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creepingsharia · 5 years

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A Month of Islam in America: June 2019

Another month, and another step forward for sharia in America as more censorship was exposed. A whistleblower leak confirmed that @Pinterest protects Muslims and censors any reference to “creeping sharia,” and many other non-liberal topics.

Click any link below for more details and link to original source.

Jihad in America in June

Brooklyn: Muslim Immigrant Sentenced to 20 Years for Attempting to Join Islamic State (ISIS) Mohamed Rafik Naji was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment by United States District Judge Frederic Block for attempting to provide material support or resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a foreign terrorist organization. Naji pleaded guilty to the charge in February 2018.

Brooklyn: Muslim Woman Who Helped ISIS Gets 4 Years, But Will Be Out in 18 Months

With credit for time served, Sinmyah Amera Caesar will end up only serving about 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges accusing her of using social media to help recruit IS fighters under the nom de guerre “Umm Nutella.” She had also admitted violating a cooperation agreement with the government a — betrayal that infuriated prosecutors.

Illinois: Bosnian Muslim refugee and mother of 4 jailed for sending money, supplies to ISIS

Mediha Medy Salkicevic, a/k/a Medy Ummuluna, a/k/a Bosna Mexico, 39, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

Salkicevic, aka Medy Ummuluna and Bosna Mexico, espoused the ISIS philosophy that infidels should be killed and once said that unbelievers should be buried alive.

At the time of her arrest, she was working for an air cargo company at Chicago O'Hare Airport...

Illinois: Two Muslim converts convicted of aiding Islamic State (ISIS)

Joseph D. Jones and Edward Schimenti proudly waved a terrorist flag during a photo at a Lake Michigan park in Zion, had plotted to attack the Navy’s main U.S. training center near North Chicago and once had their eyes on planting an ISIS flag atop the White House.

Now Jones and Schimenti, both 37, have been found guilty of providing material support to ISIS.

Indiana: Yemeni Muslim who tried to join Islamic State terrorists gets 8 years in prison

U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker handed down the 100-month sentence Friday afternoon in the case against 21-year-old Akram Musleh, U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler announced.

He admitted in the plea agreement that from about April 2016 through June 21, 2016, he offered himself to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as IS, knowing it was a “designated foreign terrorist organization.”

Pittsburgh: Syrian Muslim Refugee Arrested for Planning Jihad Attack on Christian Church

Mustafa Mousab Alowemer, 21, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was arrested today based on a federal complaint charging him with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization, and two counts of distributing information relating to an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction in relation to his plan to attack a church in Pittsburgh.

“Court documents show Mustafa Alowemer planned to attack a church in the name of ISIS, which could have killed or injured many people...”

Ohio: Jordanian Muslim Immigrant Sentenced to 15 Years for Trying to Join Islamic State (ISIS)

A Dayton, Ohio man was sentenced today in U.S. District Court to 180 months in prison and 25 years of supervised release for attempting, and conspiring, to join the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Laith Waleed Alebbini, 28, was convicted following a bench trial in November and December 2018 before U.S. District Judge Walter H. Rice.

Alebbini attempted, and conspired, to provide material support and resources to ISIS in the form of personnel, namely himself.

Alebbini, a citizen of Jordan and a U.S. legal permanent resident, was arrested by the FBI on April 26, 2017, at the Cincinnati/Kentucky International Airport, as he approached the TSA security checkpoint.

South Carolina: Muslim - twice convicted for attempts to join ISIS and kill Americans - gets 20-year prison sentence

A federal judge has sentenced a South Carolina man who tried to join ISIS to 20 years in prison.

Zakaryia Abdin, 20, pleaded guilty in September 2018. The Ladson man was arrested in March 2017.

New York: Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant arrested in Times Square terror plot

Ashiqul Alam was arrested Thursday after arranging through an undercover agent to buy a pair of semiautomatic pistols with obliterated serial numbers, prosecutors said. Police Commissioner James O’Neill said that development was “a clear indicator of (Alam’s) intent to move his plot forward.”

The defendant, a legal resident born in Bangladesh, moved to the U.S. as a child about 12 years ago...

He talked about wanting to “shoot down” gays, referring to them with a slur; using a “rocket launcher, like a huge one,” to cause havoc at the World Trade Center; and obtaining an enhanced driver’s license so he could walk onto a military base and “blow it up,” the documents said.

Illinois: Muslim Arrested for Threatening to Bomb Aurora Casino for Allah

A recently released affidavit and search warrant claimed that 30-year-old Musatdin M. Muadinov, while detained by police on Feb. 12, vowed to “pray to Allah” to “destroy the casino.” He further demanded to meet with President Donald Trump, saying that if his demands were not met, “we would all meet Allah,” according to the affidavit obtained by the Daily Herald.

Muadinov — who was dressed in what police described as “Muslim attire” when arrested — waived his right to remain silent.

