20 April 20
Robert Reich | CEOs, Not the Unemployed, Are America's Real 'Moral Hazard'
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "Many Republicans believe economic relief for those without jobs encourages slacking off. But it is corporations that are bailed out again and again."
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "Many Republicans believe economic relief for those without jobs encourages slacking off. But it is corporations that are bailed out again and again."
he coronavirus relief enacted by Congress is barely reaching Americans in need.
This week, checks of up to $1,200 are being delivered through direct-deposit filings with the Internal Revenue Service. But low-income people who have not directly deposited their taxes won’t get them for weeks or months. Worse yet, the US treasury is allowing banks to seize payments to satisfy outstanding debts.
Meanwhile, most of the promised $600 weekly extra unemployment benefits remain stuck in offices now overwhelmed with claims.
None of this seems to bother conservative Republicans, who believe all such relief creates what’s called “moral hazard” – the risk that government benefits will allow people to slack off.
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, for example, says state unemployment offices are overwhelmed because the extra $600 is “incentivizing people to leave the workforce”. Hello?
When it comes to big corporations and their CEOs, however, conservatives don’t worry about moral hazard. They should.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, corporations were borrowing money like mad, capitalizing on the Fed’s bargain-basement interest rates. Total business debt topped $16tn last year.
Corporations used much of this debt to buy back their own shares of stock. This raised the earnings of each remaining share, creating a bonanza for big investors and top executives.
Trump never tired of pointing out how spectacularly stocks had risen on his watch. But he neglected to mention those stocks were floating on a rising sea of corporate debt – which left corporate America dangerously unprepared for any sharp downturn.
Then came Covid-19 and the sharpest downturn on record.
American corporations spent $730bn on buybacks last year and more than $370bn this year before the virus, much of it financed by debt. If they hadn’t frittered away that trillion or so dollars, they’d be better able to cope with this emergency.
Over the past five years, four big airlines and the aerospace giant Boeing spent more than $70bn buying back their own stock, putting them deep in debt. If they hadn’t binged on buybacks, they’d be better equipped to weather this storm.
No worries. Government is bailing them out, just as it did the Wall Street banks that exploded in 2008.
On 9 April the Fed announced it will buy up corporate debt, even backstopping private-equity firms that also borrowed to the hilt. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced on Tuesday an agreement with the airlines under which they will receive billions of taxpayer dollars.
Forget moral hazard. They’re all too big to fail.
The Fed and the treasury had little choice. Massive defaults and bankruptcies would wreak even more havoc on the economy. Better to maintain some payrolls than add to the unemployment rolls.
But by saving the backsides of big corporations and their CEOs, the bailouts have rewarded corporate America’s obsession with short-term profits regardless of longer-term risks to the corporation, its employees, and the overall economy.
Why is moral hazard a problem when it comes to millions of jobless Americans who can’t even collect $600 in unemployment benefits, but not a problem when it comes to CEOs who have borrowed to the hilt, used the money to artificially boost share prices, and pocketed $20m a year?
Giving the vast majority of Americans a bit more cushion against the downside risks they face surely poses less harm than giving CEOs a cushion against the risks they take with the entire economy.
It’s not too late for the Fed and the treasury to take shares of stock in every corporation that gets bailed out.
This way, CEOs and big investors aren’t rewarded for binging on debt to finance stock buybacks. The public gets in on the upside of any eventual recovery. And there will be more money to finance stronger safety nets for Americans who actually need them.
Another necessary step is to ban stock buybacks – as was the case before 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission viewed them as potential vehicles for stock manipulation and fraud.
They still are. Shareholders who unwittingly sell their stocks back to corporations that are artificially pumping up share prices lose out on the gains. Why isn’t this fraud?
A final step must be to regulate credit-rating agencies charged with informing investors about the true riskiness of corporate debt. Why were they still giving high ratings to the bonds of corporations so laden with debt they couldn’t survive a downturn?
The real moral hazard has been in C-Suites, not in homes. It’s time to stop bailing out corporations and start bailing out people.
The White House at night. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Trump, Head of Government, Leans Into Antigovernment Message
Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Haberman writes: "First he was the self-described 'wartime president.' Then he trumpeted the 'total' authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus."
Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Haberman writes: "First he was the self-described 'wartime president.' Then he trumpeted the 'total' authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus."
Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances.
Not even the president’s re-election campaign can harness him: His team is often reactive to his moods and whims, trying but not always succeeding in steering him in a particular direction. Now, with Mr. Trump’s poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme — veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the legally enforceable stay-at-home orders.
A medical worker tends to a covid-19 patient at an intensive care unit at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn on April 1, 2020. (photo: Jon Gerberg/WP)
Coronavirus Destroys Lungs. But Doctors Are Finding Its Damage in Kidneys, Hearts and Elsewhere.
Lenny Bernstein, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Sarah Kaplan and Laurie McGinley, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The new coronavirus kills by inflaming and clogging the tiny air sacs in the lungs, choking off the body's oxygen supply until it shuts down the organs essential for life. But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems."
Lenny Bernstein, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Sarah Kaplan and Laurie McGinley, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The new coronavirus kills by inflaming and clogging the tiny air sacs in the lungs, choking off the body's oxygen supply until it shuts down the organs essential for life. But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems."
But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems. That development has complicated the treatment of the most severe cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, and makes the course of recovery less certain, they said.
The prevalence of these effects is too great to attribute them solely to the “cytokine storm,” a powerful immune-system response that attacks the body, causing severe damage, doctors and researchers said.
Almost half the people hospitalized because of covid-19 have blood or protein in their urine, indicating early damage to their kidneys, said Alan Kliger, a nephrologist at the Yale School of Medicine who co-chairs a task force assisting dialysis patients who have covid-19.
Even more alarming, he added, is early data that shows 14 to 30 percent of intensive-care patients in New York and Wuhan, China — birthplace of the pandemic — losing kidney function and requiring dialysis, or its in-hospital cousin, continuous renal replacement therapy. New York intensive care units are treating so much kidney failure, he said, they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country. They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver continuous renal therapy, he said.
“That’s a huge number of people who have this problem. That’s new to me,” Kliger said. “I think it’s very possible that the virus attaches to the kidney cells and attacks them.”
But in medicine, logical inferences often do not prove true when research is conducted. Everyone interviewed for this story stressed that with the pandemic still raging, they are speculating with much less data than is normally needed to reach solid clinical conclusions.
Many other possible causes for organ and tissue damage must be investigated, they said, including respiratory distress, the medications patients received, high fever, the stress of hospitalization in an ICU and the now well-described impact of cytokine storms.
Still, when researchers in Wuhan conducted autopsies on people who died of covid-19, they found that nine of 26 had acute kidney injuries and that seven had particles of the coronavirus in their kidneys, according to a paper by the Wuhan scientists published April 9 in the medical journal Kidney International.
“It does raise the very clear suspicion that at least a part of the acute kidney injury that we’re seeing is resulting from direct viral involvement of the kidney, which is distinct from what was seen in the SARS outbreak in 2002,” said Paul M. Palevsky, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine nephrologist and president-elect of the National Kidney Foundation.
One New York hospital recently had 51 ICU patients who needed 24-hour kidney treatment but had just 39 machines to do it, he said. The hospital had to ration the care, keeping each patient on the therapy less than 24 hours a day, he said.
The virus also may be damaging the heart. Clinicians in China and New York have reported myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and, more dangerous, irregular heart rhythms that can lead to cardiac arrest in covid-19 patients.
“They seem to be doing really well as far as respiratory status goes, and then suddenly they develop a cardiac issue that seems out of proportion to their respiratory issues,” said Mitchell Elkind, a Columbia University neurologist and president-elect of the American Heart Association. “This seems to be out of proportion to their lung disease, which makes people wonder about that direct effect.”
One review of severely ill patients in China found that about 40 percent suffered arrhythmias and 20 percent had some form of cardiac injury, Elkind said. “There is some concern that some of it may be due to direct influence of the virus,” he said.
The new virus enters the cells of people who are infected by latching onto the ACE2 receptor on cell surfaces. It unquestionably attacks the cells in the respiratory tract, but there is increasing suspicion that it is using the same doorway to enter other cells. The gastrointestinal tract, for instance, contains 100 times more of these receptors than other parts of the body, and its surface area is enormous.
