
Getty/Holger Leue
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel.
How to get there: Grantley Adams International Airport near Bridgetown serves as the primary point of entry for international arrivals to the island nation. American Airlines and JetBlue Airways serve the airport from their East Cubs hubs.
Belarus — no test required
People take part in a protest against the presidential election results demanding the resignation of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and the release of political prisoners, in Minsk, Belarus August 16, 2020.
Restrictions: Travelers do not need to submit a COVID-19 test result to enter Belarus or self-quarantine upon arrival. However, the US Embassy has advised Americans to reconsider travel amid massive demonstrations following the Eastern European country's disputed election results.
How to get there: Minsk National Airport in the country's capital serves as the primary point of entry for international arrivals. European airlines including Austrian Airlines, Aeroflot, LOT Polish Airlines, and Lufthansa, as well as Turkish Airlines, all serve the airport with one-stop connections to the US and allow transits through their hubs.
Restrictions: Travelers must upload a negative COVID-19 test taken within seven days of departure 48 hours before arriving in Bermuda.
How to get there: L.F. Wade International Airport in Hamilton serves as the primary point of entry to the island nation. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and JetBlue Airways all serve Bermuda from their East Coast hubs.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – test within 48 hours of travel required
An old area of Maglaj is seen, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Reuters
Restrictions: Travelers must upload a negative COVID-19 test taken within seven days of departure 48 hours before arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
How to get there: Sarajevo International Airport in the capital city is the country's primary international gateway. European airlines including Air Serbia and Austrian Airlines, as well the Turkish Airlines, offer one-stop connections through their hubs from cities across the US.
Restrictions: The US State Department has a "Do Not Travel" warning placed against Brazil — its highest restriction. However, Americans can go to Brazil without testing for the coronavirus.
How to get there: Brazil's economic hub, Sao Paulo, is currently the primary gateway to the country. US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines – as well as South America's LATAM Airlines – offer non-stop flights from cities across the US.
Cambodia — test within 72 hours of travel required
Ralf Siemieniec/Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel and undergo an additional test upon arrival. They must also put down a $2,000 deposit for potential coronavirus treatment.
How to get there: Phnom Penh International Airport in the capital city serves as the country's primary gateway for international arrivals. Asian airlines including Korean Air, Asiana Airlines, and EVA Air offer one-stop connections from the US and transits through their hub airports.
Passengers transiting through Taiwan must have connections shorter than eight hours.
Colombia — test within 96 hours of travel required
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Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 96 hours prior to their travel.
How to get there: Five airports serve as international gateways to Colombia including in El Dorado International Airport in Bogota, Rafael Núñez International Airport in Cartagena, José María Córdova International Airport in Medellin, Ernesto Cortissoz International Airport in Barranquilla, and Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali. All major US international airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, as well as Spirit Airlines and JetBlue Airways, serve various Colombian cities from cities across the US.
Colombia's flag carrier, Avianca, has also restarted flights between the US and cities across the country, while low-cost airline Viva Air Colombia offers flights between Miami and Medellin.
Costa Rica – test within 72 hours of travel and test on arrival required
Laguna del Hule in Costa Rica.
Kryssia Campos/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers from select American states can enter Costa Rica and will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel, as well as undergo an additional test upon arrival. They must also place a $2,000 deposit for potential coronavirus treatment.
How to get there: Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose and Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport in Liberia serve as the two gateways for international arrivals to Costa Rica. Nearly every major US airline serves Costa Rica including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, United Airlines, Spirit Airlines, and JetBlue Airways from cities across the US.
Croatia – test within 72 hours of travel and test on arrival required
Baska Voda, a tourist town on the Makarska Riviera, Dalmatia, Croatia.
Jorg Greuel/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel and undergo an additional test upon arrival. They must also put down a $2,000 deposit for potential coronavirus treatment.
How to get there: Zagreb Airport and Dubrovnik Airport are currently the two primary international gateways for Croatia. European airlines including Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Air Serbia, and Austrian Airlines, as well as Turkish Airlines, serve the country and allow US citizens to transfer through their airports.
American Airlines inaugurated a non-stop route between Philadelphia and Dubrovnik but canceled the service for the remainder of 2020.
Dominica – test within 72 hours of travel and test on arrival required
The Jacko Steps to Dominica's Layou River.
David Madison/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel and undergo an additional test upon arrival.
How to get there: As Dominica does not have non-stop connections to the US, the easiest way for Americans to reach the island is through San Juan, Puerto Rico. Air Sunshine and Seaborne Airlines are the only two US airlines to connect the countries, doing so through San Juan's Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport and Dominica's Douglas-Charles Airport.
Travelers can purchase single-itinerary tickets to Dominica through American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and JetBlue Airways. Puerto Rico also requires mainland arrivals to present a negative COVID-19 test if leaving the airport.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Dominican Republic – no test required
The colonial district of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Massimo Borchi/Atlantide Phototravel/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival.
How to get there: International airports in the Dominican Republic with non-stop flights to the US include Cibao International Airport in Santiago, Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, Punta Cana International Airport in Punta Cana, and Gregorio Luperón International Airport in Puerto Plata.
Most major US airlines serve the country through those airports including JetBlue Airways, United Airlines, American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, and Seaborne Airlines.
Ecuador — test required within 10 days of travel
Quito, Ecuador.
John and Tina Reid/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 10 days of travel.
How to get there: Mariscal Sucre International Airport in Quito and José Joaquín de Olmedo International Airport in Guayaquil serve as the two international gateways for Ecuador. Major US airlines serving the South American country include American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, Spirit Airlines, and Eastern Airlines.
Travelers flying to the Galapagos Islands also need to enter Ecuador and transit through Quito or Guayaquil.
Egypt — test required within 72 days of travel
Sunset at the Pyramids, Giza, Cairo, Egypt.
Nick Brundle Photography/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours before travel.
How to get there: Cairo International Airport is the main international gateway for Egypt with secondary points of entry including Luxor, Hurghada, Sharm El-Sheikh, and Aqaba. All are served by EgyptAir, which offers a non-stop flight between New York and Cairo, as well as several European, North African, and Middle Eastern airlines offering one-stop connections and allow US citizens to transit through their hubs.
Ethiopia – test within 72 hours of travel required
Landscape near Tigray, Ethiopia.
Guido Cozzi/Atlantide Phototravel/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours before travel. Those without a test result must quarantine at a government facility for seven days and then for seven additional days at their home.
How to get there: Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in the capital city is Ethiopia's primary international gateway. The country's flag carrier, Ethiopian Airlines, offers one-stop connections from Newark, Chicago, and Washington while Middle Eastern airlines including Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines also offer one-stop itineraries to the country from cities across the US.
French Polynesia — test required within 72 hours of travel
The French Polynesian Islands.
Julie Zoney/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel, and then test again within the first four days of their trip.
How to get there: Fa'a'ā International Airport in Papeete on the island of Tahiti serves as the primary international gateway to Tahiti. Four airlines offer non-stop flights from the US including Ait Tahiti Nui and Air France from Los Angeles, French Bee and United Airlines from San Francisco, and Hawaiian Airlines from Honolulu.
Ghana — test required within 72 hours of travel
The shore of a fishing village in Ghana.
John Seaton Callahan/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken no more than 72 hours prior to their travel, and then test again upon arrival at the airport.
