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In Russia Coronavirus Lockdown, Fears Of A Return To The Bottle
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New top story from Time: Elon Musk Decries ‘Fascist’ Stay-at-Home Orders During Tesla Earnings Call
Elon Musk went on a profane rant during another emotive Tesla Inc. earnings call, excoriating stay-at-home orders that are putting the electric-car maker’s red-hot run at risk.
“This is fascist. This is not democratic, this is not freedom,” the chief executive officer said after reporting Tesla’s first-ever profit to start a year. “Give people back their godd— freedom.”
Tesla is worried about being able to resume production in the San Francisco Bay area, where authorities have extended a stay-home order to the end of May. The Model 3 maker’s only assembly plant in the U.S. still produces the vast majority of the company’s cars and has been idlesince March 23.
Investors shrugged off the outburst, with Tesla shares finishing the late trading session up 8.7%. The company’s third straight quarterly profit and revenue of almost $6 billion beat analysts’ estimates, extending an advance for a stock that’s already the biggest gainer on the Nasdaq 100 Stock Index this year.
“It was vintage Elon. I wish he hadn’t done it,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures, said by phone. “But most investors don’t care. It doesn’t change the reality, which is that Tesla is making meaningful progress toward being a major player in the auto industry.”
The stock surge Musk, 48, has engineered by producing and delivering more cars than expected early this year has positioned him to receive the first set of stock options from a pay package that set moonshot goals two years ago.
By continuing to build up the shares, bulls are overlooking uncertainty about how soon the company will be able to resume production at its sole U.S. vehicle-assembly plant in Fremont, California, or how eager consumers will be to purchase Tesla cars once health orders are loosened and lifted.
“We are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay area, and that should be identified as a serious risk,” Musk told an analyst. He said shelter-in-place orders are “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights” and “breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong.”
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies,” Musk added. “While Tesla will weather the storm, there are many small companies that will not. Everything people have worked for their whole life is being destroyed in real time, and we have many suppliers that are having super-hard times, especially the small ones. It’s causing a lot of strife to a lot of people.”
During the debut quarter for the new Model Y crossover, automotive gross margin improved to 25.5%, the highest in a year and a half.
While Tesla stopped short of restating its January forecast for deliveries to “comfortably” exceed 500,000 vehicles this year, the company said it believes it can achieve industry-leading operating margins and profitability.
“Gross margin was mostly the thing that sticks out to me on the positive side,” Ben Kallo, an analyst at Robert W. Baird with the equivalent of a hold rating on Tesla, said by phone. “On the question-mark side, I have to wonder why they didn’t talk about demand at all.”
Tesla managed to build about 14,000 more vehicles than it handed over to customers in the quarter, despite being forced to suspend production at its factory in California late last month. Inventory build-up led the company to burn through about $895 million in cash during the period. Tesla still ended March with $8.1 billion on its balance sheet after raising money through a stock offering in February.
Musk will postpone initial deliveries of Tesla’s Semi truck again to 2021 — roughly two years later than initially planned — as the company prioritizes starting output of the Model Y crossover in Shanghai and building a factory in Germany from which it aims to begin shipping cars in the middle of next year.
“Tesla investors are looking past the June quarter,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst who rates the stock a hold, said by phone. “The bulls could take this and run.”
New top story from Time: Why We Still Don’t Know Which Businesses Are Getting Coronavirus Relief
When the government’s wildly popular program to cover small businesses’ overhead costs during the coronavirus pandemic came back online on Monday, thousands of Main Street businesses were lined up for the 10:30 a.m. starting pistol.
By 1 p.m. on Tuesday, banks had shoveled $52 billion dollars in federally backed small business loans out the door. By the close of business on Wednesday, more than $90 billion had been doled out. Struggling companies’ intense need for capital has had bankers across the country working around the clock to process loan applicants’ paperwork — and fighting government servers that keep crashing under the demand.
The small-business program, branded the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), is one of the biggest cash injections to the U.S. economy in history. The program’s first $349 billion in funding ran out in 14 days, and the second tranche of $310 billion, approved last week, is on track to do the same. The money is being loaned out by 5,300 separate banks without much direction from Washington other than to get the cash moving.
