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A conference to discuss the impact of coronavirus on business in the US has been cancelled - because of a sudden rise in infections in New York. The roundtable, called Doing Business Under Coronavirus, was canned after 173 cases of the infection were confirmed in the east coast city, where the conference was supposed to be held on Friday. The Council on Foreign Relations organised the event to help support the businesses facing increased pressure from the impact of Covid-19. Other conferences, scheduled from March 11 to April 3, also had to be scrapped - including roundtables in New York...

Two and a half weeks after Bernie Sanders slammed Michael Bloomberg for trying to "buy this election," the former New York City mayor dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, having spent $570 million of his own money to win 61 delegates. Tom Steyer, the other billionaire in the race, did even worse, abandoning his campaign after spending more than $250 million and earning zero delegates. Those spectacular failures should give pause to the politicians and activists who argue that money poses a grave threat to democracy -- so grave that the Constitution must be amended to...

Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role. A pair of 500-foot smokestacks rise from a natural-gas power plant on the harbor of Moss Landing, California, casting an industrial pall over the pretty seaside town. If state regulators sign off, however, it could be the site of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery project by late 2020, helping to balance fluctuating wind and solar energy on the California grid. The 300-megawatt facility is one of four giant lithium-ion storage projects that...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem (Music in The Bible) Psalms Psalm 121 A song of ascents. 1 I lift up my eyes to the mountains—     where does my help come from? 2 My help comes from the Lord,     the Maker of heaven and earth. 3 He will not let your foot slip—     he who watches over you will not slumber; 4 indeed, he who watches over Israel     will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord watches over you—     the Lord is your shade at your right hand; 6 the sun will not harm you by day,     nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord will...

A little earlier today, my colleague Bonchie posted on Joe Biden losing his sh** at an autoworker. Calculated anger is something that most candidates for president have engaged in at one time or another. But with Biden, this incident is simply the latest example in a rapidly expanding catalog of statements and behaviors that have only one unifying explanation: his actual, medical dementia is rather obviously in full bloom. It has not gone unnoticed. Via Politico: Some major Sanders allies have made the same observation:

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Japan shed a little bit of history this week as the last of the country’s RF-4E/J Phantom II reconnaissance jets, part of a fleet that has served for more than 50 years, flew for the last time. The last six recon Phantoms flew for the last time on March 9, and the country will retire its entire Phantom fleet by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Tokyo is pursuing the development of a new fighter jet it will design with help from the U.S.. The six jets, part of the 501 Hikotai squadron, were RF-4 photoreconnaissance variants of the iconic...

RIVER VALE, NJ — A River Vale 7-Eleven owner was arrested Tuesday after she allegedly sold sanitzer that burned children. Manisha Bharade was hit with four counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Four boys were burned. One mother shared pictures of her son on social media as a warning to parents. Bharade allegedly mixed commercially available foaming sanitizer, which was not meant for resale, and water. Fourteen bottles were sold. Five bottles were turned over to police. Officers said nine bottles are unaccounted for. Many have been making their own version of sanitzer amid coronavirus-related shortages.

... State health officials joined Chu in asking the CDC and Food and Drug Administration to waive privacy rules and allow clinical tests in a research lab, citing the threat of significant loss of life. The CDC and FDA said no. "We felt like we were sitting, waiting for the pandemic to emerge," Chu told the Times. "We could help. We couldn't do anything." They held off for a couple of weeks, but on Feb. 25, Chu and her colleagues "began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval," the Times reports. They found a positive case pretty quickly, and after discussing...

Confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus are swiftly ballooning across the United States, and President Trump's former Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert says time is running out to control the spread. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who is overseeing one of the country's largest clusters, said "if you do the math" there could be 64,000 cases of COVID-19 in the Evergreen State by May, while New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the positive cases in the city are "coming in so intensely now" that public officials are struggling to keep up with them. He said he wasn't in...

The United Nations' weather and climate agency is out with its annual State of the Climate report, and it says "the tell-tale physical signs of climate change" are everywhere. The report documents unprecedented heat waves, fires and floods over the past year, and warns that there is likely more to come. In the report, the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) cited the historic fires in Australia and the Amazon, record-shattering heat waves in Europe, and soaring levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a statement released with the report, the leader of the United Nations calls climate change "the...