More Jihad in America in June

Florida: Suspect sent bomb threats to judges ‘for cause of Islamic State’

Nebraska: Heavily armed Marine arrested trying to enter Air Force Base

Arizona: Muslim shared terror propaganda before attacking police officer

Brooklyn: Muslim in Jail for ISIS Support Pleads Guilty to Slashing Correctional Officer

South Carolina: Man who pledged allegiance to ISIS hid explosive device in teddy bear

Arizona: Witness in probe of 2015 Islamic jihad attack on free speech event convicted of lying to FBI

Libyan National Found Guilty of Terrorism Charges in 2012 Attack on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi

Iraqi Muslim who orchestrated jihad attack that killed 5 U.S. troops gets 26 years prison, then release to Canada

Immigration Jihad in America

Minnesota’s first Somali Muslim cop gets 12 years for murdering Australian woman

Minnesota: St. Paul’s first Somali Muslim city council member says criticizing his homophobic comments is… Islamophobic

New York: Brooklyn Mosque Blasts Islamic Call to Prayer to 20 Block Radius (VIDEO)

Somalis have Changed Minneapolis

New York: Thousands of Muslims take over two city blocks in Brooklyn to pray in the streets

Four Muslim ISIS suspects arrested in Nicaragua, likely headed for US

Islamization of America

Pennsylvania: 167-year-old Catasauqua church will become Islamic mosque

Pennsylvania: Former Easton church is now a Sunni mosque

Pennsylvania: Former daycare in residential Salisbury to become Muslim “community center”

Virginia: Residential home in Annandale to become a Muslim funeral home

Education Jihad in America

New Jersey Public School District to Students: “May Allah Continue to Shower You Love and Wisdom”

Maryland school fails Christian student for refusing Islamic prayer

New York: Cornell Univ. Muslim Students Demand More “Prayer Rooms”

Stanford administrators say advertising for conservative event threatens Muslim students

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Muslim Students Association: What Americans Need to Know

DOE Investigating Elite Colleges For Hiding Saudi, Qatari Cash from Regulators

Islamic Slavery & Sexual Jihad in America

Virginia: Three Muslim family members arrested for conspiracy, forced labor, and document servitude

Detroit Imam: Wife-Beating Serves to Remind Her That She Misbehaved (VIDEO)

Dhimmitude in Elected Office

Trump Admin Sues Greyhound for Banning Muslim Driver from Wearing Full Length Islamic Robe

Democrat majority passes defense authorization bill that funds transfer of remaining Gitmo jihadis to U.S.

Minnesota: City of Bloomington allows terror mosque to flout local laws (VIDEO)

Minnesota city council votes 5-0 to ditch Pledge of Allegiance (to avoid offending Muslims)

Diversity is our Strength Alert

Minnesota’s first Somali Muslim cop gets 12 years for murdering Australian woman

Minnesota: St. Paul’s first Somali Muslim city council member says criticizing his homophobic comments is… Islamophobic

Boston Police Dept’s First Muslim Captain Put On Administrative Leave Amid ‘Anti-Corruption’ Investigation

Minnesota: First Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar fined by state for unlawful use of campaign funds

Minnesota Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar filed joint tax returns before she married husband

Fraud for Jihad

Connecticut: Muslim Grocery Store Worker Pleads Guilty in $3.2M Federal Food Stamp Fraud

Massachusetts: Muslim Restaurant Owner Pleads Guilty to Tax Fraud Conspiracy

That’s just what we had time to compile for just the month of June.

Far too many steps forward for the sharia, and only a few pushbacks, but worth noting:

New Jersey: School District Scraps Posters Calling upon “Allah” to “Shower” Students with Blessings After Threat of Lawsuit

Rather Than Go to Trial, Terror-linked CAIR Settles with the Victims They Defrauded

Tunisian Muslim who swore allegiance to ISIS removed from U.S.

New York: Albany mosque imam convicted of terrorism is deported back to Iraq It’s almost midnight and Americans are losing their first amendment rights to sharia supremacists and the big technology, media and politicians who support them.

Please share this report before it’s too late.

#Legal #Jihad #Sharia #News #Politics #Immigration #monthly

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securecheck360 · 5 years

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New Year Regulations that Employers Should Know Beforehand

The Year 2020 brings obligatory regulations both locally and nationwide for Employers to be aware of. Most notably, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – the federal wage/hour law – will increase its pay package test to the “white collar” exemptions to approximately $35,000/year effective from January 1st. The Department of Labor (DOL), which is tasked with enforcing the FLSA, estimates 1.3 million currently exempt employees will be reclassified as nonexempt next year by its final rule.

Moreover, many states have enacted paid leave, background checks, drug testing, and non-compete legislation in the past year. As the New Year started, employers are accessing the next set of labor and employment laws and regulations they will face in the current year and beyond. However, as the New Year starts, employers should be sure to review overall state and federal compliance concerning employees, job categories, compensations, paid leave, job requirements, employee handbook language, and employee agreements.

As a conclusion, Securecheck360 would like to remind employers about certain changes that employers should consider while starting the year checklists.

1. Confirm Number of Employees: Due to the latest changes in U.S. laws, both on a local and national level changes in an employer’s business may impact the regulations that apply to it. For instance, if the total number of employees reached 50 across all locations, it may have to comply with the new set of requirements. Employers should count their total number of employees to determine what laws are significant to them. Notable milestones to cross are 15, 20 and 50 employees (for instance, the Family Medical Leave Act applies to organizations with 50 or greater employees, Age Discrimination in Employment Act applies to private associations with 20 or more employees, and Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to employers with 15 or more employees).