And yet as of today, the taxpayers footing the historic tab have no way of knowing who is getting the cash. Though some large firms that were recipients have been identified by their Securities and Exchange Commission filings — and shamed or bullied into giving back their loan money — the government body overseeing the enormous fund has yet to release any comprehensive list of beneficiaries. Though now-dated information is available on what sectors and states were the program’s biggest winners during the first funding round, it may be months before any complete public accounting takes place for who got what cash and to what end.
“We are missing a critical moment. All this money is going out the door,” says Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s a really live question what oversight is being done at this moment.”
The Paycheck Protection Program offers eligible businesses with fewer than 500 employees, non-profits and self-employed individuals loans from private lenders that will be forgiven if the firms keep their payrolls steady. In other words, companies can carry unneeded workers for free, a measure aimed at stopping the spiraling unemployment numbers of 26 million and counting.
The loans that went out under the program’s first pot of money came under fire for excluding smaller banks and minority communities. When Congress restocked the fund last week, those concerns yielded carve-outs to help smaller banks participate and offset potential favoritism of banks toward bigger, better-resourced customers. On Wednesday, the program also announced that only banks with assets of less than $1 billion could submit after-hours paperwork between 4 p.m. and midnight, giving smaller banks another advantage and the computer servers a break.
But without any real-time visibility into who is getting the funding, it is impossible to know whether the second tranche of money is avoiding the pitfalls of the first. Immediate disclosures of how the money is being spent was not part of either deal Congress struck for the first or second round of spending. The government, after all, had plenty on its plate and there were legitimate worries that rapid disclosure could put thumbs on the scale of competition. Some borrowers have been identified through SEC filings, but the mom-and-pop shops that were envisioned to be the core beneficiaries of the program aren’t regulated there.
“We know they have to make it public at some point. But they have not made it easy so far,” says Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a progressive watchdog group.
For now, the most recent public accounting of the program, posted on the Treasury Department’s website, tracks money through April 16. It breaks down the dispersed loans by state and sector, but it does not identify loan recipients, and it only identifies the biggest lenders under the program by a number. (For instance, an unnamed Lender One had an average loan amount of $515,000.) The Small Business Administration (SBA), the federal agency that’s on the hook for reimbursing the banks, offers a little more information about the size of the banks that are lending from the latest funds, but not who’s getting it.
Ultimately, the best source of solid information about the spending is likely to be the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a panel established in the broader law that set up the Paycheck Protection Program. After President Donald Trump sidelined the panel’s first leader in a bureaucratic swing, it has an interim chairman, the top watchdog at the Justice Department, and this week hired a top staffer to get work started. Anyone receiving help under any part the relief packages has to report back quarterly to the pandemic panel details about the money and what it’s being used for. The panel in turn will have 30 days to post that online for public review. But the quarter doesn’t end until June 30. The soonest disclosures could happen might be late July or early August for some of the first businesses to access the small business aid.
Congress also created the Office of the Special Inspector General at the Department of Treasury, a new watchdog dedicated to tracking where the pandemic dollars are going. The post, however, requires a Senate confirmation. Trump has selected White House lawyer Brian D. Miller, a former federal prosecutor and previous inspector general. But he faces a tough crowd in the Senate; last year, Miller told the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the White House was done cooperating with its investigation into the withholding of security aid to Ukraine — the event that is central to Trump’s impeachment and acquittal earlier this year.
If Miller wins confirmation, he will have to build his office from scratch. Congress did not include any emergency language for the new watchdog to oversee a separate $500 billion fund that help businesses that fall outside the SBA loan program. That means Miller or anyone else running the office will face routine bureaucratic hurtles for hiring staff. Miller won’t be able to simply bring his inner-circle with him and the positions will have to be posted widely.
The prolonged process will inevitably mean missed opportunities for lawmakers and policy wonks to tinker with the programs as they figure out the most beneficial and effective way to pump more money in the beleaguered economy. Right now, Congress is considering another relief package, but hasn’t yet seen what the first two pots of small business cash has yielded.
“The bottom line is that this pandemic is going to be with us for a very long time,” says Austin Evers, the founder of American Oversight, a liberal group that has peppered the Trump Administration with requests and litigation for public records. “It’s unlikely this is the only financial support that businesses and individuals are going to be receiving. If we can’t see the data for how the first tranche has been spent, we don’t have the tools we need in the future.”
Some in Washington are ready to start cutting checks directly to local relief funds and pull back from the lenders. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, have worked with Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., on a $50 billion proposal that would give to local pools of money, with the goal of helping small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and those with 50 employees of less in poor neighborhoods.