“If you unfurl it, it’s like a tennis court of surface area — this tremendous area for the virus to invade and replicate itself,” said Brennan Spiegel, co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
In a subset of covid-19 cases, researchers have found, the immune system battling the infection goes into hyperdrive. The uncontrolled response leads to the release of a flood of substances called cytokines that, in excess, can result in damage to multiple organs. In some severely ill covid-19 patients, doctors have found high levels of a pro-inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-6, known by the medical shorthand IL-6.
The unfettered response, also called “cytokine release syndrome,” has long been recognized in other patients, including those with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or in cancer patients undergoing certain immunotherapies.
For covid-19 patients, cytokine storms are a major reason that some require intensive care and ventilation, said Jeffrey S. Weber, deputy director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center.
“When your cytokines are systemically out of control, bad stuff happens,” he said. “It can be a complete disaster.” It isn’t clear why cytokine storms occur in some patients and not others, though genetic factors may play a role, some doctors say.
To treat cytokine storms, some doctors are using anti-IL-6 drugs such as tocilizumab, which is approved for cancer patients who develop cytokine storms as a result of immunotherapy.
Another odd, and now well-known, symptom of covid-19 is loss of smell and taste. Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, said studies of patients in Italy and elsewhere have shown that some lose their sense of smell before they show signs of being sick.
“The coronavirus can actually attack and invade olfactory nerve endings,” Hopkins said. When these aroma-detecting fibers are disrupted, they can’t send odors to the brain.
Anosmia — the medical term for the inability to smell — was not initially recognized as a symptom of covid-19, Hopkins said. Doctors were so overwhelmed by patients with severe respiratory problems, she said, that “they didn’t ask the question.”
But subsequent data from a symptom-tracking app has shown that 60 percent of people later diagnosed with covid-19 reported losing their senses of smell and taste. About a quarter of participants experienced anosmia before developing other symptoms, suggesting it can be an early warning sign of infection.
Intriguingly, Hopkins said, people who lose their sense of smell don’t seem to develop the same severe respiratory problems that have made covid-19 so deadly. But a very small number of patients have experienced confusion, low blood oxygen levels and even lost consciousness — a sign that the virus may have traveled along their olfactory nerve endings straight to the central nervous system.
“Why you get this different expression in different people, nobody knows,” she said.
There are also reports that covid-19 can turn people’s eyes red, causing pinkeye, or conjunctivitis, in some patients. One study of 38 hospitalized patients in Hubei province, China, found that a third had pinkeye.
But like many of the non-respiratory effects of the virus, this symptom may be relatively uncommon — and may develop only in people already severely ill. The fact that the virus has been found in the mucus membrane that covers the eye in a small number of patients, however, does suggest that the eye could be an entryway for the virus — and is one reason that face shields and goggles are being used to protect health-care workers.
The virus also is having a clear impact on the gastrointestinal tract, causing diarrhea, vomiting and other symptoms. One study found that half of covid-19 patients have gastrointestinal symptoms, and specialists have coined the hashtag #NotJustCough for social media to raise awareness of them.
Studies suggest that patients with digestive symptoms will also develop a cough, but one may occur days before the other.
“The question is, is it kind of behaving like a hybrid of different viruses?” Spiegel said. “What we’re learning is, it seems anyway, that this virus homes in on more than one organ system.”
Reports also indicate that the virus can attack the liver. A 59-year-old woman in Long Island came to the hospital with dark urine, which was ultimately found to be caused by acute hepatitis. After she developed a cough, physicians attributed the liver damage to a covid-19 infection.
Spiegel said he has seen more such reports every day, including one from China on five patients with acute viral hepatitis.
A particular danger of the virus appears to be its tendency to produce blood clots in the veins of the legs and other vessels, which can break off, travel to the lung and cause death by a condition known as pulmonary embolism.
An examination of 81 patients hospitalized with pneumonia caused by covid-19 in Wuhan found that 20 had such events and that eight of them died. The peer-reviewed data was published online April 9 in the Journal of Thrombosis and Hemostasis.