2. Job Categories and Compensation: Job responsibilities, essential functions, and compensation can change throughout the year. Employers need to assess whether employees are properly categorized exempt vs non-exempt. In September 2019, the DOL increased minimum pay requirements for overtime exemptions for executives, administrative, and professional employees. Under the final ruling, the pay package level for these white-collar exemptions Increased from $23,660 per year ($455 per week) to $35,568 per year ($684 per week). The final ruling increases the annual compensation requirement for an employee to be considered a “highly compensated employee” and exempt from overtime from the current $100,000 per year to $107,432 per year. Employers must note that the highly compensated employee rule allows employers to use non-discretionary bonuses, incentive payments and commissions are rewarded at least annually to satisfy up to 10 percent of the basic salary level.

3. Ensure Vacation and Leave Carryover: As employers finalize employees’ leave carryover and calculate vacation accordingly, they should also be sure to review local and state law’s regulating paid leave this year. More than six states and localities have enacted some type of paid leave laws to take effect in 2020. These states and local regulations affect a variety of employers, some applying to organizations with as few as 10 employees. Effective January 1, Nevada employers with 50 or more employees must provide employees with up to 40 hours of paid leave annually for any reason, with very few exemptions. Washington State has enacted a Paid Family Leave program that requires employers with 50 or more employees to pay a share of the state benefits program. Also, Washington employees are eligible to take up to 12 weeks of paid leave. These are only a few of the newly enacted paid leave laws that came into effect this year.

4. Verify Notices and Posters: Employers must verify that they are up to date and have the latest versions of all the required posters and notices, especially in states and localities with new regulations that may impose additional posting requirements. For instance, New York State’s recent prohibition on discrimination against employees’ reproductive health decisions imposes employer notice requirements. The District of Columbia’s Paid Leave Act requires employers to post and maintain a notice to employees explaining the terms and conditions of their rights to paid leave benefits. These are the only two of several new posting requirements with which employers may be required to comply.

5. Update Policies: Employee handbook policies should reflect your organization’s culture, expectations, and practices, as well as the current state of employment laws, starting this year. Among many common state and local trends related to discrimination, a few localities have joined California in enacting laws prohibiting employers from discriminating against racially specific hair bias. In addition to amendment of non-discrimination policies, anti-harassment, and dress code requirements, employers should also consider reviewing their grooming policies for prohibitions against natural hair, style, and textures, because these prohibitions may violate state laws.

6. Guarantee Non-Compete Agreements Comply with Applicable State Laws: Employers should ensure non-compete agreements comply with any applicable state laws. For instance, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington have amended and enacted regulations on employee non-compete agreements. Oregon has amended its current regulation to now require employers to provide employees a signed copy of their non-compete agreement within 30 days of an employee’s termination. From the third week of January 2020, Rhode Island will prohibit employers from entering into non-compete agreements with certain employees, including non-exempt and those 18 or younger. In Washington, non-compete agreements with employees who make less than $100,000 per year are void from this January. Moreover, Washington has enacted a regulation creating a presumption that any agreement lasting 18 months or above is considered unenforceable.

Year start is a busy time for employers, but keeping up with these factors can help ensure a smoother start to the New Year.

#employers #employees #agreement #securecheck360 #workplace #employment #paid leave #2020

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suffragettecity100 · 4 years

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Women’s Work is Never Done

84. Women’s Work

Women have always been part of the workforce as both paid and unpaid labor. While wealthier women could choose work as an option, most poorer, widowed or single women had no choice; they had to go to work but the playing field was not equal and neither was the pay.

In a “San Francisco Call” article (June 23, 1910) suffragist Dr. Sophonisba Breckinridge argued the need for women to learn to value their work and demand higher wages, “...while woman was a keen and shrewd maker, buyer and manufacturer, she knew little of bartering for her own wages”. She believed that the advancement of women across all industries would also help lead to equal pay.

In 1911, while working for the National Consumers League in New York City, suffragist Francis Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. She was horrified by the event and vowed to do something about it. Teddy Roosevelt recommended her as Executive Secretary for the Committee on Safety and she helped create the New York State Factory Investigating Commission which inspected factories to make sure that safety standards were in place. In 1932, Perkins became the first woman to be appointed to Secretary of Labor. She was instrumental to the success of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and helped America navigate the Great Depression.

June 5, 1920, Public Law No. 66-259 established the Women's Bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor. It is federally mandated to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment”. In 1920 women made up 20% of the workforce. As of 2020, women make up close to half of the workforce (47%).

The first Director of the Women’s Bureau was Mary Anderson. She was also the longest serving director having held the position from 1920 until 1944. In her autobiography, she stated, “I think our most important job was issuing the standards for the employment of women. It was the first time the federal government had taken a practical stand on conditions of employment for women, and although the standards were only recommendations and had no legal force, they were a very important statement of policy and were widely used in all parts of the country.”

However it was the rise of modern appliances and indoor plumbing that liberated more women than the vote. Having more free time allowed women to enter the workforce and pursue other interests outside of domestic responsibilities. Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics of University of Montreal did a major study on the impact of technology and women in the workforce. In 1890, 25% of American households had running water and 8% had electricity. In 1950, 83% had running water and 94% had electricity. In 1900, women spent an average of 58 hours per week on household duties. By 1975, those same chores only took about 18 hours. That’s a 40 hour difference; enough time to have a full time job or several leisure pursuits including getting an education or being politically active.

This week’s song pick:

“She Works Hard for the Money” by Donna Summer https://youtu.be/ci8uvhiU9LE

#SuffragetteCity100 #SufferingForSuffrage

Episode 84 Sources:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history

https://www.fdrlibrary.org/perkins

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1910-06-23/ed-1/seq-6/

Article about the impact of modern technology on women’s economics

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312150735.htm

The origin of the old adage “a man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done”, is unknown, but it may have its roots in this English broadside from 1629. (Historically, a broadside is a poster or flyer printed on only one side.)

