Walgreens: Looting Cost $75 million — as reported by Bloomberg News
Walgreens: Looting Cost Five One-hundredths of 1 percent of 2019 Revenue or One-tenth of One Percent of Assets — the way we “communists” (otherwise known as Democratic voters) might describe it. Poor babies are bleeding to death.
from the BVI News < https://bvinews.com/three-years-later-loose-mongoose-re-opens-in-trellis-bay/ >
Three years later |
Loose Mongoose re-opens in Trellis Bay
on July 10, 2020 at 8:07 AM /
Amid a global pandemic and roughly three years after it was severely impacted by the weather events of 2017, local hot spot De Loose Mongoose has re-opened with improvements in Trellis Bay on Beef Island.
Human Resources Manager at Loose Mongoose Rochelle Lawrence told BVI News on Thursday that patrons can expect the same great food and a revamped ambience with added amenities.
“We have completely renovated the property, and I think it is about six times the size it was before. We were just left with the original structure, which was a one storey building. Everything else was completely gone,” she said referring to the hurricane damage to the facility.
“We now offer the amenities of a restaurant, an outside bar, an inside lounge, the upstairs is an open-top bar, we also have a boutique and a coffee shop. In addition to that, we will also have docks that we will be serving our marine customers with fuel. So everything that you will need in this little area,” she added.
Lawrence said that after a few unavoidable delays, the structure took roughly eight to nine months to complete and will officially re-open this coming Sunday.
“We are going to be full-blown open,” she stated, adding that they have been partially opened since last Tuesday.
In the meantime, Lawerence said the establishment offers employment to 14 staff, and that figure is expected to increase soon.
“Things are still a little bit slow coming out of the pandemic and maintaining social distancing has been quite a bit of struggle for us, so we have a bit of a skeletal staff. But we do wish to increase it very soon. We used quite a bit of staff that we had from before too,” she said.
Food, service
Meanwhile, well-known executive chef Neil Cline said patrons can expect to be delighted with their food offerings.
He said the restaurant has had “great reviews” on its cuisine so far.
“We are trying our Caribbean fusion. We are trying to offer a service to our people that is comfortable and a taste of what the BVI has to offer. It was a hefty investment, but it was an investment that was worthwhile. It will be even more worthwhile to see our people supporting,” he stated.
Spend more time studying ducks than funnies
Bruce
From The Washington Post — free from the paywall . . .
World
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected global poverty?
By
Siobhán O’Grady
July 3, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
The novel coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, upending entire industries and leaving scores of people around the world without work, child care and — in many places — enough food on their tables.
The economic upheaval has exposed and intensified deep-seated inequity, thrusting many of the world’s most vulnerable people into more precarious situations and pushing others into poverty. More than 10 million cases of the virus have been confirmed globally, but even in places where the official case count remains low, the ripple effects of the economic crisis have left many families on shaky financial footing.
Previous economic crises have taken devastating tolls. During the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, poverty increased in some countries and the rate of poverty reduction slowed in others. Countries suffered persistent losses in output. And researchers documented close associations between spikes in unemployment and excess mortality.
The pandemic is an external factor, not directly comparable to the problems within financial markets that led to the Great Recession. But regardless of cause, economic downturns affect human health and well-being, all the more so when a public health crisis is the cause of the downturn in the first place.
Here’s what we know about how international economic turmoil is playing out and what may come next.
What do economic forecasts tell us?
In April, the International Monetary Fund projected that the global economy would experience a 3 percent downturn in 2020, its sharpest contraction since the Great Depression. Last week, the IMF revised those forecasts, saying that the global recession will be far worse than originally thought. New projections suggest output will drop by 4.9 percent.
Justin Sandefur, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post that the projections can only tell part of the story.
“We are still mostly relying on forecasts of what’s happening, not actual numbers,” he said.
Some new data is trickling in via phone surveys, which allow interviewers to ask questions about how individual households are coping and can offer a better sense of how the economic crisis is playing out on the ground.
So far, evidence in some places suggests the impact has been “really severe,” Sandefur said. “But we don’t yet have a systematic picture of that. It’s still sort of just a collage of small pieces.”
It may take several years, he said, to gain a full understanding.
How is the economic turmoil affecting global hunger?
The World Food Program announced Monday that it will dramatically escalate its food assistance to serve up to 138 million people this year as more people go hungry due to lockdowns and job losses during the pandemic. That marks the highest number of people that WFP, the United Nations’ hunger relief arm, has ever served in a single year since its inception in 1961.