Across New York City, blood thinners are being used with covid-19 patients much more than expected, said Sanjum Sethi, an interventional cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center.
“We’re just seeing so many of these events that we have to investigate further,” he said.
Jonathan Bowen, a 39 year-old cook, was laid off from his job at a Taqueria Restaurant in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Jonathan Bowen)
Where You're Out of Work Makes All the Difference in the World
Clio Chang, VICE
Excerpt: "Jonathan lost his job in America. Daniel isn't working in Germany. Their governments are handling things completely differently."
Clio Chang, VICE
Excerpt: "Jonathan lost his job in America. Daniel isn't working in Germany. Their governments are handling things completely differently."
Jonathan lost his job in America. Daniel isn't working in Germany. Their governments are handling things completely differently.
onathan Bowen calls the Oregon unemployment office hundreds of times a day. Or at least he has since March 21, when he first applied online after losing his job as a cook at a small taqueria. Bowen was told then that his claim wasn’t valid and that he had to call the office, so he did. Every week, he still puts in his claims, in order to create a record of how long he’s been unemployed. One day, the 38-year-old estimated that he called the office over 1,000 times.
“It’s complete insanity. I can’t get paid until I talk to somebody there,” Bowen told VICE.
A few weeks before Bowen lost his job, Daniel Flohr, a 33-year-old part-time flight attendant, was sent home from work. Flohr lives more than 5,000 miles away from Portland, in an apartment an hour outside of Frankfurt, Germany, and has been working as a flight attendant for more than ten years. Because of the existing contract that was negotiated between his company and his works council, Flohr’s basic salary is still being paid in full. At the end of April, he expects for his pay to go down to 90 percent of his salary, with most of that coming through Kurzarbeit, Germany’s short-term work scheme.
Flohr, who is the chairman of his union, calculated his monthly budget—including rent, car payments, and grocery bills—and said that the subsidies he’s getting should cover those costs. While he’s worried about what will happen in the long term, for now, Flohr says his basic needs are met. “I’m very grateful to have these security systems in place,” Flohr told VICE.
Across the world, the coronavirus pandemic has ground the economy to a halt. Governments have issued necessary shelter-in-place orders in an attempt to keep the virus from overwhelming their populations, which means that millions of people are suddenly out of work through no fault of their own. But depending on how their country is handling the situation, the first month of this historic recession has gone drastically different for different workers. The variation is not just due to countries’ immediate responses, but also because of policies like health care that they already had in place. Bowen has no idea how he’ll pay any of his bills, including for a coronavirus-related doctors’ appointment. Flohr, on the other hand, feels relatively secure for now.
Flohr and Bowen work in different industries and would face different situations even if they lived in the same country. Airlines are one of the few industries in America that secured their own bailout to pay employees. And the low-income service sector in Germany is not as well-protected as larger industries, like airlines and manufacturing.
But for so many different types of workers in the United States, the process of applying for unemployment over the last month has been an unmitigated disaster. In the last month, an unprecedented 22 million people were laid off and applied for unemployment insurance. To send relief to those people, Congress passed the CARES Act, which, among its many giveaways for the wealthy, also includes an extra $600 per week in unemployment benefits and a one-time $1,200 check for adults, with an additional $500 for their children—all of which could add up to a generous subsidy. The bill also created a Paycheck Protection Program, which offers loans to small businesses that can be forgiven if companies spend at least 75 percent of that money to pay their workers.
All of this only helps if people are able to actually get their benefits. Before everything fell apart, Bowen worked 30 hours a week, at a job he enjoyed, and made enough for him and his 6-year-old son to get by in the two-bedroom house they rented. Bowen even saved a little, too. But now while they wait for unemployment to come in, he and his son have been surviving on the $200 per month he gets in food stamps and $50 that his mother lent him. “Fifty dollars feels like so much money now,” Bowen laughed. The little savings he had went towards his April rent and Bowen has already told his landlord that he’s planning to use his stimulus check—whenever it comes in—to cover May rent. He’s been paying his utility bills by washing his landlord’s car.