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Womans_Work_is_Never_Done.htm

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paulbenedictblog · 5 years

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%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

News Lev Parnas, barred from impeachment trial, makes himself its star anyway - The Washington Post

News

Senators will most definitely be ready to address Lev Parnas from talking, but they couldn’t motivate him from walking. So, spherical 10: 45 a.m. Wednesday, the first day of questions within the president’s impeachment trial, Parnas — who is entangled within the Ukraine scandal as an affiliate of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but cooperating with prosecutors — took a stroll from Union Region to the Capitol building.

He used to be headed to the impeachment trial, the put neither he nor anybody else has been referred to as as a stare. He already suspected he wouldn't be allowed inside of. Even though his lawyer, Joseph Bondy, had procured tickets from the space of labor of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Parnas used to be carrying an electronic monitoring utility spherical his ankle because he used to be below condo arrest in Florida, charged with advertising and marketing campaign finance violations. A Fresh York federal judge authorized the accelerate back and forth but denied Bondy’s question to bear his consumer’s video display temporarily removed. Senate guidelines prohibited most electronic devices from the trial.

So, if he couldn’t narrate it in entrance of the Senate, he could well perhaps narrate it here, in entrance of the Union Region Ladurée macaron store: “The president knew every thing that used to be occurring in Ukraine,” Parnas mentioned. “There used to be many quid expert quos.”

“I don’t know Washington, D.C., that effectively,” mentioned Bondy, a prison protection and cannabis industry lawyer. He gestured within the direction of the Capitol. “I judge we accelerate that implies, ethical?”

Both wore gray fits. Both had American flag pins on their lapels. The pair were swarmed by TV camera crews.

“I’m no longer here to originate a circus,” mentioned Bondy, but most circuses originate with a parade. Demonstrators within the vicinity latched onto Parnas’s walking caravan, some of them following the scrum without intelligent who or what they were chasing, till the chant started, on Delaware Avenue: “Let Lev talk!”

“I felt cherish a Kardashian for a pair of minutes,” a law pupil accompanying the ultimate crew remarked.

“I didn’t await how tense it'd be to address walking with the cameras, . However I believed it'd be the ethical thing for us to attain,” mentioned Bondy, who referred to as the stroll “symbolic”: “With a dinky bit of luck our presence will bear some fee . . . in pushing this movement against a comely trial.”

He wasn’t determined the put Parnas would see the trial. “We’ll figure it out. He’ll be safe with you guys, he’s safe with all people. Other folk cherish him.”

Other folk looked as if it would. “Thanks, Lev!” referred to as out Jennifer Chartrand, 55, of Rockville. She used to be carrying a knitted purple pussy hat. “Thanks for speaking truth!” All the method thru the road, Stephen Parlato from Boulder, Colo., stood outside the Capitol’s Senate entrance with a poster board signal: “The stone wall is CRACKING.”

If the wall does crack, Parnas has dealt a pair of hammer blows. Since his arrest in October with one other Giuliani affiliate, he has publicly and now and again implicated Trump and a few other Republican lawmakers in an alleged design to stress Ukraine to analyze a political rival.

Digicam operators walked backward for the half of-mile stroll within the course of the Union Region plaza, down Delaware Avenue and up Structure Avenue, calling out limitations to forestall any falls. “Columns!” “Steps!” “Hydrant, 15 feet!” Sooner than the day used to be over, a photographer would fall backward true into a planter.

“Here's jaywalking, I don’t know,” mentioned Bondy with performative warning. He assign his arm spherical Parnas, sooner than the procession lost its skill.

“The put’s the Hart Building? We’ve gotta salvage our tickets,” Bondy requested the cameramen.

“You handed it,” one spoke back.

“I knew somebody would lend a hand us,” mentioned Bondy, sooner than bounding up the stairs to the Russell Building, to an entrance which — oops — used to be closed.

“These steps don’t accelerate anyplace!” a reporter referred to as out to the group.

The video display on his ethical ankle tracked all of Parnas’s scandalous turns. It tracked him as he entered the Dirksen Senate Region of enterprise Building at 11: 04, thru a steel detector, which beeped as he handed thru (he raised one overlong pant cuff to illustrate the guard the utility and persevered on his skill). It tracked him as he walked thru the hallway that linked to the Hart Building, past the aides pressed up against the glass within the space of labor of Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona, then as a lot as Schumer’s space of labor, the put he sat within the lobby and failed to originate tiny talk with the press.

“Would possibly perhaps level-headed Senator [Lindsey] Graham be apprehensive?” a reporter requested.

Certainly, Parnas spoke back. “Correct cherish Devin Nunes knew, Senator Graham knew for a in point of fact lengthy time,” he mentioned sooner than his co-counsel Stephanie Schuman interjected to diminish him off. He did no longer meet with Schumer, who used to be giving a news convention about the impeachment trial at the time.

The utility tracked him as he walked lend a hand thru the underground tunnels against the Capitol, the put he and Bondy, now carrying two inexperienced tickets, breezed past Triumph, the Insult Comic Canines, a character voiced by comic Robert Smigel. They met one other phalanx of reporters, and Parnas spoke of his desire to testify, though he realized it could well maybe maybe perhaps no longer originate a distinction.