How to get there: Kotoka International Airport in Accra is the country's primary international gateway. Delta Air Lines offers a non-stop flight from New York with one-stop connections to cities throughout the US while European airlines including British Airways, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Air France, and TAP Air Portugal also offer one-stop itineraries through their hubs.
Grenada — test required within 10 days of travel and a 14-day quarantine
The town of Alhama de Granada.
Juana Mari Moya/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to upload a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 10 days of travel. They will then be tested again upon arrival and required to spend 14 days in self-approved quarantine. Those who test positive will quarantine for 14 days in a state facility.
How to get there: Maurice Bishop International Airport in St George's serves the island nation of Grenada. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and JetBlue Airways all fly to the country from their East Coast hubs.
Flights are currently limited to the island with no US carrier scheduled to serve Grenada until October. Air Canada also serves the country via Toronto with one-stop connecting itineraries available to US citizens.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Haiti — no test required
View of the Riviere de la Cosse in Haiti.
John Seaton Callahan/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers do not need to present a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival.
How to get there: Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince is the main international gateway to Haiti. Four US carriers serve the airport including American Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Spirit Airlines, and Eastern Airlines from cities across the East Coast, while Air France also connects Port-au-Prince with Miami.
Honduras — test required within 72 hours of travel
Santa Cruz De Yojoa, Honduras.
Hugo Caballero/EyeEm/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to submit a negative COVID-19 test result taken 72 hours prior to their travel.
How to get there: Toncontín International Airport in the capital of Tegucigalpa is the primary international gateway for Honduras. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines serve the country from some of their East Coast and Texas hubs.
Ireland — no test required
The Ha'penny Bridge, a pedestrian bridge built in 1816 over the River Liffey in Dublin, Ireland.
Peter Unger/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers do not need to present a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival. Visitors must self-isolate at an address they disclose on a government form upon arrival.
How to get there: Dublin Airport and Shannon Airport are the primary international gateways for arrivals into Ireland. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines, as well as Aer Lingus, connect the two countries from cities across the US with non-stop flights.
Restrictions: Visitors must upload a negative COVID-19 test within 10 days of travel at Jamaica's tourism website.
How to get there: Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston and Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay are the two international gateways for arriving Americans. Most major US airlines including American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines, and Sun Country Airlines serve the country from cities across the US.
Kenya — test required within 96 hours of travel
Kenya's Masai Mara National Park.
Buena Vista Images/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 96 hours of travel, and undergo a temperature and health check upon arrival.
How to get there: Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi is the country's primary international gateway with flag carrier Kenya Airways resuming non-stop flights to New York on October 30. European and Middle Eastern airlines including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, British Airways, EgyptAir, Lufthansa, Air France, and Qatar Airways also offer one-stop connections from cities across the US.
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival. However, the US Embassy urges against travel to Kosovo, stating that the "health situation is deteriorating, and public institutions are struggling to keep up with demand."
How to get there: Pristina International Airport is the sole passenger airport serving Kosovo and its main international gateway. Austrian Airlines and Turkish Airlines currently offer one-stop connections to Pristina from cities across the US and allow Americans to transit through their hubs.
Maldives — test required within 72 hours of travel
Jimmy Im for Business Insider
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours of travel.
How to get there: Velana International Airport near the capital of Male is the primary international gateway for foreign visitors. Global airlines serving the Maldives include Lufthansa, Emirates, Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific, Turkish Airlines, and Etihad Airways.
Passengers transiting through the United Arab Emirates on Emirates or Etihad Airways will need to present a negative COVID-19 test from a maximum of 96 hours before departure.
Restrictions: Travelers do not need to present a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival.
How to get there: Mexico has no shortage of international airports with non-stop flights from the US. Nearly every major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines, and Alaska Airlines, as well as Aeromexico, VivaAerobus, and Volaris serve numerous cities in Mexico from cities across the US.
Montenegro — test required within 72 hours of travel
St. George Church on an island in Montenegro.
Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours of travel.
How to get there: Podgorica Airport and Tivat Airport are Montenegro's two international gateways. European airlines including Air Serbia, Austrian Airlines, LOT Polish Airlines, as well as Turkish Airlines, offer one-stop connections between the US and Montenegro and allow US citizens to transit through their hubs.
Morocco — travel company or hotel reservation required along with test within 48 hours of travel
Marrakech, Morocco.
Henryk Sadura/Getty Images
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 48 hours of travel. They also need a reservation with a Moroccan hotel or travel agency, or a business invitation from a local company,
How to get there: Mohammed V International Airport in Casablanca and Marrakesh Menara Airport serve as the country's two primary international gateways, with secondary cities including Rabat, Fes, and Tangier also receiving international flights. The country's flag carrier, Royal Air Maroc, offers non-stop flights between New York and Casablanca and may resume additional flights from Boston, Miami, and Washington.
International airlines including TAP Air Portugal, Air Canada, and Air France also offer one-stop connections through their hubs.
Namibia — test required within 72 hours of travel
The Namib-Naukluft Park.
Francesco Ciccotti/Getty
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours of travel.
How to get there: Hosea Kutako International Airport in Windhoek is the country's primary international gateway. Qatar Airways currently offers one-stop connections through its Doha hub from cities across the US.
North Macedonia — test required within 72 hours of travel
Ohrid, North Macedonia.
Getty Images/Paul Biris
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours of travel.
How to get there: Skopje International Airport in the capital city is the primary international gateway for North Macedonia. Air Serbia, Turkish Airlines, Austrian Airlines, and LOT Polish Airlines all serve North Macedonia, offer one-stop connections to the US, and allow Americans to transit through their hubs.
Panama — test required within 48 hours of travel
Outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Panama City
Reuters
Restrictions: Panama will reopen its international borders on October 12 and travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 48 hours of travel for entry. Travelers with a less recent test will need to undergo additional screening upon arrival in the form of a rapid test at a cost of approximately $30.
How to get there: Tocumen International Airport in Panama City is the country's primary international gateway. American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Spirit Airlines all serve Panama City from their hubs across the US.
Panama's flag carrier, Copa Airlines, also connects the country with cities across the US.
Rwanda — test required within 120 hours of travel, along with a 24-hour quarantine
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Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 24 hours of travel. They will be transported to their designated quarantine hotel upon arrival, tested again, and then allowed to leave once the test comes back negative.
How to get there: Kigali International Airport in the capital city is the main international gateway serving Rwanda. Brussels Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Qatar Airways, and Turkish Airlines all offer one-stop connections between the US and Rwanda and allow US citizens to transit through their hub airports.
Serbia — no test required if coming from US
Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1503238700 BELGRADE, SERBIA - AUG 10: Skadarlija (Skandarska), Belgrade's bohemian quarter full of cafes and restaurants on 10 Aug 2019 in Serbia
e2dan/Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival if they are coming from the US. But if they are coming from North Macedonia, Croatia, Bulgaria, or Romania, they must present a negative COVID-19 test taken within 48 hours of travel
How to get there: Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport is the country's primary international gateway serving the capital city. Air Serbia offers non-stop flights between New York and Belgrade while European airlines including Lufthansa, Aeroflot, LOT Polish Airlines, as well as Turkish Airlines, offer one-stop connections to cities across the US.
Sint Maarten — test required within 120 hours of travel
Sean Pavone/Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 120 hours of travel. They may not enter the French side of the island, Saint Martin.