It’s clear that the current bureaucracy in the United States is unable to handle the overwhelming influx of people in need—earlier this month, VICE tried to get through to unemployment offices in all 50 states, and only two states picked up. In many cases, even the benefits that do exist aren’t necessarily enough. The Paycheck Protection Program’s funds ran out last week and most workers that VICE talked to this month said that the $1,200 stimulus checks will barely cover their expenses. Bowen expects to receive $1,700 in total with his son, which he said will essentially cover one month of rent and his car payment.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if this goes into June,” Bowen said. “I might try to literally hit up my friends and my community and say basically that I’ll work for money and food. Beyond that, I got nothing.”
During economic downturns, Germany relies on its Kurzarbeit policy. Through this program, businesses apply for short-term work subsidies, in lieu of laying off their employees. The government will then pay 60 percent of an employees’ salary to keep them afloat. This keeps workers on payroll with their company and allows them to preserve their official relationships with their employers.
“In principle, once the pandemic is more or less under control, there’s no reason why the [German] economy should not restart in a moment's notice,” Ruediger Bachmann, a German-American professor of macroeconomics at the University of Notre Dame, said to VICE. He pointed out that it wasn’t just that workers got their pay subsidized, but that the German government also provides assistance for firms’ other costs to help keep them going.
Flohr said he expects to receive 60 percent of his salary from Kurzarbeit, with his company contributing an extra 30 percent, which is a result of an agreement with his works council. Because all of this is administered through his company’s existing payroll system, Flohr won’t miss a paycheck. This is in stark contrast to what Bowen is currently experiencing, as he waits to get through to the unemployment office so he can receive an enhanced $971-per-week unemployment benefit. Since the German system is fairly transparent, people know exactly how much money they’ll be getting, and are able to budget appropriately.
“It takes away the economic insecurity that people have in this situation,” Anke Hassel, a professor of public policy at the Hertie School in Berlin, told VICE. “The administration is pretty clear for everyone concerned. Companies know how to do it, the administrators know how to do it, and the workers know how to do it.”
By comparison, many people in the United States who might be newly eligible for unemployment insurance, or have never applied before, now have to navigate an archaic system that isn’t built to process the flood of claims.
The German system is not perfect. Hassel pointed out that workers in the low-paid service sector verus, say, the manufacturing sector in Germany might differ in how much their company might top off the wage subsidy. A restaurant worker might only get 60 percent of their wages, while an auto worker might get closer to 100 percent. Kurzarbeit also favors full-time workers over others, who are likely in poorer and more precarious situations in the first place. For example, the program doesn’t cover the self-employed, which is why Berlin’s city government sent out 5,000-euro checks to people who fell in that category.
The system is being tested, as an unprecedented 650,000 companies have already applied for Kurzarbeit. But while there are sure to be bottlenecks, one advantage is that most of the bureaucracy was already in place, meaning Germany could more quickly respond to an unexpected crisis. “From a practical point of view, we didn't need to make it up on the fly,” Bachmann said.
After Germany’s relatively rapid recovery from the 2008 financial crash, different variations of Kurzarbeit-like policies were adopted by other countries in Europe. During this recession, countries like the U.K. and Denmark introduced new wage subsidy programs, covering 80 percent and 75 percent of a workers’ salary, respectively. On Friday, Senators Bernie Sanders, Mark Warner, Doug Jones, and Richard Blumenthal revealed a new plan, similar to one introduced in the House by Pramila Jayapal, that would cover up to $90,000 of a laid off or furloughed worker's payroll costs if a business can show it has lost at least 20 percent revenue. The expansive proposal, which would be delivered through the Treasury Department and the IRS, is more in line with what European countries are doing.
The United States’ Paycheck Protection Program is also a somewhat similar scheme, although it’s limited to small businesses and, as previously noted, the program received far from enough funding, running out last week. It’s also somewhat in contradiction with the country’s existing reliance on unemployment insurance—for many firms and workers, it’s difficult to calculate whether they would get more from being laid off and applying for unemployment or from getting their paycheck subsidized under this new system. Hassel pointed out that if someone does get laid off in Germany, they would still get the same 60 percent of their salary from unemployment insurance.