“Trump world is cherish a cult, and most of those senators are within the cult, so I don’t know if anything else could well perhaps alternate some of their minds,” mentioned Parnas. “However confidently the final public will know what’s occurring.”

“Develop you can maybe additionally simply bear anything else to impart to Rudy Giuliani?” somebody requested.

“Repeat the truth, Rudy,” Parnas mentioned.

“Are you looking out to diminish a deal?” somebody requested.

“He’s looking out to provide an clarification for the truth,” Bondy answered for his consumer.

Requested if he could well perhaps mumble their fill praises his ankle video display, Parnas declined. “That’s a separate self-discipline,” he mentioned. “It has nothing to attain with this. Or even it does.” Requested later if the utility used to be wretched, Parnas ultimate smiled and shrugged.

Parnas’s fellowship started to crash up within the Capitol subway terminal. Bondy took his stamp thru safety and boarded a practice against the Senate gallery, the put a balcony seat used to be ready for him underneath a bust of Chester A. Arthur. Parnas and the the rest of his entourage loitered within the course of the terminal a pair of minutes longer, after which backtracked thru the space of labor buildings, making a few more scandalous turns sooner than they chanced on the ultimate exit.

After they walked lend a hand into the daylight hours, a queue of demonstrators erupted into cheers, some chasing Parnas correct down to hand him pamphlets or pose for selfies.

“That it is possible you'll perhaps maybe be a gigantic name!” a person screamed. Seeming to fill this, Parnas hailed a cab and rode off without telling the reporters the put to win him, though his ankle video display knew.

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Coronavirus News in USA: Live Updates

As new hot spots emerge, the pandemic may be entering another phase.

The simplest way to track the progress of any outbreak is by seeing how many new cases and deaths are reported in a given area each day. And in the United States, falling numbers in some of the hardest-hit places have offered glimmers of hope. Totals for the country have been on a downward curve, and in former hot spots like New York and New Jersey, the counts appear to have peaked.

But infections and deaths are rising in more than a dozen states, as they are in countries around the world, an ominous sign that the pandemic may be entering a new phase.

Wisconsin saw its highest single-day increase in confirmed cases and deaths this week, two weeks after the state’s highest court overturned a stay-at-home order. Cases are also on the rise in Alabama, Arkansas, California and North Carolina, which on Thursday reported some of the state’s highest numbers of hospitalizations and reported deaths since the crisis began.

In metropolitan areas like Fayetteville, Ark.; Yuma, Ariz.; and Roanoke and Charlottesville, Va., data show new highs may be only days or weeks away.

Outbreaks have accelerated especially sharply in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, leading the World Health Organization to say on Tuesday that it considered the Americas to be the new center of the pandemic.

And although much of the Middle East seemed to avert early catastrophe even as the virus ravaged Iran, case counts have been swelling in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Reported cases are not perfect measures to chart the spread of the virus because they depend on how much testing is done. Death counts are less dependent on testing, though official numbers are typically undercounts. Both counts, though, can indicate how the outbreak is evolving, especially in places where lockdown rules are easing or where governments have been ineffective at slowing the spread, and offer early clues about new hot spots.

That is why Wisconsin is being closely monitored. Two weeks ago, the conservative majority on the State Supreme Court overturned that state’s stay-at-home order, effectively removing the most serious restrictions on residents.

It can take several weeks after changes in behavior — like the increased movement and interactions associated with the end of a stay-at-home order — for the effect on transmissions to be reflected in the data. In Wisconsin, there were indications that the virus was still spreading before the order was lifted. But in the weeks since restrictions were overturned, the case numbers have continued to grow.

“It worries us,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison. “We wonder if this is a trend in an unfavorable direction.”

Upon arriving at work, employees should get a temperature and symptom check.

Inside the office, desks should be six feet apart. If that is not possible, employers should consider erecting plastic shields around them.

If followed, the guidelines would lead to a far-reaching remaking of the corporate work experience. They even upend years of advice on commuting, urging people to drive to work by themselves, instead of taking mass transportation or car-pooling, to avoid potential exposure to the virus.

The recommendations run from technical advice on ventilation systems (more open windows are most desirable) to a suggested abolition of communal perks like latte makers and snack bins. And some border on the impractical, if not near impossible: “Limit use and occupancy of elevators to maintain social distancing of at least 6 feet.”

For millions of Americans left out of work by the pandemic, government assistance has been a lifeline preventing a plunge into poverty, hunger and financial ruin.

This summer, that lifeline could snap, reports Ben Casselman.

The $1,200 checks sent to most households are long gone, at least for those who needed them most, with little imminent prospect for a second round. The lending program that helped millions of small businesses keep workers on the payroll will wind down if Congress does not extend it. Eviction moratoriums that kept people in their homes are expiring in many cities.

And the $600 per week in extra unemployment benefits that have allowed tens of millions of laid-off workers to pay rent and buy groceries will expire at the end of July.

The latest sign of the economic strain and the government’s role in easing it came Thursday, when the Labor Department reported that millions more Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week. More than 40 million people have filed for benefits since the crisis began, and some 30 million are receiving them.

The multitrillion-dollar patchwork of federal and state programs hasn’t kept bills from piling up or prevented long lines at food banks, but it has mitigated the damage. Now the expiration of those programs represents a cliff they are hurtling toward, for individuals and for the economy.