How to get there: Princess Juliana International Airport on the Dutch side of the island acts as the primary gateway for visitors visiting either side of the island. Major US airlines offering non-stop flights between the two countries include American Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Spirit Airlines.
Seaborne Airlines also operates flights between Sint Maarten and San Juan.
South Korea — 14-day mandatory quarantine at a government-designated hotel
Cj Nattanai/Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers do not need to present a negative COVID-19 test, but they will be tested upon arrival and required to quarantine for 14 days at a government-designated facility. This will cost approximately $1,400 to $2,100.
How to get there: Incheon International Airport near Seoul is the primary international gateway for Americans entering the country. All big three US airlines, and South Korea's Korean Air and Asiana Airlines, connect Seoul and cities across the US with non-stop flights.
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours of travel.
How to get there: Visitors to Saint Barthelemy often have to pass through a third country or island and transfer to a boat or small aircraft capable of utilizing the island's notoriously challenging airport. Tradewind Aviation offers flights from San Juan and St. Thomas while St. Barth's Commuter and Winair offer flights from nearby Sint Maarten.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Saint Lucia — test required within 7 days of travel
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Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within seven days of travel.
How to get there: Hewanorra International Airport is Saint Lucia's main international gateway for visiting Americans. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and JetBlue Airways all serve the country from cities across the US.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — test required within 7 days of travel
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Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within seven days of travel. US citizens will be quarantined at a government-designated facility for five days and re-tested prior to release.
How to get there: Argyle International Airport in Kingstown is the sole international airport serving Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. American Airlines offers the only non-stop flights between the two countries on a US carrier while Air Canada offers one-stop connections through Toronto.
Visit the US Embassy in Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean, and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States page for the most updated information.
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result, though Tanzania's US embassy has not specified when this test needs to be taken.
How to get there: Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam and Kilimanjaro International Airport in Northern Tanzania both act as international gateways for the sub-Saharan country most famous for Serengeti National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro. European and Middle Eastern airlines including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines, EgyptAir, and Emirates all connect Tanzania with the US through hubs that allow transfers for Americans.
Passengers transiting through the United Arab Emirates on Emirates will need to present a negative COVID-19 test from a maximum of 96 hours before departure.
Turkey — no test required
FILE PHOTO: Spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Istanbul
Reuters
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test or to quarantine upon arrival.
How to get there: Istanbul Airport is the primary international gateway to Turkey though the country has numerous international airports with one-stop connections to the US through Europe and the Middle East. Turkish Airlines offers the only non-stop flight between Turkey and the US, serving cities throughout the country.
Turks and Caicos — test required within 5 days of travel
TravnikovStudio/Shutterstock
Restrictions: Travelers will need to upload a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 5 days of travel.
How to get there: Providenciales International Airport in the country's capital acts as the primary international gateway for American visitors. Major US carriers including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and JetBlue Airways all serve the country.
United Arab Emirates — test required within 48 hours of travel and travel limited to Dubai
A general view shows the area outside the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, mostly deserted, after a curfew was imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Dubai
Reuters
Restrictions: Travelers will need to present a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 48 hours of travel and may only visit Dubai.
How to get there: Dubai International Airport serves as the main international gateway for Americans traveling to Dubai. Emirates offers the only non-stop flights between the US and Dubai with service to cities across the country.
United Kingdom — no test required but mandatory 14-day quarantine
Reuters/Matthew Childs
Restrictions: Travelers do not need a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival. However, they must self-quarantine for 14 days.
How to get there: London is the primary gateway to the country with Heathrow Airport and Gatwick Airport receiving international arrivals from the US. The big three international US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines, as well as UK carriers British Airways and Virgin Atlantic Airways, all fly to London and a few secondary cities in the country.
It's critical for leaders to be flexible when supporting their remote employees.
PeopleImages/Getty Images
During the holiday season, it can be difficult to keep employees engaged, energized, and productive, especially when working remotely.
Take some time to ask your employees if they have the proper tools to work from home, reflect on any bumps or shortcomings from this past year, and encourage them to volunteer or participate in a virtual group activity.
Make physical and mental health priorities across the company, and be generous and flexible when it comes to taking vacation days, time off, or other health-related reasons.
Make wellness a priority for your teams and prepare your people through the message that their well-being is important, and their ability to recharge in the next few months is a top priority. Employers that can do this successfully will reap the benefits of increased commitment and productivity as the new year comes around.
Protecting time and energy
Research has shown that the priorities of younger women and men have changed, as they seek more opportunities for a flexible workplace. In 2021, it's more likely that we can expect a hybrid solution between in-office and virtual working. The best way to adopt these new norms, and prepare teams is to open the lines of communication and reduce the stigma of having conversations around what a flexible work-life looks like. By hearing the concerns of people and teams, managers can problem-solve on challenges and focus on what is working for the future.
Now that most of the year has passed, take time to ask your employees if they have the proper tools for their home office. Engage, and see how as a company you can support their work environments through stipends for speedy internet, office supplies (paper, pens), and proper furniture (i.e. lumber supported chairs). Offer reimbursements or deals on chairs and tables that could be used in the home.
These upcoming months are also a perfect time for individuals and families to find ways to give back to the community and volunteer. Ask if your teams are interested in volunteering for the holidays and help source virtual or in-person events they can attend. Volunteering has been shown to increase a sense of purpose and fulfillment. You could also volunteer together as a team, to continue to build outside work relationships and connection. For example, our team had recently come together and wrote encouraging messages to seniors online. We were able to give back, while catching up with people on our lives outside of work.
And lastly, take this opportunity to reflect with your teams. Evaluate the office tools that have worked or ones that would be nice to have. This could be anything from virtual conferencing tools to online collaboration services. In addition, evaluate team communication and whether there needs to be changes or if things are working smoothly. Ask how people believe this last year went, and what they expect to happen in 2021. Encourage and support their views and show grace when at all possible. 2020 has been difficult, and this holiday is a great time to take time to breathe and recharge together.
This year, the holidays are different from any other that we have had in the past. Many families have been quarantined together all year long, struggling to balance the lines between work and home. Being on calls, virtual meetings, and attending online conferences, while feeding small children and pets is exhausting. Work feels like it is never-ending, and many are struggling with burn out. We all are due for a much-needed time off — to properly be strengthened as individuals, and as a team.
As 2020 ends and 2021 feels uncertain (work circumstances, vaccines, etc.), here are a few ways you can help your teams' recharge and enter 2021 feeling refreshed and ready to handle any new (or old) challenge that comes.
Incentivizing health and wellness during the holiday season
Balance is the name of the game. Think through the different policies and practices that have been in place this year and evaluate whether those have been working. 2020 has been the year of transition to remote working, and virtual collaboration. Workplace stress along with family/personal responsibilities can cause burn out and fatigue that affects productivity and effectiveness in all areas of life.
As a leader, be willing to be generous and flexible. Take a closer look at your rules and norms and figure out the areas where flexibility is available. See if you can build in additional days off, such as mandatory mental health days. Or for the holidays, ask, can the team spare mandatory blackout periods i.e. no work emails after 5 p.m. during the months of November and December.
Send out intentional and thoughtful notes to your employees for the end of the year. Acknowledge the struggles and imperfections with the transition and any new policies. Go the distance with a small, handwritten note dropped in the mailbox to your team mates. This will make people feel special and remind them that you are thinking of them.