“It’s making the poorest poorer and the hungriest hungrier,” Steve Taravella, senior spokesman at WFP, said of the pandemic. “A lot of what we’re talking about really is the impact of the socioeconomic fallout from the virus more than the health impact.”
Hunger could be more deadly than coronavirus in poorer countries
For people facing food insecurity, the choice to stay home without money or food may feel more dangerous than the risk of the virus. David Beasley, WFP’s executive director, said in April that the world “could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months.”
Countries that were already facing food insecurity before the pandemic began are particularly at risk for being pushed over the brink.
WFP has not yet seen evidence that famine is happening, Taravella said this week, but he added that the organization fears “that if we don’t receive the resources to help meet this dramatic need very quickly, we could see famine in multiple countries.”
How does economic instability affect women and girls?
Experts have warned that globally, women and girls often bear the brunt of economic downturns, which can impact schooling, health and career opportunities.
By late March, more than 1.5 billion children had their schooling disrupted due to the pandemic, and a report in April from the Malala Fund projected that the pandemic will terminate or seriously delay secondary schooling for 10 million girls. Case studies from the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa found that during that deadly outbreak, large numbers of girls quit school and never returned.
When countries started to lock shut down, women’s health organizations warned that restrictions on movement could limit women’s ability to access lifesaving medical care and contraceptives, which could affect their ability to plan their families and control their finances. Some groups estimated that millions of women would experience unplanned pregnancy due to the effects of the shutdown.
Nahla Valji, who serves as senior gender adviser to António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, told the New York Times in May that past crises show that although economic upheaval can affect anyone, it is women who are less likely to bounce back from fiscal damage wrought during a crisis. Globally, women perform most of the world’s unpaid labor. And when women and girls are forced out of school early or experience unplanned pregnancy, it can have long-term effects on their finances.
Globally, “women earn less, they save less, they’re more likely to be in precarious jobs with little security or protections if they do work, or in the informal sector, with no protections at all,” Valji told the Times. “And that means that they have less buffer to economic shocks, such as the ones we are experiencing.”
Stay safe and informed with our free Coronavirus Updates newsletter
How do travel restrictions and lockdowns affect the global economy?
In March, as the coronavirus spread, airlines started cutting flights and furloughing staff. Some shut down entirely. Border restrictions put in place to keep people from spreading the virus meant even travel between many neighboring countries became impossible.
Now, experts are trying to measure the full impact tourism losses will have on the global economy.
On Wednesday, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD) warned that the global tourism industry is on track to lose at least $1.2 trillion due to pandemic-related disruptions. If travel continues to be affected for an entire year, the losses could reach $3.3 trillion.
Millions of jobs rely on tourism, which connects to sectors including food and entertainment. UNCTD warned that because so many women work within the tourism industry, many in informal jobs, as well as in service jobs tied to related industries, they are at particular risk of losing work due to the impact of shutdowns.
Countries that rely on tourism for crucial income are at serious risk of fiscal trouble. Jamaica, for example, looks set to lose 11 percent of its gross domestic product from losses in the tourism industry, even in the best-case scenario, UNCTD said in its report. Thailand would lose 9 percent.
“The global contraction in tourism arrivals could have devastating economic consequences as some developing countries are highly dependent on tourism,” the report said. “In some countries, such as several small island developing states, tourism accounts for more than half of the GDP.”
The jobs will affect workers in formal and informal sectors, and the lost wages could push workers who previously enjoyed steady work into dangerous financial uncertainty.
Lockdowns can also take a disproportionate toll on the most vulnerable. Strict shutdowns “carry a much higher human price in the developing world,” where the absence of social safety nets can make survival without work nearly impossible, economist Julian C. Jamison said in an essay published by The Washington Post.
From the Capital Gazette, p 1, 26 June 2020
Co-founder of ReOpen Maryland says he has COVID-19, but won’t help contact tracing efforts
Photo caption: Tim Walters, chair of Reopen Maryland, speaks at the Reopen Howard County rally beginning at the Howard County courthouse and ending at the bottom of Main Street in Ellicott City. Walters has said he has tested positive for coronavirus. (Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun)
A co-founder of the ReOpen Maryland movement has said on social media that he tested positive for coronavirus this week but won’t work with public health officials trying to track the spread of the pandemic.
Tim Walters, a two-time Republican candidate for the General Assembly from Linthicum, said in a series of Facebook videos starting Tuesday that he has come down with COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
“I was diagnosed yesterday at the ER with COVID-19 and here I am months after not wearing a mask at rallies, churches and so on and so it’s funny how capricious this thing is,” he said.