“Oversight makes programs work better,” says Kildee. “These administrations and these banks will achieve their goals more effectively when they know someone is watching and measuring. If no one’s watching and measuring, things get sloppy.”
Others take a longer view. Former GAO assistant director John Kamensky notes that Congress has already set aside $280 million in oversight for the pandemic response so far and boosted the GAO budget by $20 million, in addition to creating the Treasury’s Special Inspector General position and the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. On top of that, there’s talk of a 9/11 Commission-style panel, House Democrats’ own inquiry and the already robust oversight operations on the Hill.
“Transparency is going to be there, I think,” says Kamensky, who spent eight years advising former Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative and now is a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government. “It’s a matter of getting it timely and getting it clean.”
Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.
New top story from Time: Italy Says App Tracing Contacts of People Infected With COVID-19 Will Be Anonymous
ROME — The Italian government has decreed that the data provided through an app to facilitate tracing of persons who come in close contact with someone positive for COVID-19 will be completely anonymous and that all data will be destroyed by year’s end.
Premier Giuseppe Conte’s Cabinet, at a meeting that ended early Thursday, approved a law, in the form of the decree, that guarantees that those who decide not to use the app won’t suffer limits on their movement or other rights.
Health authorities are encouraging Italians to use the app as a key tool to prevent the rate of contagion to rise again in Italy. The app, which uses Bluetooth, won’t geo-localize users, and data will only be mined for purposes of containing the virus or for epidemiological study, the government said Thursday.
The Cabinet also stipulated that any bid to release to house arrest prison inmates convicted of terrorism or Mafia crimes due to COVID-19 concerns must seek the opinion of prosecutors, or in the case of top organized crime bosses must run the request by Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor. Prosecutors have expressed concern mobsters can exploit the pandemic to get out of prison.
New top story from Time: Police Say Bodies in Vehicles Connected to Brooklyn Funeral Home
(NEW YORK) — Police were called to a Brooklyn neighborhood Wednesday after someone reported human bodies in vehicles, which officers determined were connected to a nearby funeral home.
The New York Police Department said the call to 911 came in just before 11:30 a.m., and officers responded to Utica Avenue.
The vehicles were determined to be connected to the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home nearby, police said.
The NYPD notified the state Department of Health, which oversees funeral homes. The department did not respond to an email seeking comment.
When a call was made to the funeral home, a person on the other end picked up and then hung up. Subsequent calls went to voicemail, which was full.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams went to the scene on Wednesday evening. He told the Daily News, “While this situation is under investigation, we should not have what we have right now, with trucks lining the streets filled with bodies.”
He said “it was people who walked by who saw some leakage and detected an odor coming from a truck.”
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Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today
By BY PATRICK J. LYONS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2xhiE0W
New top story from Time: President Trump Erupts at Campaign Team as His Poll Numbers Slide
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.
As the virus takes its deadly toll and much of the nation’s economy remains shuttered, new surveys by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign pointed to a harrowing picture for the president as he faces reelection.
While Trump saw some of the best approval ratings of his presidency during the early weeks of the crisis, aides highlighted the growing political cost of the crisis and the unforced errors by Trump in his freewheeling press briefings.
Trump reacted with defiance, incredulous that he could be losing to someone he viewed as a weak candidate.
“I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,” he repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.
The message to the president was sobering: Trump was trailing the former Democratic vice president in many key battleground states, he was told, and would have lost the Electoral College if the election had been held earlier this month.
On the line from the White House, Trump snapped at the state of his polling during a series of calls with campaign manager Brad Parscale, who called in from Florida; RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, on the line from her home in Michigan; senior adviser Jared Kushner; and other aides.
Echoing a number of White House aides and outside advisers, the political team urged Trump to curtail his daily coronavirus briefings, arguing that the combative sessions were costing him in the polls, particularly among seniors. Trump initially pushed back, pointing to high television ratings. But, at least temporarily, he agreed to scale back the briefings after drawing sharp criticism for raising the idea that Americans might get virus protection by injecting disinfectants.
Trump aides encouraged the president to stay out of medical issues and direct his focus toward more familiar and politically important ground: the economy.
Even as Trump preaches optimism, the president has expressed frustration and even powerlessness as the dire economic statistics pile up. It’s been a whiplash-inducing moment for the president, who just two months ago planned to run for reelection on the strength of an economy that was experiencing unprecedented employment levels. Now, as the records mount in the opposite direction, Trump is feeling the pressure.