Provide gifts that encourage relaxation and recharge. For example, gift cards are a great way to deliver options for local massages, nail salons, float tanks. And if these shops are still not open due to COVID-19 restrictions, your team members will have something to look forward to in the future, all the while supporting a local, small business.
In the upcoming months make connection a priority, and aim to conduct a few group activities, such as virtually led meditation workshops or virtual exercise classes. Teams could also hire a therapist and conduct a workshop to discuss tactics to monitor stress and wellness, especially with increased responsibilities around the holidays.
by snagarajan@businessinsider.com (Shalini Nagarajan)
Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images
Ethereum and Ripple are soaring, echoing the powerful rally in Bitcoin, as mass interest in cryptocurrencies picks up steam.
Ethereum has jumped almost four-fold this year to just below $600, although this is still short of its record $1,500 in January 2018.
The price of smaller crypto rival Ripple has hit its highest since mid-2019, having doubled in value in this month alone.
This growing interest raises red flags, because many people are pouring in money into cryptocurrencies without really understanding how they work, which could lead to several mistakes and lost money, a researcher said.
Bitcoin's growing reputation as an inflation hedge is boosting the price of other cryptocurrencies. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, rose by more than 6% to $597 on Monday, its highest since mid 2018.
Ethereum is still well below its all-time high of about $1,500 recorded in January 2018, but its price has increased four-fold since March 2020, when the pandemic brought global money markets to a grinding halt. Smaller rival Ripple's price has doubled in the month of November alone.
The sudden price surge could be explained in large part because of Bitcoin's massive rally this year. The digital token is up 160% on the year and was trading around $18,632 on Monday, near three-year highs.
As the pandemic continues to quarantine huge swathes of the global population, people are spending more time online, and they're probably getting more interested in cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bernard Meyer, senior researcher at CyberNews.com, said.
"But because it's all so technical, they're probably investing in these cryptocurrencies without really being certain of what they're doing – which can lead to a lot of mistakes and money lost," he said.
In the past, a number of high-profile hacking and security breaches resulted in millions of dollars' worth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies being stolen on various platforms. While security across the major trading platforms has tightened up, would-be Ethereum buyers need to make sure they are familiar with their token's smart contract - a form of account on the Ethereum blockchain that can send transactions across the network.
"If they're on Ethereum, they'll be using what's known as a smart contract to sort of automate the process of sending and receiving payments for users. But these smart contracts can have some big security holes in them," Meyer said.
Investors need to check the type of smart contract they're using and whether it has been audited and verified, to limit the chances of something going wrong.
Nikon is bringing back its promotion that allows you to stream its entire online curriculum of photography classes at no cost, just in time for the holiday season.
Now through December 31st, you can stream all classes featured at the Nikon School Online. Normally, these classes cost between $15 and $50 each. Each course is taught by a professional photographer and features in-depth lessons to improve your photo-taking skills.
However, it is important to note that although it is called the “Nikon School Online,” you do not need to own a Nikon camera to take advantage of these free courses. A few classes focus on Nikon-specific gear, but most of the classes available focus on photography as a skill set and how to improve.
The COVID-19 pandemic signals that civilization has breached a major ‘tipping point’ that could pave the way for a dangerous new era of interacting ecological emergencies.
Scientific evidence accumulated over the last five years suggests that the pandemic didn't come out of the blue, but is a direct consequence of industrial civilization's breaching of key ‘planetary boundaries’—these are important natural ecosystems needed to maintain what scientists describe as the ‘safe operating space’ for human survival on the planet.
The more we destabilize those boundaries, the more this safe space for human habitation shrinks—and COVID-19 suggests that the world economy is now entering a volatile new phase of chronic instability due to not just one crisis, but the interaction of many crises including climate change, resource bottlenecks, food system failures and civil unrest. It is the escalating synergy between these crises, each of which is experiencing its own tipping points, which points to the risk we are crossing a planetary threshold in the global system.
This verdict doesn’t come from new data, but from applying a systems lens to understand the massive amount of data we already have. I assessed the evidence in a major report for the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, a British think-tank which has led on the European Commission’s CONVERGE project, among other things.
Pandemic: a symptom of civilization itself
Prior to 2020, warnings from public health experts of an incoming global pandemic had accumulated over the last few decades. All of them have based their diagnosis on examining the risks posed by the relentless expansion of industrial civilization.
One of the latest warnings in 2016 from the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework published by the National Academy of Medicine, identified the main drivers of pandemic risk as continued population growth, increasing food production, closer transport ties due to globalization, and the expansion of urban areas into natural wildlife.
Numerous studies have similarly pinned the heightened risk of a pandemic on such expanding industrial processes. And many have noted that intensifying climate change plays a compounding role, by forcing disease-hosting species out of their traditional habitats.
There could be up to 600,000 unknown “zoonotic” virus species—hosted by animals—circulating in wildlife which could potentially spread to humans, the transmission of which is made more likely due to how industrial expansion is driving climate and land use changes. “Climate change means more zoonotic emergence risk—and no, mitigation doesn’t seem to reduce that, even if we stay under 2 degrees,” said Professor Colin J. Carlson of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science Security on Twitter. “It’s coming no matter what we do now.”
One of the other biggest drivers of the increasing risk of pandemics is tropical deforestation, also a result of accelerating industrial expansion. New research has shown that the COVID-19 pandemic not only spurred greater illegal forest clearing in tropical countries—especially Brazil—during lockdown measures; but in turn is increasing the risk of disease outbreaks. “Zoonotic diseases, public health, economy, agriculture, and forests may all be reciprocally linked in complex positive and negative feedback loops,” wrote the authors, describing a self-reinforcing cycle of “emerging threats to nature and society.”
There is no evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic was triggered by deforestation or climate change. But it did seem to emerge from wildlife-to-human transmission in China, which has become more common in the context of a rapidly expanding urban society.
Five years ago, an international team of scientists identified deforestation and land-use change as among four planetary boundaries which civilization was already at high risk of crossing, out of a total of nine.
Other planetary boundaries we were on the brink of breaching at that time included the rate at which species extinctions, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment due to industrial agriculture. The further we breach these and other planetary boundaries, the greater the risk of irreversibly driving the Earth into a less hospitable state for humanity. Now scientists warn that at the current rate of deforestation, industrial civilization faces a 90 percent chance of collapse within the next two to four decades due to the devastating impacts on key ecosystems.
The COVID-19 crisis, I argue, urgently needs to be reframed. It’s not just ‘a pandemic.’ It’s a direct consequence of industrial civilization’s continued encroachment across planetary boundaries. As urban civilization along with its tightly-coupled global transport networks continue to expand and penetrate the biosphere, it is exposing more people to greater numbers of different virus habitats, which is what helped trigger the global pandemic.
Multiple tipping points
The systemic consequences of the pandemic have also been unpredictable and wide-ranging, exposing deep-seated structural fragilities within interconnected social, economic, and health systems. The public health crisis is now amplifying, and being amplified by, multiple simultaneous breakdowns.
The pandemic has forced an already unsustainable global economy into a state of paralysis. Economic modeling shows that all options lead to economic contraction and a reduction in GDP. If we let the virus spread uncontrollably, we face the devastating impact on health care systems amidst millions of hospitalizations, leading to economic collapse. Periodic lockdowns, too, have dire economic consequences. And even countries in East Asia that have protected most lives and livelihoods face what the World Bank calls a “triple shock” from the pandemic, the economic impact of containment, and reverberations from global recession.