The United States has offered to sell Turkey its Patriot missile defence system if Ankara promises not to operate a rival Russian system, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, in what he called a significant softening in Washington's position. Two Turkish officials told Reuters News Agency that Turkey was evaluating the US offer but added that Ankara had not changed its plans for the Russian S-400 systems, which it has said it would start to activate next month. NATO allies Turkey and the US have been at odds over Ankara's purchase last year of the S-400s, which Washington says...

Two state attorneys general ordered a prominent televangelist to stop peddling an alleged coronavirus elixir on his show. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Jim Bakker for misrepresentations about the effectiveness of "Silver Solution" as a treatment for coronavirus. Schmitt's lawsuit came a week after the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a cease-and-desist order to Bakker, ordering him to stop promoting the supplement as a COVID-19 treatment.

I Voted for Warren, My Husband Voted for Sanders, and I Feel Betrayed Voting for a progressive woman felt like a chance so rare that it caused me to fume at my own husband for making a different decision. ELLEN O'CONNELL WHITTET MARCH 10, 2020 Ever since Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, I’ve been mad at my husband. Just a week earlier, two canvassers for Bernie Sanders had shown up at our door with flyers. “We’re Warren people,” my husband told them, something I later joked was the most romantic thing he’d ever said. But in the...

ISTANBUL/ATHENS - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused Greek security forces on Wednesday of behaving like Nazis for using force against migrants trying to cross the border from Turkey into the European Union. Tens of thousands of migrants have been attempting to get into EU member Greece since Turkey said on Feb. 28 it would no longer keep them on its territory as part of a 2016 deal with Brussels in return for European aid for the refugees. Greek security forces have used tear gas and water cannon to stop the migrants. Athens has suspended asylum applications for a month and...

There are 10 new coronavirus cases in New York City, bringing the total to 46, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said Wednesday he is considering canceling the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. “Right now 46 cases, that’s important for sure, but it’s still a city of 8.6 million people,” de Blasio said on PIX 11 morning news Wednesday. The city is “nowhere near” implementing containment zones like the one scheduled to go into effect in New Rochelle, de Blasio said.

Sacramento County health officials on Tuesday focused their coronavirus prevention efforts on an senior living facility, one day after families were notified that a resident of an Elk Grove home had tested positive for the potentially deadly illness. Sacramento County health chief Peter Beilenson said his agency is trying to prevent a repeat of what happened two weeks ago at a nursing home near Seattle, where the virus has caused a reported 15 deaths.. Senior Living Elk Grove tested positive for the new coronavirus, according to an email sent to family members of residents Monday afternoon obtained by The Sacramento Bee. It...

For over eight decades sports fans have dreamt of attending the Masters, golf’s best event held on the sport’s most exclusive grounds, Augusta National in Georgia. Amen Corner. Blooming azaleas. Towering loblolly pines. Pimento cheese sandwiches. Witnessing Tiger Woods march up the hill on No. 18, the way Hogan, Arnie and Jack once did. This is golfing heaven. The problem is getting in. You either need to know someone, get lucky in the low-odds ticket lottery or hit the overheated secondary market where a one-day badge routinely soars over $2,000 and sometimes $3,000. Well, welcome to 2020 and what could...

College sports are a gigantic entertainment business that have nothing to do with the missions of the schools. Frequently, the highest-paid employee of a school is the football or basketball coach, and the athletics budget is hugely subsidized by fees paid by financially strapped students. Players who read and write at a middle-school level (if even that) are recruited to help teams win, but the academic work they do is laughable. Schools rack up big debts trying to win glory on the gridiron or court, even if it means scrimping on faculty salaries and building maintenance. How did this lamentable...

PARIS -- As of this writing, there have been 1,412 confirmed cases of the coronavirus here in France, and 30 people have died from it. In a country where it's customary to spend the first several minutes of each workday air-kissing the cheeks of your colleagues, it's a miracle this virus hasn't KO'd even more people. One reason it hasn't could be a long-festering lack of trust in the French government to manage any situation, which has led to increased self-reliance. According to a poll taken here last year by the newspaper La Tribune, 88 percent of the French admitted...