“We built the greatest economy in the world,” Trump has said publicly. “I’ll do it a second time.”
Trump’s political team warned that the president’s path to reelection depends on how quickly he can bring about a recovery.
“I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again,” Kushner told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. But other aides, business leaders and economists predict a far longer road toward recovery.
Representatives for the RNC and the Trump campaign did not comment on the polling or last week’s phone calls.
According to people familiar with the incident, Trump vented much of his frustration at Parscale, who served as the bearer of bad news.
Trump has long distrusted negative poll numbers — telling aides for years that his gut was right about the 2016 race, when he insisted that he was ahead in the Midwest and Florida. At the same time, Parscale and other Trump aides are talking up the sophistication of their data and voter outreach capabilities this time.
The president and some aides have had simmering frustrations with Parscale for a while, believing the campaign manager — a close Kushner ally — has enriched himself from his association with Trump and sought personal publicity. Trump had previously been angered when Parscale was the subject of magazine profiles. This latest episode flared before the campaign manager was featured in a New York Times Magazine profile this week.
Aides have grown particularly worried about Michigan — which some advisers have all but written off — as well as Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Trump announced Wednesday that he will visit Arizona next week — his first trip outside Washington in a month — as he looks to declare that much of the nation is ready to begin reopening after the virus.
The president has mocked Biden, his presumptive general election rival, for being “stuck in his basement” in his Delaware home during the pandemic.
Trump said Wednesday that he hopes to soon visit Ohio, a battleground state that Trump carried handily in 2016 but that aides see as growing slightly competitive in recent weeks.
Aides acknowledged that the president’s signature rallies would not be returning anytime soon. Some have privately offered doubts that he would be able to hold any in his familiar format of jam-packed arenas before Election Day, Nov. 3.
___
Lemire reported from New York.
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New top story from Time: Joe Biden Wins Ohio’s Delayed Mail-in Primary
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Joe Biden won Ohio’s presidential primary Tuesday, clinching a contest that was less about the Democratic nomination and more about how states can conduct elections in the era of the coronavirus.
The primary was the first major test of statewide elections via mail amid an outbreak. And the results were mixed.
There were reports of confusion but no widespread disruption. It wasn’t like Wisconsin earlier this month, when voters were forced to overlook social distancing guidelines to stand in line wearing masks to cast a ballot.
Still, overall turnout appeared to be off. The secretary of state’s office said that about 1.5 million votes had been cast as of midday Saturday, down sharply from the 3.2 million cast in Ohio’s 2016 presidential primary.
“Within the context of the threat of the virus, it’s a decision that we will have made the best of,” Republican Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio elections chief who chairs the bipartisan International Foundation for Electoral Systems, said of mail-in balloting.
The primary, originally scheduled for March 17, was delayed just hours before polls were supposed to open. Citing a “health emergency,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine recommended that in-person balloting not be held until June 2. But amid legal challenges, officials moved balloting to this week while converting to a mail-in process since the state remains under a stay-at-home order.
Most Ohioans casting absentee ballots had to run at least three pieces of mail — an application, a blank ballot and a completed one — through the U.S. Postal Service. Only homeless and disabled people were initially encouraged to cast in-person ballots at county election board offices, though anyone not receiving ballots by mail in time to participate could also turn up in person.
Lynne Marshall, of Sylvania, near the Ohio-Michigan border, opened her mailbox Tuesday and was disappointed to see that her ballot had not arrived after waiting months and making countless calls to the state and local election offices. She then agonized over whether to cast a vote in person at the election board and put her health at risk or stay home and skip an election for the first time that she can remember.
“What should I do?” she asked. “I’m just really disgusted with it all. Of course, I’ll feel guilty if I don’t vote.”
With his last competitor, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, leaving the race weeks ago, Biden has emerged as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and the Ohio results were never in doubt. Still, moving to a mail-in primary on the fly was watched around the country as states with upcoming elections grapple with how to fulfill one of the most basic functions of American democracy, voting, while battling coronavirus’s spread.
Some governors have suggested they would consider moving to an all-mail voting system for the November general election, something President Donald Trump has strongly opposed. Polling suggests that Democrats are now more in favor of their states conducting elections exclusively by mail than Republicans are — a partisan divide that has grown amid the coronavirus outbreak and may have been exacerbated by Trump’s opposition.