Given economic research showing that over the last century the global economy is experiencing increasingly larger and slower recessions, the pandemic appears to be amplifying this pre-existing trend.
Perhaps the most significant yet understated impact has been on the global oil industry. Prior to the pandemic, some experts were forecasting that by 2020 fossil fuels would face a crisis of plummeting demand, while others predicted a supply crisis of escalating costs amidst ever diminishing returns. In hindsight, the pandemic has dramatically worsened both these processes, precipitating the largest oil price collapse in history. There is now a risk that long-term shut-ins could lead a significant percentage of oil reserves to experience permanent damage, suggesting that global oil production may well be experiencing a turning point this year.
The danger is that this unfolding energy crisis will, too, have complex societal consequences that are difficult to anticipate. With so much of the last decade of economic growth fueled by the shift to US shale oil and gas, the pandemic not only threatens to accelerate industry bankruptcies, but to provoke deepening recession and a global debt crisis that could particularly afflict oil producers.
Meanwhile, the pandemic is driving up levels of global hunger, as well as straining food supply chains—a crisis that could be worsened due to the effects of an oil crisis on our fossil fuel-dependent food system.
All these crises would be greatly amplified by climate change, where our ability to detect potential tipping points is inherently ambiguous. Eight years ago, scientists recognized 2020 as the critical year before which we needed to reduce carbon emissions to keep global average temperatures below the upper safe limit of two degrees Celsius.
It’s 2020, and emissions have continued rising overall, despite the pandemic’s dampening effect. And cutting-edge research around planetary boundaries suggests that human activities over the next decade or two will be pivotal in determining whether or not we trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a worst-case ‘hothouse earth’ scenario.
The global system is therefore experiencing multiple, simultaneous crises—the pandemic, energy, the economy, food, and climate change. These crises are not separate, but inherently intertwined. As they intensify, they converge and amplify one another. Left unchecked on a business-as-usual trajectory, this could become a system-wide self-reinforcing feedback process.
When a whole system experiences multiple, simultaneous tipping points, the very structure and architecture of that system comes under strain, and is pushed into a transition toward a new state. My research suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is a signature of this process. Civilization’s breach of planetary boundaries is now triggering multiple interconnected crises which are shrinking the safe operating space for human survival. And it could either result in breakdown—or breakthrough.
Toward the next system
That’s why our report recommends a simultaneous whole system transition across multiple sectors. As governments continue to think about 'COVID-19' recovery plans, they need to join the dots and realize that economic prosperity, public health and ecological health are deeply intertwined.
To avoid the next pandemic, the next climate crisis, the next resource bottleneck, we need a World War II-scale transition to a ‘lifeboat economy’: an economy that thrives by protecting public health and planetary life-support systems. Markets cannot thrive when they degrade their own ecological foundations.
That requires a paradigm shift in economics: moving away from profit for its own sake, toward redesigning markets so that they meet public needs and nourish ecosystems. Governments are going to have to accept that a future of declining GDP may be unavoidable. Far from doom and gloom, this opens up an opportunity to rethink our addiction to endless growth linked to material overconsumption, and to embrace the mounting evidence that a good quality of life is available to all within planetary boundaries even with dramatically lower GDP—as long as we are ready to change.
Integral to that is a strategy to address the frontline driver of future pandemic risk, which also contributes to around 15 percent of global carbon emissions: deforestation. Driven largely by expanding industrial agriculture, there isn’t a single major food commodity that escapes deforestation. Currently, the predominant approach (for instance in the EU) tends to single out one commodity—palm oil. But this makes little sense given that beef production is the world’s number one driver of deforestation. It also creates a danger that if we shift away from palm oil, this will displace demand onto other oilseeds which, however, are less efficient and more land-intensive—which could drive even greater rates of deforestation.
To solve this, we therefore need a more consistent approach to stop deforestation across all commodities. One way to do this is to scale-up approaches which are beginning to work. In Malaysia, for instance, the rate of deforestation has fallen year on year for the last 5 years largely due to the impact of its own national certification scheme, MSPO—which is the world’s first mandatory sustainable palm oil scheme. According to Glen Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, although far from perfect, such schemes have been so successful in dropping deforestation from over a million to less than 250,000 acres per year, that they could be used as a “blueprint” for how to achieve the same in the Amazon.
The imperative, in other words, is to further incentivize, strengthen and support those locally-enforced schemes which are working, while focusing penalties on intransigent producers. One mechanism to incorporate this combination of carrot and stick could be realigning trade deals so that ecological restoration is at their foundation, rather than simply an afterthought. Trade would open access to Western markets for producing countries on condition of meeting core targets on domestic sustainable production.
Simultaneously, the full potential of the ‘Green New Deal’ opportunity must be recognised. Recent research reveals that just $2 trillion could transition the entire continental United States to a 100 percent solar, wind, and battery storage system, provided at marginal near-zero cost, opening up opportunities to transform entire industries across mining, manufacturing and agriculture while creating millions of jobs.
Governments can support this transition by gradually winding down incumbent fossil fuel industries. This would mitigate economic shocks as the industry declines, while retraining oil workers so that they can move into new renewable industries and emerging sectors.
As the Bank of England’s little-understood ‘Ways and Means’ facility proves, all this can be sustainably financed. Instead of printing money by borrowing it into existence from private banks, which tends to inflate asset bubbles and increase inequality, authorities can create their own money debt-free to support productive investments in the great transition.
Taken together, this programme of structural change can protect our societies from the consequences of overshooting planetary boundaries, and pave the way for the emergence of an ‘ecological civilization’—a civilization that enables the conditions of life to thrive within planetary boundaries.
The pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, together with the University of Oxford, announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was more than 70 percent effective. | Nathan Stirk/Getty Images
AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford say their vaccine has up to 90 percent efficacy. But there’s a lot we still don’t know.
If someone told you in March, when the World Health Organization finally called the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, that we’d have three strong coronavirus vaccine candidates by mid-November, you might have called that person delusional.
Yet with Monday’s news from AstraZeneca and University of Oxford that early results from their phase 3 trial demonstrate their vaccine’s effectiveness, that’s exactly the scenario we’re in.
In a press release, the pharmaceutical giant and its Oxford co-developers reported interim findings from two groups in their ongoing trials — one in the UK and one in Brazil. The trials used different approaches to inoculating the people who participated, and found two levels of efficacy, which they averaged to 70 percent. The researchers also found no severe cases or hospitalizations in the study participants who got the vaccine.
Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
AstraZeneca researcher Gaby Atencio presents some of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine work to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
In the UK trial group AztraZeneca reported on, the vaccine — known as AZD1222 — was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose around one month later, resulting in 90 percent efficacy. In the Brazil group, study participants were given two full doses at least one month apart, and the efficacy was 62 percent.
The researchers aren’t sure why there was this striking gap in vaccine performance — and in a press conference, said that the half dose may better prime the immune system to respond to the second full vaccine. But while the company framed the reason for the half dose was “serendipity” — in reality, the trial participants were given a smaller dose in error. And while it appears the accidental dosing regimen may have outperformed two full doses, independent researchers wondered about whether it was administered to enough people to know for sure. (More on that in a moment.)
Either way, 50 percent efficacy is the floor set by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency (the FDA equivalent in Europe) for approval. The AstraZeneca-Oxford research team will “immediately” submit their findings to regulatory agencies around the world, seeking early approval.