“The CARES Act was massive, but it was a very short-term offset to what is likely to be a long-term problem,” said Aneta Markowska, the chief financial economist for the investment bank Jefferies, referring to the legislative centerpiece of the federal rescue. “This economy is clearly going to need more support.”

Even the possibility that the programs will be allowed to expire could have economic consequences, Ms. Markowska said, as consumers and businesses brace for the loss of federal assistance.

President Trump and other Republicans have played down the need for more spending, saying the solution is for states to reopen businesses and allow companies to bring people back to work. So despite pleas from economists across the political spectrum — including Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman — any federal action is likely to be limited.

The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to give businesses more time to use money borrowed under the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers forgivable loans to small businesses that retain or rehire their workers. The bill’s fate in the Senate is uncertain, but a deal seems likely to be reached.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where it is difficult to maintain social distancing, including grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations. It also continues to emphasize how critical social distancing is.

But masks have unexpectedly crossed over from public health measures to politically charged symbols, with many shops and restaurants banning customers who do not wear them — and a few others moving to ban customers who do.

In Kentucky, a gas station told customers that no one was allowed inside its convenience store if they had their face covered. In California, a flooring store near Los Angeles has encouraged hugs and handshakes but does not permit face masks or protections. And a bar in Texas taped a poster to its front door this week that said “sorry, no masks allowed.”

In New York, the hardest-hit state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday that he would issue an executive order authorizing businesses to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings.

“That store owner has a right to protect themselves,” Mr. Cuomo said. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”

Dennis Townsend, a Republican supervisor in California’s rural Tulare County, said that as his conservative district reopened for business, masks had become a continuing point of contention.

“People tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better be wearing masks in there.’ And then other people tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better not make me wear a mask,’” he said.

Mr. Townsend said he was “not real big on wearing masks” himself but had done so when shopping.

“What I tell people is that with every freedom we have comes additional responsibility,” he said. “We’ve had one freedom suppressed for a little while, but now it’s back, and that’s going to require additional personal responsibility on our parts.”

Washington State says it has reclaimed $300 million in fraudulent unemployment claims.

Washington State, which has been battling a deluge of fraudulent unemployment claims, has managed to claw back some $300 million in payments that went out to fraudsters, officials said Thursday.

Suzi LeVine, the commissioner of Washington State’s Employment Security Department, said the recovery came from coordination among law enforcement agencies and financial institutions. She did not reveal exact numbers on recoveries or the total number of fraudulent claims and said that the state was continuing to work on additional collections while blocking more false claims.

“The criminals have not gone away because we continue to see significant highly suspicious traffic,” Ms. LeVine said.

The Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance said in a statement that it had also seen fraudsters trying to file large numbers of illegitimate claims, while the cybersecurity firm Agari said it had seen evidence of the fraudulent claims targeting states all over the country.

Unemployment claims around the country have exceeded 40 million since the start of the pandemic.

Democrats are mobilizing to turn the $2 trillion effort that Mr. Trump is overseeing into a political liability going into his re-election campaign.

The attention has focused on a small business loan program that has been marred by glitches, changing rules and cases of big publicly traded companies receiving funds while smaller shops are left waiting.

Top Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Biden have seized on examples of rich executives getting money through the Paycheck Protection Program as indicative of corporate cronyism.

The Democratic National Committee and Democratic state parties in swing states held conference calls last week with reporters and other events highlighting stories of small business owners who did not get approved for loans.

Pacronym, a progressive super PAC that focuses on digital advertising, began running a $1.5 million ad campaign in five swing states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that focused on struggling small businesses.

Some Republicans are embracing the program. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican facing a tough re-election battle, has spent nearly $500,000 on ads that promote her role in “co-authoring” the program, according to data from Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, spent $175,000 on an ad featuring small business owners and employees describing jobs and businesses that were “rescued” by Mr. McConnell’s efforts on the stimulus package.

The Trump administration has scrambled to rewrite the rules of the program on the fly as public backlash intensified. The Treasury on Thursday carved out $10 billion of money to be used for loans to underserved communities.

Sports fans can attend games at outdoor venues in Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said that starting Friday, sports fans could attend games at outdoor venues in most counties in Texas, so long as occupancy was limited to 25 percent. Fans cannot attend indoor sporting events.

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said amusement parks, traveling carnivals and water parks could open June 12. And in California, more than a dozen Indian casinos, asserting sovereignty, defied Gov. Gavin Newsom and reopened last week. The Viejas Casino and Resort in Alpine, Calif., vowed to impose strict limits on the number of people gambling at once. A majority of Indian casinos in the state have chosen to stay closed and are coordinating their reopening with the governor’s office, which has proposed a date in early June.

A French study found 1 in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19 died within a week of being hospitalized.

One in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, died within a week of being hospitalized, according to a study published on Thursday by French researchers in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Another 20 percent were put on ventilators to assist with breathing by the end of their first week in the hospital. Just 18 percent were discharged within a week.

“I don’t want to scare people, but what is true is we did not expect to see such high mortality, with 10 percent of people admitted dying in the first seven days,” said Dr. Samy Hadjadj, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Nantes in France and one of the authors of the paper.

A majority of patients in the study had Type 2 diabetes. Many people with diabetes also have cardiovascular disease, which raises the risk of death in Covid-19 patients.

But the new study, which included 1,317 patients at 53 French hospitals, found that microvascular injuries — involving tiny blood vessels supplying the eyes, kidneys and peripheral nerves — were also linked to a higher risk of death.