Five states currently conduct all elections entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah, but none had to adopt such practices amid a pandemic.
Maryland was also balancing balloting and voter safety on Tuesday as polling centers conducted a special election to finish the term of the late Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings. Democrat Kweisi Mfume, a former NAACP leader, defeated Republican Kimberly Klacik in the congressional district, returning to the seat that he held before Cummings.
Most of the focus, though, was on Ohio, which also held congressional primaries. It’s traditionally a battleground state that has shifted to more consistently Republican in recent cycles. Trump won it by a surprisingly high 8 percentage points in 2016, after Barack Obama, with Biden as his running mate, carried the state twice.
Jen Miller, the head of the League of Women Voters in Ohio, said it will be impossible to know how many people stayed home because they didn’t get a ballot in time.
“We’ve had people waiting weeks and weeks,” Miller said.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s early voting began Feb. 19, meaning Sanders was in a position to still pick up some of its delegates — despite no longer technically being in the race. The senator has reminded his supporters that his name will be on the ballot in all upcoming races and urged them to vote for him so he can amass delegates and better shape the Democratic Party platform at its national convention in Milwaukee.
But Sanders has endorsed Biden, and a group of his top advisers announced Tuesday that they were forming an outside political committee to promote the former vice president and progressive values. The efforts at unification of Democratic forces against Trump in November could defuse tensions heading into the party’s convention — which has already been delayed from June until August and may yet be further marred by the virus.
Blackwell, the former Ohio election chief, said he didn’t see Tuesday’s results setting a precedent. He said the state’s in-person voting — run by 88 bipartisan county election boards and offering a wide, 30-day early voting window — lends “a degree of almost guaranteed legitimacy” that’s missing from mail-in balloting.
“My opinion going forward is that no serious thought should be given to converting to mail-in balloting for the November election,” Blackwell said. “You lick an envelope and mail in a ballot, there’s all kinds of evidence that would suggest that there would be ballots lost, and because you’ve taken out the bipartisan oversight at the basic community level, you lose a degree of almost guaranteed legitimacy.”
___
Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and John Seewer in Toledo contributed to this report.
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New top story from Time: Oklahoma and Utah Criticized Over Spending Millions on Malaria Drugs Touted by President Trump
OKLAHOMA CITY — Republican state leaders in Oklahoma and Utah are facing scrutiny for spending millions of dollars combined to purchase malaria drugs promoted by President Trump to treat COVID-19 patients that many other states obtained for free and that doctors warned shouldn’t be used without more testing.
While governments in at least 20 other states obtained more than 30 million doses of the drug through donations from the federal reserve or private companies, Oklahoma and Utah instead bought them from private pharmaceutical companies.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday defended the state’s $2 million purchase, saying the drug was showing some promise. His health secretary attributed buying the 1.2 million hydroxychloroquine pills to something that happens in the “fog of war.”
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert at first defended the state’s $800,000 purchase of 20,000 packets of hydroxychloroquine compounded with zinc, but has since ordered an investigation of a no-bid contract with a local company that had been promoting the drugs. Herbert, a Republican, also canceled an additional plan to spend $8 million more to buy 200,000 additional treatments from the same company.
A left-leaning nonprofit group in Utah filed a price gouging complaint Tuesday with state regulators, arguing the $40 per pack drug was grossly overpriced.
Oklahoma’s attorney general requested an investigative audit on Tuesday of its Department of Health over spending and warned the agency about retaliating against employees who report wrongful government activities under the state’s Whistleblower Act. A spokesman for Attorney General Mike Hunter declined to comment on whether the request was related to the $2 million spent on the drug.
Doctors can already prescribe the malaria drug to patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing, and many do. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday warned doctors against prescribing hydroxychloroquine for treating the coronavirus outside of hospitals or research settings because of reports of serious side effects, including irregular heart rhythms and death among patients.
Preliminary results from a recent study done on coronavirus patients at U.S. veterans hospitals showed no benefit, casting more doubt on the drug’s efficacy during the pandemic.
Those were the latest admonitions against the drug that Trump has regularly promoted in public appearances, touting its potential despite his own health advisors telling him it is unproven.
Oklahoma acquired 1.2 million pills, or about 100,000 doses, on April 4 from FFF Enterprises, a California-based medical supply wholesaler, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health.