While the efficacy outcome falls short of the 95 percent preliminary result recently reported by both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, the results, if real, could be promising. At around $3 to $4 per dose, the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot is the cheapest of the three current options and should be easier to distribute globally (since it can be stored in regular refrigerators). That’s why lower-income countries around the world have been pre-purchasing access.
But, as with all the new coronavirus vaccine candidates, there are some big caveats to consider. And since the results came via press release and lacked detailed data, they raise questions we don’t yet have answers to. Here’s the rundown.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be a game changer for low- and middle-income countries
Among the Covid-19 vaccines furthest along in development, the AstraZeneca-Oxford candidate is among the most likely to be affordable to low- and middle-income countries. And considering much of the world’s population currently lives in low- and middle-income settings, it’s the jab that — with a 90 percent efficacy result — could makea big dent in the pandemic worldwide.
It also uses a novel approach to inoculation, one that’s different from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — and from conventional vaccines.
Vaccine makers have typically used the virus itself or a fragment of the virus, often in a weakened or inactivated form, to inoculate recipients. But this new generation of vaccines uses genetic instructions for making parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. All three candidates — Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca-Oxford — deliver the instructions for making the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, or the part of the virus that lets it enter human cells. And it’s these instructions, which human cells then use to manufacture parts of the virus, that are injected into vaccine recipients, essentially coaching the immune system to fight off the invader should it arrive.
The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines both use mRNA as their platform for delivering the genetic instructions. AstraZeneca-Oxford’s uses DNA instead, and the DNA is delivered to cells with the help of another virus known as an adenovirus. (Other Covid-19 vaccine developers, like CanSino Biologics and Johnson & Johnson, are also using adenovirus vectors.)
AstraZeneca, unlike Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, has promised to sell its shot at cost — around $3 to $4 — and not to profit from the vaccine while the pandemic is ongoing (though public money has gone into funding its research effort). According to the FT, that price is “a fraction” of the expense of the other vaccine candidates, which are expected to cost between $15 and $25 per dose.
Also unlike the two other leading vaccine candidates, it doesn’t require extremely cold temperatures for storage. That’s the distribution hurdle Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are working to overcome.
Moderna’s vaccine requires long-term storage at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) and is stable for 30 days at refrigerator temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit). Meanwhile, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine demands ultra-cold temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit) or lower, with about five days of shelf life at refrigerator temperatures. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine can be stored in a normal refrigerator for at least six months.
So these are the reasons why the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has become a leading contender lower-income countries are relying on to end their epidemics. For now, the shot “accounts for more than 40% of the supplies” going to low- and middle-income countries, according to Bloomberg. AstraZeneca said the company has the capacity to supply 3 billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.
“[T]he vaccine’s simple supply chain and our no-profit pledge and commitment to broad, equitable and timely access means it will be affordable and globally available supplying hundreds of millions of doses on approval,” said Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, in a statement.
The US is also poised to benefit. In May, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) under the Department of Health and Human Services pledged up to $1.2 billion to back the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, aiming to secure 300 million doses for Americans.
Of course, if the shot only has around 70 percent efficacy, officials will have to grapple with how and where it’s used at all. “If it’s 70%, then we’ve got a dilemma,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Stat. “Because what are you going to do with the 70% when you’ve got two [vaccines] that are 95%? Who are you going to give a vaccine like that to?”
The caveats
That’s not the only caveat to consider. The AstraZeneca-Oxford results so far came via press release, and gloss over nuances we’d need to understand to know how the vaccine works in people. AstraZeneca-Oxford also released fewer details about their research than the other two companies, and reported their results in a way that made drawing comparisons among the three candidates difficult. Let’s go over what we know.
Before clinical trials begin, research groups are supposed to publicly share a plan — called a protocol — for how they’ll run the studies and analyze and share the results, and they’re supposed to stick to it. That helps ensure experimenters don’t move the goalposts to come to more favorable conclusions.
But AztraZeneca and Oxford have only shared two of the protocols for their phase 3 studies after the trials began. We have the protocol for their US phase 3 study, and as writer and meta-scientist Hilda Bastian points out in Wired, a UK protocol published in a Lancet study appendix, also shared after the trial started.
“The appendix doesn’t say when this became the plan. We don’t even know if the Oxford-AstraZeneca team followed it,” Bastian writes. Again, in the press release, AstraZeneca also only disclosed data for subgroups in two of the trials, not the four specified in the UK protocol, she told Vox. “We do know [what’s in the protocol] is not what they reported.” “Transparency can increase confidence in the trials and are essential for establishing the quality of the science. [Six companies or research groups] have released protocols for their phase 3 studies — why not Oxford?” asked Peter Doshi, who has been a prominent critic of Covid-19 vaccine trials.
The press release doesn’t report details of what side effects the study participants experienced. The company only reported there were no serious safety events confirmed to date, and that the vaccine “was well tolerated across both dosing regimens.” We do know that the UK trial for AZD1222 was paused in July and again in September after two volunteers reported neurological problems. Investigations later found no link between the vaccine and these symptoms, and regulators allowed the trial to resume in October.
While we know the number of participants included in each in the UK and Brazil trials (2,741 in the UK versus 8,895 in Brazil), we don’t know how many got the vaccine (versus a placeboor meningococcal vaccine), which raised a statistical question about how many people were infected with the virus in the UK group that saw 90 percent efficacy. Some statisticians have suggested the number may be very small — and potentially unreliable:
TLDR: I think my gut feeling that the "90% efficiency" was based on as few as 2 infections out of 2741 wasn't very wrong. (And 2 is a tiny number: you see that out of a Poisson(6) about 5% of the time, so reckon the confidence interval is HUGE).
The press releases also lack details about the demographics of people participating in the trials. AstraZeneca said its trial participants come from “diverse racial and geographic groups who are healthy or have stable underlying medical conditions,” but without knowing the exact numbers, it’s hard to gauge how well they reflected the groups most at risk of severe disease (including older adults and people of color).
The trials also didn’t use a simple placebo to measure efficacy. In the UK arm of the trial, volunteers were randomly assigned to receive the AZD1222 vaccine or the meningococcal vaccine. In the Brazil arm, the comparison group was given the meningococcal for the first dose and a saline placebo for the second dose.
Another factor to consider: AstraZeneca-Oxford measured their results in a different way from their two major competitors. The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech trials only captured Covid-19 infections in their trial pool that advanced far enough to produce symptoms, while the AstraZeneca trials conducted weekly swab tests among their participants, allowing them to detect much less severe cases — including potential asymptomatic infections — among their volunteers. These differences make it trickier to draw apples-to-apples comparisons of the efficacy of the different vaccines.
Together, these factors highlight that there’s still a lot to learn about the new vaccines, even as they’re all set to roll out imminently. The Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Oxford-AstraZeneca teams have all vowed to publish their trial results in peer-reviewed journals. But distribution on a limited emergency use basis may begin as soon as next month, pending approval from regulators.
For now, it’s worth pausing over how remarkable it is that there are several SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates that have reported high levels of efficacy, featuring technologies that have never been deployed at a large scale in humans before.
If the AstraZeneca-Oxford, Moderna, and Pfizer-BioNTech groups pass regulators, the coronavirus vaccines may be the beginning of an entirely new approach to inoculating people against disease.