Obstructive sleep apnea also raised the risk of early death in these patients, while obesity and advanced age were linked to a greater likelihood of severe disease, the study found.

“This is serious,” Dr. Hadjadj said. “If you have diabetes and are elderly or have complications, be very careful. Keep away from the virus. Go on with social distancing, wash your hands carefully, keep people away who can bring you the virus.”

Dr. Hadjadj added, “You are not the kind of person who can afford to disregard these rules.”

As more people under 40 test positive in Washington State, researchers fear they will spread the virus.

People under 40 make up an increasing share of those who have tested positive for the virus in Washington State. Researchers in Seattle said that policymakers might need to focus on younger people to limit the spread.

In a new analysis, the researchers said about half of new identified cases were among people under 40, up from one-third of infections earlier in the outbreak.

Younger people may be more likely to work or participate in social activities, especially as restrictions are eased. While they do not face as high a risk of serious complications from infections, they can expose other people they encounter who may be older or who have hazardous underlying conditions, the researchers said.

“Our findings indicate a justifiable concern regarding the phased reopening plan for Washington State in late May in light of the shift in Covid-19 incidence from older to younger age,” the researchers wrote in their report, posted on the preprint server medRvix.

The researchers said government leaders may need to pursue specific advisories for children, teenagers and young adults to warn them of the risks of social interaction.

Pennsylvania House Democrats say Republicans hid a lawmaker’s positive virus test.

Democrats in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Thursday accused Republicans of keeping a lawmaker’s positive virus test a secret to avoid political embarrassment, even at the risk of exposing fellow legislators.

A Republican House member, Andrew Lewis, confirmed on Wednesday that he received a positive test on May 20 and self-isolated. Mr. Lewis said that every lawmaker or staff member he was in contact with who “met the criteria for exposure” was notified.

But Democrats disputed that, saying none of their own members were alerted even though some were near Mr. Lewis in committee meetings.

The House Democratic campaign arm accused Republicans of hiding Mr. Lewis’s positive test “to protect their public talking points against science and facts.” Another Republican representative, Russ Diamond, who said he was notified of possible exposure through contact with Mr. Lewis, had previously spoken at a shutdown protest outside the Capitol and boasted on social media of not wearing a mask while shopping.

In an emotional Facebook video recorded in his office at the Capitol, Representative Brian K. Sims, a Democrat from Philadelphia, said Mr. Diamond had “apparently been quarantining himself for weeks” but “didn’t explain that to any of us when he was in committee, talking with us or walking up and down the aisles or bumping into us or letting us hold the door open for him.”

Mr. Lewis said he had kept his positive diagnosis private “out of respect for my family and those who I may have exposed.”

Representative Ryan Bizzarro, a Democrat, disputed that Mr. Lewis had quarantined himself after his diagnosis. “We have footage of him being here,” he said.

The Trump administration will not issue a midyear update to its economic forecasts this summer, breaking decades of tradition during the uncertainty of a pandemic recession, administration officials confirmed on Thursday.

The decision will spare the administration from having to announce its internal projections for how deeply the recession will damage economic growth and how long the pain of high unemployment will persist.

When the administration last published official projections in February, it forecast economic growth of 3.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021, and growth rates at or around 3 percent for the ensuing decade. It forecast an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent for the year.

The virus has rendered those projections obsolete. Unemployment could hit 20 percent in June, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNN this week. The Congressional Budget Office said in April that it expects the economy will contract by 5.6 percent this year and end with unemployment above 11 percent.

The White House is required by law to issue both an annual budget and a midyear update to it, called a “mid-session review.” Updating economic projections in the mid-session review is optional, but it is a practice that administrations — including Mr. Trump’s — have widely followed since the review was mandated by Congress in 1970.

The review is required by law to give at least a partial window into how the administration expects the economy to perform this year and in the future.

The decision not to release updated projections was first reported by The Washington Post.

Trump administration officials have in the past resisted updating their forecasts in the face of evidence that the economy was not growing as fast as they had projected. The budget they released in February officially conceded for the first time that growth in 2018 and 2019 had not reached 3 percent, as they had predicted.

Fears about contracting the virus from contaminated surfaces have prompted many to wipe down groceries, leave packages unopened and stress about elevator buttons.

But what is the real risk? The C.D.C. recently tried to clarify its guidance: “It may be possible that a person can get Covid-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it, and then touching their own mouth, nose or possibly their eyes, but this isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”

So does this mean we can get the virus from touching a doorknob, catching a Frisbee or sharing a casserole dish? The Times asked the experts.

The best way we can protect ourselves from the virus — whether it is surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing our hands, not touching our faces and wearing masks.

Starting Thursday, anyone in Britain who has potential symptoms will be tested and, if positive, asked to list all those with whom they have recently been in close contact for at least 15 minutes. Those people, in turn, will be contacted and asked to isolate themselves for 14 days.

It is the latest national campaign that aims to prevent more infections. The results so far are mixed.

What does it feel like to have Covid-19 and not need hospitalization?

Rest and fluids are essential, but so is knowing when to call a doctor. Give yourself plenty of time to feel better.

Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Karen Barrow, Scott Cacciola, Ben Casselman, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Michael Cooper, Catie Edmondson, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Fuller, Trip Gabriel, David Gelles, Erica L. Green, Jenny Gross, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jennifer Medina, Sarah Mervosh, Talya Minsberg, Andy Newman, Nadja Popovich, Roni Caryn Rabin, Alan Rappeport, Dana Rubinstein, Margot Sanger-Katz, Anna Schaverien, Kaly Soto, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Vanessa Swales, Jim Tankersley and Katie Van Syckle.