And then there is one stress that is uniquely American: the issue of health care. Because of our country’s dependence on employer-sponsored health insurance, many people who lose their jobs are also losing their insurance. Plus, there are nearly 30 million people who didn’t have insurance in the first place, all of whom are now living through a pandemic with a fraught relationship with the country’s wildly unaffordable medical system.
Bowen, who has been uninsured for about a year, said he is almost certain he was experiencing COVID-19 symptoms two weeks ago. He couldn’t get off the couch without feeling out of breath and started seeing spots in his vision. “It was so intense,” Bowen said. He didn’t want to go to a doctor out of fear of what it might cost, but his mother and friend finally convinced him to make an appointment with the local research hospital. He was seen by a doctor over video and the bill came in later at $400. Bowen said he can’t see himself paying that anytime soon.
Flohr, on the other hand, is insured and said if he felt sick, he would have no hesitation about consulting his doctor immediately. Even if he were laid off, he said he would still be covered by the government—in Germany, it’s mandatory for everyone to have health insurance. As Flohr put it, “Nobody ever asks themselves in Germany, ‘Can I go to the doctor or not?’”
Countries like Germany won’t be able to subsidize employees indefinitely. And it’s unclear what this recession might mean for different countries’ economies in the long run. But in the short-term, more people seem to be getting what they need to cover their basics and in theory, they’ll be able to return right to work once things open up again.
Meanwhile, in the United States, millions of worker-employer relationships are going to be completely severed. Even if companies do rehire workers, they’ll have to go through the entire employment process all over again.
Flohr said that he and his coworkers are definitely worried. “As an airline employee, if you see planes on the ground, it’s never good,” he said. If the recession stretches too long, Flohr is afraid that they will see layoffs too. But for now, he’s pretty certain he will resume his job.
Bowen thinks he’ll be hired back again as well, but he’s nervous that the restaurant might shut down completely. More imminently, he’s worried about all the unpaid bills adding up and pushing him further into debt. He points out that, like many Americans, he’s been in a precarious balancing act for years. It wouldn’t have taken much to throw his financial life off the rails, but this is one of the worst possible scenarios.
“When life goes back to normal, I’m going to be at the lowest rung of the ladder,” Bowen said. “I’m not going to have anything, and I’m going to be so behind on all my bills. It’s just going to be an avalanche.”
In this Nov 24, 2009 file photo, a University of Phoenix billboard is shown in Chandler, Ariz. (photo: AP)
While Other Colleges Struggle, For-Profits Hope for Revival
Collin Binkley, Associated Press
Binkley writes: "Some of the nation's largest for-profit colleges are ramping up advertising, hiring recruiters and offering discounts for online classes as they predict the coronavirus pandemic will push unemployed workers back to school, helping revive the industry."
READ MORE
Collin Binkley, Associated Press
Binkley writes: "Some of the nation's largest for-profit colleges are ramping up advertising, hiring recruiters and offering discounts for online classes as they predict the coronavirus pandemic will push unemployed workers back to school, helping revive the industry."
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A woman walks past damaged buildings with her child in the rebel-held Idlib city, Syria April 19, 2020. (photo: Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)
Some Syrians Prefer Ruined Homes to Crowded Camps
Khalil Ashawi, Reuters
Ashawi writes: "Taher al-Matar's home in northwest Syria is in ruins but he has gone back to live there anyway, driven by dire conditions in camps for displaced people, where he fears any outbreak of the coronavirus would be devastating."
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Khalil Ashawi, Reuters
Ashawi writes: "Taher al-Matar's home in northwest Syria is in ruins but he has gone back to live there anyway, driven by dire conditions in camps for displaced people, where he fears any outbreak of the coronavirus would be devastating."
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A leatherback turtle in Florida. (photo: Mark Conlin/Getty Images)
Florida: Endangered Sea Turtles Thriving Thanks to Covid-19 Restrictions
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "Marine life researchers in Florida say that coronavirus restrictions keeping humans and harmful waste off beaches are having a beneficial effect on the numbers of endangered leatherback sea turtles in the state."
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Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "Marine life researchers in Florida say that coronavirus restrictions keeping humans and harmful waste off beaches are having a beneficial effect on the numbers of endangered leatherback sea turtles in the state."
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