Clarification, December 4: An earlier version of this story stated that AstraZeneca/Oxford only shared the protocol for their US study. While that was the only phase 3 protocol registered on their clinical trials database, the researchers also shared the protocol for the UK trial in an appendix in a journal article.
Next year, Comcast plans to charge home internet customers in northeastern US states for going over 1.2TB of data in a month — a cap that’s already in effect for customers on non-unlimited plans in other parts of the country.
In January and February, Comcast will give its Xfinity customers not on an unlimited plan a “credit” for any data usage charges over 1.2TB during those months to ease them into the new limits. Then, starting in March, non-unlimited customers who exceed 1.2TB in a month will be charged $10 per 50GB of data, for a maximum of $100.
Customers who go over the limit will get one “courtesy” credit per 12 months, so if you go over 1.2TB in March, you get a grace period for April. If you go over again in May, you’ll pay...
The service, named Spotlight, will show snaps submitted by users to be featured in a reel of looping videos. Content algorithms will try to match users with Spotlight videos that match their interests.
The reveal lifted Snap as high as $47.27 before shares pared gains. The rally placed shares above the previous record-high of $45.60 seen on November 6.
Spotlight's introduction brings a major update to Snapchat's app and opens the service up to the hundreds of millions of people who use TikTok. Previously, Snapchat users would receive content from individual friends or videos published by media outlets and channels on its Discover page. Spotlight presents a middle ground, where everyday users' videos can be featured to Snapchat's nearly 250 million daily users.
Snap will incentivize users to submit clips to be featured in Spotlight with payouts totaling more than $1 million every day. Members looking to win a payout need to be at least 16 years old. The program will run through the end of the year and could be extended into 2021, according to a press release.
The feature will first be rolled out in the US, Canada, Germany, France, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
Snap traded at $45.94 as of 12:55 p.m. ET Monday, up 189% year-to-date. The company has 38 "buy" ratings, 11 "hold" ratings, and two "sell" ratings from analysts.
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Fuze recently hosted its productfest 2020, which showcased newly launched products and revealed future innovations. The session began with a briefing from Clément Wehrung, a Product Management executive at Fuze, who discussed the company’s Fuze Integrations Ecosystem which launched in May. This features a portfolio of enterprise-grade, secure integrations. He also highlighted the Fuze Developer Center, which provides a hub for innovation, and will be adding many new APIs over the coming months.
Wehrung then revealed Fuze’s updated integration for Microsoft Teams that is designed specifically to simplify the experience for end users.
“This new update enables more efficient communications with access to new dialpad features and complete directory access,” he explained. “The presence sync really enables you to save time, and you don’t have to have information about each app, it just works with one click access via the Fuze extension button”
Hadi Chemaly
Wehrung concluded his presentation by detailing Fuze’s major updates for Google Workspace, including the introduction of an extended solution which supports Gmail and Google Calendar natively. That solution also works on mobile devices, which are increasingly utilised by people working from home or in remote locations.
Hadi Chemaly, a Group Product Manager, then presented on the topic of improving the experience of joining meetings. “The key to satisfaction is a low barrier to entry with a secure, no download approach,” he said, pointing out that Fuze Meeting Join Support is achieving a more than 20% improvement in successful meeting joins among users.
Chemaly added that Fuze has several further innovations coming including immersive screen share and increased video feed capacity to provide a richer experience for sessions that have larger numbers of video users but also need to present users’ screens attractively. He also highlighted developments in the Fuze Contact Center offering, before sharing a demo.
“We’re very excited about Fuze Contact Center and we have had very positive feedback to date,” he said. “We have new enhancements to add value on the supervisor side, like additional alerts and agent search, because the experience has been centred around queues but we want to promote better coaching applications focused on the agents. We’ve also introduced a detailed view for agents, giving them more information and visibility. In addition, we anticipate a gradual return to office-based call centres and we want to support supervisors by providing them with a view of information on tablets, for example. This will provide greater richness of data to supervisors and enable enhanced coaching.”
Chemaly also previewed two new features designed for non-contact centre employees; in-app call monitoring outside queues and virtual pick up of group calls, both of which are designed to provide advanced PBX functionality accessible through the Fuze app.
Colleen White, Director of Product Management at Fuze, then detailed Fuze Hub, the company’s customer administration tool and the new Star Ratings Visibility feature. “When you have users in many different locations it makes it hard to triage what an issue might be,” she said.
Colleen White
“With this solution we can find users from a group of what we call silent sufferers and using this feature, we surface the qualitative data via star ratings, and don’t just rely upon quantitative data, like MOS, which does not always represent a user’s experience. The data provides an opportunity to see how users are doing and ultimately enable predictive maintenance”
Finally, Tim Laughlin, a Network Engineer for Customer Connectivity, detailed how Fuze is addressing the market’s needs for resilient and flexible connectivity. He turned his attention to the hot topic of SD-WAN and explained that the company has added four new SD-WAN partners; Aryaka, Cato Networks, 128 Technology and Silver Peak. These have been added in order to support various interpretations and deployment decisions with regard to SD-WAN.
“The SD-WAN hype cycle is rampant with 30-35 providers and constant acquisitions,” he said. “However, there is no RFC standard so there are lots of different strategies. For that reason, Fuze is focusing on providers who utilize network peering, but will invest in hosting customer appliances in our data centres for providers who don’t, it’s not just a cookie-cutter solutions, our alliances are there to give customers choice.”
Laughlin went on to detail how the company is also accommodating customers who bring their own carrier (BYOC) and growing its footprint for private network hosting. The company currently participates on 10 internet exchanges and 2 SDN platforms, manages 6 Technology Alliances with SD-WAN providers, and is on-net with 4 MPLS providers, ensuring a wide range of options for customers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (left) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
AP; Francois Mori/AP
In a letter to pro-privacy nonprofits on Thursday, Apple accused Facebook of collecting "as much data as possible" while showing a "disregard for user privacy."
Facebook shot back saying Apple is abusing its dominance to "self-preference their own data collection."
Apple's letter was defending the delayed rollout of a privacy feature that will require users to opt in to being followed by ad-trackers on apps.
Facebook previously complained this feature would gut its advertising revenue.
Apple and Facebook traded barbs this week over which one of them exploits their users more.
Apple struck the first blow on Thursday in a letter addressed to nonprofits, including Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying it doesn't hoover up detailed user data to sell to third parties. Facebook takes a "very different approach," Apple said.
"Not only do they allow the grouping of users into smaller segments, they use detailed data about online browsing activity to target ads," Apple's Senior Director of Global Privacy Jane Hovarth wrote in the letter, which was first reported on by Bloomberg.
"Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products."
Facebook hit back hard in a statement sent to Business Insider, accusing Apple of abusing its dominance to benefit itself.
It also accused Apple of sending the letter as a "distraction" from privacy concerns that emerged last week after a series of Mac computers had difficulties opening apps. Security researcher Jeffrey Paul claimed in a blog this was because macOS has started harvesting data from users.
"The truth is Apple has expanded its business into advertising and through its upcoming iOS 14 changes is trying to move the free internet into paid apps and services where they profit," Facebook said.
"As a result, they are using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data. They claim it's about privacy, but it's about profit," the statement read.
"This is all part of a transformation of Apple's business away from innovative hardware products to data-driven software and media."
Apple's letter to the nonprofits was defending its decision to delay the rollout of a major new privacy feature that will mean iPhone users will have to explicitly choose to opt in to ad trackers, rather than have them quietly start following users by default when they download an app.
