2 Choir Members Are Dead & Dozens Have COVID-19 After Rehearsal
60 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale recently met up for rehearsal – now dozens of them have COVID-19 and two are dead. “It seemed like a normal rehearsal, except that choirs are huggy places,” Adam Burdick, the choir’s conductor, recalled. “We were making music and trying to keep a certain distance between each other.”…
Saudi Arabia floods the oil market; America tries to prop up prices
Editor’s note (March 30th 2020): This article has been updated since it was first published.EARLY IN MARCH the oil market’s central banker seemed to go berserk. Saudi Arabia, the most powerful member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), has long adjusted its supply to help stabilise the price of crude. Russia had…
South Korea keeps covid-19 at bay without a total lockdown
But the long-term outlook is still uncertainA GROUP OF young people sit around a table in a bar, immersed in animated conversation. A man and a woman sit in the window of a coffee shop and share bites of a large slice of cream cake. A handful of people in face masks and office attire…
Instagram Followers: Buy or Not to Buy?
Instagram has millions of users. Some Instagram accounts have acquired followers organically after many years, while others have bought followers. But, in the virtual world, it’s tough to differentiate real followers from those that have been bought. That’s why many people are opting to buy Instagram followers (e.g. at https://howsociable.com/buy-instagram-followers/) to enhance the popularity of…
Why Every Brand Needs a Coming Soon Page Before Going Live
Are you planning to launch a new WordPress site? If so, you might be preparing to set up the right permalink structure, the sitemap, and the synchronization with Google Analytics. You must have gotten your domain registered, signed up for cloud security, and are now busy in finalizing the website before it goes live. However,…
Nationalist Planned to Bomb Hospital as Revolt against Covid-19 Lockdowns
With some thinking government lockdowns are a step in the infliction of a tyrannical order — we’ve experienced our first COVID-19 related act of terrorism, domestically. On Friday, a man named Timothy Wilson from Missouri made plans to detonate a car bomb at a local hospital in Belton, which was intended as a mutiny against…
America’s mortgage market sickens
Mar 26th 2020AMERICA’S $19trn commercial and residential mortgage market is jittery as investors begin to fear that laid-off workers and shut-down firms will struggle to repay their debts. Plenty of investors—such as real-estate investment trusts—are highly leveraged. As the value of mortgage-backed securities has dropped sharply they have begun to face margin calls on their…
If you thought the trade war was bad for global commerce…
Mar 26th 2020WASHINGTON, DCCONTAINER-SHIP navigators, box-ticking customs officials, logistics wizards, truck drivers and warehouse nightwatchmen: all are familiar with dealing with glitches involving international trade, from strikes to trade wars. But with forecasters predicting a slump in global GDP this year, even their most creative thinking cannot keep $25trn of goods and services flowing around…
An imaginative template for dealing with the cash crunch
Mar 26th 2020TAKE YOURSELF back, if you can manage it, to a more tranquil time—January, say. Imagine a smallish restaurant chain that had a bad Christmas. Its owner borrowed heavily to expand only to find its new outlets were slow to attract customers. The chain cannot meet its interest and other costs. A consultancy says…
The ECB breaks its self-imposed rules
Mar 26th 2020CHRISTINE LAGARDE took over as the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) in November intent on peacemaking. The bank’s negative interest rates and bond-buying were reviled in the euro area’s northern countries. In order to heal the rift Ms Lagarde launched a year-long review of the ECB’s strategy. Few investors expected policy…