Walters helped organize ReOpen Maryland protests in Annapolis, on the Eastern Shore and elsewhere in Maryland to challenge state and local measures put in place by Gov. Larry Hogan to slow the spread of the virus.
The group describes itself as pursuing “peaceful, law-abiding advocacy for public health measures that respect Marylanders’ civil rights, economic well-being and educational access.”
In the first of what Walters described as a series of planned daily videos about his illness, he described himself as a 53-year-old man with diabetes who hasn’t maintained good health habits since he left the Navy.
He said he has had a dry cough since March, that in recent days has worsened and expanded to include a headache, fever and loss of focus in one eye.
Walters urged people who have come in contact with him in the past two weeks to pay attention to the symptoms he described but he said he would not provide any information to public health officials trying to trace the spread of the disease.
Anne Arundel County Health Office Nilesh Kalyanaraman has described contact tracing as the most effective tool public health officials have in slowing the spread of the virus.
By retracing the steps of people who are confirmed positive, contact tracing becomes key for containing the deadly coronavirus’ spread and lowering hospitalization rates. It’s a routine procedure that epidemiologists and infectious disease detectives have done for decades, but tracking coronavirus requires an unprecedented intensity compared with other infectious diseases.
The county did not see a spike in positive test results after protests Walters helped run in Annapolis this spring, in spite of state and local restrictions on the size of gatherings. Kalyanaraman said they were too small to have much of an impact on the spread of the virus.
Anne Arundel County was among the first counties in Maryland to establish a robust tracking system. The state of Maryland has also set up a contact tracing program.
Walters was having none of it.
“I will not share anybody’s information with the government. I will not do it,” he said.
In a second video posted Wednesday, Walters said he had been contacted by the state contact tracing team and decided to have his wife and members of his family tested.
Anne Arundel County added 29 coronavirus cases but no additional deaths Thursday, state health data shows, as the county continues to show a downward trend in cases. Maryland added 440 new coronavirus cases and 23 deaths.
Numbers released Thursday morning show the county now has 4,985 confirmed cases and 193 deaths. An additional nine people may have died from the disease, but a lab test was never performed.
Across Maryland, at least 603,597 tests have been conducted, an increase of more than 11,000 in the past 24 hours, bringing the statewide rate of positive cases to 5.05%. Anne Arundel’s rate of positive cases is 3.88%.
Statewide, 511 people are currently hospitalized, with 209 patients in the ICU and 302 patients in acute care.
Walters frequently posts videos on social media, often daily worship commentary based on his reading of the Bible.
Even though he said he would not work with state or county public health officials, he urged those who follow him to speak with their doctors if they have symptoms similar to his: a dry cough, severe headache and fever.
‘I just want to educate people,” Walters said. “Don’t live in fear, chances are that everyone is going to get this.”
Another great example of how unbridled capitalism serves the public interest — thank you Mr Freeman for saving us.
Heath Freeman says he wants to save local news. Reporters call him a ‘vampire.’
How a former Duke place kicker took control of one of the biggest newspaper groups in America — and what it means for democracy.
. . . otherwise we wouldn’t pay them so much, would we?
Actually sounds like a great deal. From your Washington Post, March 18 2020: More lifesaving ventilators are available. Hospitals can’t afford them. Typically $25,000 to $50,000 each.
|
On Friday, April 10, 2020, 11:43:58 AM EDT, Bruce G. Potter <bpotter@irf.org> wrote:
The Washington Post, 9 April 2020, page A19,
”U. S. to Pay GM $490 million for 30,000 Ventilators.”
So the World’s Greatest Negotiator was able to get the price down to $16,333.33 apiece???
My grand-niece Courtney could’ve gotten them delivered to your door for $16,000, with an extra SUP board thrown in for her.
And if niece Janie led the negotiation, the price would’ve been $12,000 with individualized paint jobs to order.
And Jennifer would have gotten the ventilators donated for free, as long as they had a Cadillac hood ornament.
The guy’s a piker.
The Washington Post, 9 April 2020, page A19,
”U. S. to Pay GM $490 million for 30,000 Ventilators.”
So the World’s Greatest Negotiator was able to get the price down to $16,333.33 apiece???
My grand-niece Courtney could’ve gotten them delivered to your door for $16,000, with an extra SUP board thrown in for her.
And if niece Janie led the negotiation, the price would’ve been $12,000 with individualized paint jobs to order.
And Jennifer would have gotten the ventilators donated for free, as long as they had a Cadillac hood ornament.
The guy’s a piker.
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