The feature had been slated to be pushed out to iPhones with iOS 14 in September, but after several developers including Facebook complained it would gut their advertising revenues, Apple delayed the rollout until early 2021 to give developers time to adapt.
The nonprofits criticized the postponed rollout earlier this year, saying it was leaving users exposed to targeted political advertising during the US election.
Microsoft is making a big push to entice fans of Zoom over to Microsoft Teams with a new all-day video calling option that can be used for free. While the software giant launched Microsoft Teams for consumers on mobile earlier this year, it’s now bringing Teams’ friends and family features to the desktop and web allowing you to create a Microsoft Teams meeting for up to 300 friends and family that can run all day free of charge.
You won’t need a Microsoft Account or the Microsoft Teams app to join calls, as you can join free via a web browser. Microsoft Teams will also support seeing up to 49 friends or family members in a gallery view or through its Together Mode feature that puts you side by side in a virtual environment.
Alongside disputing the 2020 election results and refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden two weeks after losing, President Donald Trump has resumed firing senior officials in rapid succession on Twitter.
In what appears to be a post-election purge of anyone the president deems disloyal, at least 12 people have been sacked or have resigned from the Trump administration since November 3. Most of them worked in national security, and critics worry that the shakeup and any further actions by Trump may pose risks to the federal government during an uncertain transition period.
The president's most recent dismissal was cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, who'd been responsible for overseeing election security and repeatedly challenged Trump's unfounded claims that the race was stolen from him due to voter fraud. Trump booted the director of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency via Twitter on Tuesday, which sparked outrage from Democratic lawmakers who applauded Krebs for protecting the election process in a bipartisan way. Republicans, too, frowned at the decision, in a rare pushback against Trump.
Still, Trump's GOP allies have largely avoided commenting on his refusal to admit defeat, even though every network called the race for Biden nearly two weeks ago. Instead, they've pushed for Trump's legal battles to be allowed to play out. So far, the president has won zero out of the 21 lawsuits filed in an effort to overturn the results. Trump has sent his campaign staff to do the on-the-ground work battling the election, while he's resorted to airing out his grievances online.
Biden, in the meantime, has pressed along with his transition team, despite the Trump administration's efforts to block them. The president-elect recently announced members of his incoming administration, including chief of staff Ron Klain, and several other White House appointees.
Here are the officials that have left their Trump-appointed positions since the election:
November 17:
Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of CISA, after the agency released a statement that called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history." Krebs reacted to his departure in a tweet: "Honored to serve. We did it right."
November 12:
John McEntee, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, requested resignation letters fromBryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA and Valerie Boyd, assistant secretary for international affairs at DHS. The Washington Post reported that the administration pushed out the two officials as part of an effort to remove anyone who hasn't been sufficiently loyal to the president.
November 10:
A slew of top Pentagon officials left their posts, just one day after Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper. That list included his chief of staff Jen Stewart, deputy chief of staff Alexis Ross, Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security Joseph Kernan, and acting Undersecretary of Defense for policy James Anderson. They have been replaced by a crew of Trump loyalists. Anderson previously clashed with the White House when it tried to hire controversial figures, Politico reported, yet he did not clarify reasons for leaving in his resignation letter.
November 9:
Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Twitter and replaced him with National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller. The president did not say why he made the move, yet for months there had been talks to remove the top Pentagon official, who opposed Trump's decision to deploy active-duty troops to quell national protests over racial injustice.
Richard Pilger, the Department of Justice's election-crimes division chief, also resigned after Attorney General William Barr authorized investigations into voter fraud, violating longstanding policy that prevents the DOJ from interfering in elections.
Reports surfaced about possible plans to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, but they haven't materialized yet.
November 6:
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for safeguarding the nation's nuclear weapons, resigned. Defense News reported that her decision likely occurred because of nearly a year's worth of clashes with Trump's Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette.
The Trump administration ousted another energy official, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Neil Chatterjee, a longtime fossil fuel supporter who recently hinted at climate-friendly policies, which the president has opposed.
Bonnie Click, deputy administrator of US Agency for International Development,was also forced out. The White House sent her a letter that she needed to resign by 5 p.m. otherwise she'd be terminated without cause, sources told CNN. She had no intentions to leave, yet that evening the agency announced her replacement.
Last week on The Vergecast, the crew spent some time discussing Apple’s announcement of new Mac computers with its own Arm-based processor chip, which Apple is calling the M1. This week, Vergecast co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn got their hands on the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with the M1 chips for review and brought their findings to this week’s episode.
Nilay and Dieter also bring in deputy editor Dan Seifert and editor Chris Welch to discuss their experiences with the new computers in regards to performance, battery life, and running iOS apps on macOS.
But before they got into all of that, The Vergecast starts the discussion with an interview with legendary tech reviewer Walt Mossberg, who was able to try out the new...
Let's state upfront that there is no way in hell this is happening, and it's all just performative nonsense. No one is actually going to do this. However, the NY Times is reporting that White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has floated the idea of "compromise" to get the annual NDAA passed, after President Trump has whined about it requiring the renaming of military bases named after Confederacy leaders. As a bit of background, I still don't understand why we have literally anything named after leaders who actually tried to leave the country and fought against the US military, in order to continue enslaving people... but that's just me. The NDAA (the National Defense Authorization Act) is the annual budget allocated by Congress for the military. It's one of those "must pass" kind of things that some in Congress try to sneak junk into, knowing that it has to pass. President Trump has threatened to veto the bill because of the base renaming bit.
Over the course of several conversations, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Mr. Meadows what might persuade Mr. Trump to sign the measure with the renaming requirement intact, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Meadows, according to the people, said that adding a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, considered the most consequential law governing speech on the internet, would help.
Just to put this out there: this is insane. On many different levels. I've already expressed my confusion over why there's any debate at all about these base names, but the idea that Congress should simply wipe out Section 230 in the NDAA just creates an entirely new layer of pure ridiculousness. I mean, in part because this would simply increase uncertainty and liability for internet services, leading to a much higher likelihood that Twitter and other social media sites would take down Trump's nonsense for fear of having to defend themselves in court over it.
It truly is striking how focused so much of Washington DC has become on Section 230 without even understanding what it currently does, how it works, and what will happen if it gets removed.
Anyway, again, this is not happening. No one is going to go ahead with this. But it's just yet another example of the ridiculous policy proposals now floating around the White House.
In-N-Out opened its first two Colorado locations on Friday, and people were ready to wait hours for the beloved chain's food. The restaurants in Aurora and Colorado Springs both opened with drive-thru and take-out service, as indoor dining is currently closed because of the coronavirus.
The Aurora Police Department tweeted updates of the situation around the popular burger chain's grand opening. "Traffic is double double animal style right now all around the mall. We are on hand helping manage the massive traffic response," one tweet read, referencing the fan-favorite animal style serving of burgers and fries.
Around 2 p.m. local time, Aurora PD tweeted that the wait had increased to 12 hours. "They will close before you get to the window most likely," the department warned. In-N-Out restaurants are open from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m., and until 1:30 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, according to Denver CBS Local. The Aurora location will only offer drive-thru service after 10 p.m. following local ordinances, CBS reported.
In-N-Out has more 350 locations in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Oregon, and now Colorado, according to The Gazette. The chain is reportedly looking at adding more Colorado locations, and the nearby distribution facility can potentially serve up to 50 restaurants, The Gazette reported.
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Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