Oklahoma state Rep. Melissa Provenzano, a Democrat from Tulsa, said the state’s purchase shows that Gov. Stitt’s actions don’t follow his claim that he relies on data to drive his decisions.
“Two million dollars is a lot of money to waste, especially when we have unemployment claims approved yet going unpaid, health care professionals without proper protective equipment, and diagnosed cases and deaths continuing to rise,” Provenzano said.
Stitt, a first-term Republican, said hydroxychloroquine was showing some promise as a treatment in early March, and he didn’t want Oklahoma to miss out on an opportunity to acquire it.
“Now there’s some evidence the chloroquine may not be as effective, but I was being proactive to try and protect Oklahomans,” Stitt said Tuesday when asked about the purchase. “That’s always going to be my first instinct, to get the equipment and things we need that I’m seeing in the future would help Oklahomans.”
Oklahoma’s Secretary of Health Jerome Loughridge said several physicians, including some in Oklahoma, were previously optimistic about the drug’s promise in treating COVID-19. He added that the drug is also useful for treating lupus and some other auto-immune diseases, so the state’s supply “will not have gone to waste.”
“When we were battling sort of the fog of war at that point, we certainly acquired it on the potential that it would have utility,” Loughridge said.
Doctors in Oklahoma have been using the drug to treat patients with COVID-19, often in conjunction with a second drug, azithromiocin, but the results “just are not that promising,” said Dr. Douglas Drevets, chief of infectious diseases at University of Oklahoma Medicine.
FFF Enterprises said it’s the company’s policy not to comment on transactions with customers.
Utah gave a local company called Meds in Motion the $800,000 contract without taking bids from other companies under emergency procurement rules, said Christopher Hughes, director of Utah’s division of purchasing. State officials haven’t explained why they didn’t seek to get the drugs for free.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Saturday it has sent out 28.6 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine sulfate free of cost to states around the country. Several states including New York, Connecticut and Texas received donations of the medication from a private company based in New Jersey called Amneal Pharmaceutical, according to information compiled by The Associated Press.
Utah taxpayers deserve to know what happened to allow a purchase that seems like a company taking advantage of the early, chaotic days of the pandemic said Chase Thomas, executive director of the group called Alliance for a Better Utah that submitted the price gouging complaint. The complaint alleges Utah paid at least double the common price for the medication.
“Whether they were buying drugs we didn’t need or paying too much for it when they could have gotten them for free, there just needed to be a lot more thought going into this,” Thomas said.
Meds in Motion didn’t answer an email seeking comment about the allegations.
Herbert declined to provide an update Tuesday about the investigation of the purchase. He said Friday the state’s legal counsel would aim to find out what, how and why it happened. He said he believed state officials acted in good faith as they scrambled to slow the spread of coronavirus, but acknowledged a mistake may have been made.
“I have some questions about how it came about,” Herbert said Friday. “Bottom line is, we’re not purchasing any more of this drug.”
___
McCombs and Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City.
Tuesday 28 April 2020
New York Attorney General Scrutinizes Amazon for Firing Warehouse Worker
By BY KAREN WEISE from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/3eUMvNL
Delhi Breaches 3,000-Mark, Coronavirus Recovery Rate Falls
Delhi's coronavirus total on Monday crossed the 3,000-mark with the addition of 190 cases in the last 24 hours. With no fresh deaths, the number of those who have died of the virus in the national capital remains 54.
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"Have A Very Good Idea": Donald Trump On Kim Jong Un's Health
US President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to confirm that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is alive, saying he wished him well after days of speculation over the dictator's whereabouts.
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Boeing Chief Sees Slow Airline Rebound, Says No Dividend For "Years"
Boeing's head said Monday that restoring the dividend could take three to five years as the company girds for a slow air travel recovery in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.
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New top story from Time: Police Find 5 Dead, Baby Alive After Shooting at Milwaukee Home
Police found five people shot to death Monday inside a Milwaukee home and arrested the man who dialed 911 to report the slayings, the city’s police chief said.
The police department received a call around 10:30 a.m. from a man who said his family was dead, Chief Alfonso Morales said during a brief news conference. When officers arrived at the house on the city’s north side they found five victims ranging in age from 14 to 41, the chief said.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters at the house that a baby was found alive in the house. Investigators believe the shooter decided to spare the infant.
Morales said investigators recovered a weapon and believe the shooter acted alone, adding that that there’s no threat to the public.
The man who called authorities to the house has been taken into custody, and detectives were trying to determine the relationship between the caller and the victims, Morales said. No names have been provided.
Morales called the shooting “a very tragic event.”
The Journal Sentinel, citing three unidentified police sources, reported the suspect was a 43-year-old Milwaukee man with a lengthy criminal record in Milwaukee County.
Online court records show he was convicted in 2002 of misdemeanor battery. He was sentenced to probation, ordered to attend domestic abuse counseling and prohibited from possessing firearms.
He pleaded guilty in 2007 to felony battery, felony bail jumping and felony intimidation of a witness. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, prohibited from possessing firearms and ordered to complete a batterers’ intervention course.
Five years later, in 2012, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery with a domestic abuse modifier, and drew 18 months in prison with another gun ban. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct and was sentenced to a month in jail with work-release privileges.
The state Department of Workforce Development filed a warrant against him in 2016 seeking $13,304 in unemployment compensation that still hasn’t been paid. The online records don’t offer any further details. DWD spokesman Ben Jedd said such cases are confidential under state law.
Asked for confirmation of the suspect’s identity and more details on the shooting, Milwaukee Police spokeswoman Sheronda Grant said only that the department “will provide additional information regarding this incident in the upcoming days.”
The attack is the second mass shooting in Milwaukee this year. Molson Coors brewery worker Anthony Ferrill gunned down five co-workers on Feb. 26 before turning his gun on himself. His motive remains unknown.
White supremacist Wade Michael Page killed seven people at a Sikh temple in suburban Oak Creek before a police officer killed him in a firefight in 2012. That incident is the worst mass shooting in the Milwaukee area since 2005, when Terry Michael Ratzmann killed seven fellow congregants at the Living Church of God in suburban Brookfield before killing himself. Prosecutors never determined an exact motive, although they said he blamed the church for his depression and financial problems.
John Grisham Returns to Camino Island, This Time in Hurricane Season
By BY JANET MASLIN from NYT Books https://ift.tt/2Y9rw3J
Trump Vows More Coronavirus Testing, but Less Than What May Be Needed
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Argentina Imposes Toughest Travel Ban in Americas, Banning Flights Until Sept. 1
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एफआईएच प्रो-लीग टलने से तैयारियों का मिला मौका, टीम में वापसी की तैयारी : वरुण
फुलबैक वरुण ने कहा है कि एफआईएच प्रो-लीग को एक साल सरकाने से हॉकी टीम को श्रेष्ठ टीमों के खिलाफ मौकों को भुनाना होगा व ओलंपिक में श्रेष्ठ देने के लिए तैयार करना होगा।
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कोरोना की वजह से पांच स्थानापन्न चाहता है फीफा, खिलाड़ियों को चोटिल होने से बचाने की कोशिश
कोरोना के कारण अब बचे हुए मैच कम समय में कराने की चुनौती झेल रहा फीफा चाहता है कि टीमें पांच स्थानापन्न खिलाड़ियों का इस्तेमाल करे।
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ऑनलाइन शूटिंग लाई कैंसर पीड़ित शूटर के चेहरे पर मुस्कान, अस्पताल से प्रतियोगिता से जुड़ीं
कोविड-19 के कारण ऑनलाइन हो रहे निशानेबाजी टूर्नामेंट ने कोलकाता के एक अस्पताल में कैंसर का इलाज करा रही एक युवा महिला निशानेबाज के चेहरे पर मुस्कान और सकारात्मकता लाने में मदद की है।
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Trump’s Bleach Statements Echo Claims by ‘Miracle Cure’ Quacks
By BY ANDREW JACOBS from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2VICawQ
Officials Say Limits on Virus Relief Funds for States Are Too Tight
By BY CARL HULSE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2xeqKHH
U.S. Governors Move Ahead With Reopening, Despite Health Worries
By BY JACK HEALY, MANNY FERNANDEZ AND PETER BAKER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3eXCu2o
Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today
By BY PATRICK J. LYONS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/35hgbQL
Briefings Were ‘Not Worth the Time,’ Trump Said. But He Couldn’t Stay Away.
By BY PETER BAKER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3eZndxS
In Kayleigh McEnany, Trump Taps a Press Fighter for the Coronavirus Era
By BY ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3eYg8xO
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