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newyorktheater · 4 years

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These posters are from the Federal Theatre Project, a massive government program during the Great Depression to offer relief to artists, writers, directors, and theater workers by employing them. The just-passed $2 trillion stimulus deal, called CARES, does nothing close to that. The FTP created a system of regional theaters, encouraged experimentation, and made it possible for millions of Americans to see live theatre for the first time.

Congress passed, and the president signed, a $2 trillion stimulus deal that includes specific relief for arts organizations and artists, although advocates say not enough.

Officially titled CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security), the law gives $75 million each to The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to pass on to institutions that need it and $50 million to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. There was also $25 million for the John F. Kennedy Center (although it didn’t stop the Center from laying off all 96 members of the National Symphony Orchestra with only a week’s notice.)

Arts advocates had asked for $4 billion.

“Germany has rolled out a staggering €50 Billion ($54 billion) aid package for artists and cultural businesses, putting other countries to shame” –Artnet

“Although $150 million isn’t chump change, it’s only 3.75 percent of the original ask. You could film a season of Westworld with that money; you will obviously not be able to restart an entire sector.” – Helen Shaw, New York Magazine.(who is counting just the NEA and NEH grants.)

“,,,the institutional damage done by the coronavirus looks at first glance to be especially devastating to theater. Even the biggest regional theaters have either laid off staff or are days away from doing so…Imagine, then, the plight of the smaller companies, the no-budget storefront and off-Broadway houses whose risk-taking productions supply the artistic fertilizer for America’s theatrical culture. Many of these groups—perhaps most of the smaller ones—simply won’t reopen when the crisis abates. As for the actors, directors, playwrights, designers and other professionals who make sure there’s a show onstage when the curtain goes up…well, they’re in can’t-pay-the-rent trouble…” — Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

Still, other provisions in CARES will likely aid these theaters and individual theater artists (F.A.Q. on Stimulus Checks, Unemployment and the Coronavirus Plan – NY Times.)

The $1,200 “paycheck” to individuals making less than $75,000.

Calculate how much your stimulus check will be (likely, $1,200)https://t.co/sKLsGs6yES

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 26, 2020

$377 billion for small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, which may offer a boon to eligible arts businesses and nonprofits – Jamine Weber, Hyperallergic

Expanded Unemployment Insurance that includes coverage for furloughed workers, freelancers, and “gig economy” workers, which describes, for example, almost all actors, directors and playwrights. The bill increases such payments by $600 a week for four months, in addition to what one claims under a state unemployment program. – Hayley Levitt, Theatermania

What the theater industry would hope for the future:

“One of the things we’re talking about internally,” TCG’s Corinna Schulenburg told Helen Shaw, “has been the way in which the scale of this catastrophe — a wholesale shutting down of the field — is only really comparable is the Great Depression. We’re looking at 20 percent or higher unemployment! So what lessons can we find in the Federal Theater Project?” Under the New Deal, the government’s super-spending effort that put America back to work in the ’30s, the Federal Theater Project only accounted for 0.5 percent of the Works Progress Administration spending, which, if you applied that to the current bailout, would come to $10 billion. Schulenburg has dreams for that money. And oh, oh, oh — a new New Deal is a heady thought. We’re still surrounded by the structures the WPA gave us, including dams, bridges, airports, roads — and, yes, our regional theater system. Maybe a new one could bring it back.”

Summer theater canceled too?

Three Broadway shows that were scheduled to open in April are facing facts, and moving to sometime in the Fall: Roundabout’s “Caroline, or Change” and “Birthday Candles” and Lincoln Center Theater’s “Flying Sunset.” Since both “Hangmen” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” announced they would not be returning at all when Broadway resumes, that leaves 11 shows still officially scheduled to open in the 2019-2020 Broadway season.

No surprise: The 74th Annual Tony Awards will be postponed to a date that will be determined after Broadway reopens. It was originally scheduled for June 7th

A bad news/good news announcement: Ars Nova has canceled the remainder of its 2019-2020 season, originally set to conclude on June 30, 2020. But it’s committed to paying all 150 staff, crew and cast through June 30th.

New York City Center has announced the cancellation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, an Encores concert scheduled for May 6-10,

“As nonprofits around the country cancel all spring programs, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival halts performances through Labor Day, and will lay off 80 percent of its staff….Lincoln Center Theater has decided to move two summer productions to next season; the Public Theater says it is awaiting guidance from local officials before determining what impact the pandemic might have on its popular Shakespeare in the Park program. And in the Berkshires, a summer destination in Western Massachusetts with a rich concentration of cultural institutions, Barrington Stage Company has already canceled its first production, which was scheduled to run from mid-May to early June….“ — Michael Paulson, NY Times

To avoid any more little jolts of disappointment, perhaps we should just assume the following for all theater: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, __ (theater) has announced the cancellation of __ (show) which was schedule for __ (months from now!)

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 29, 2020

Hope Goes Online

A huge amount of theater is going online, which I’m trying to track by continually updating my roundup, Where To Get Your Theater Fix Online, Old Favorites and New Experiments

Some highlights in the last week:

TrickleUp, a new “grass-roots subscription platform” for $10 a month, hopes to raise money for artists in need. Launched March 23 by a group of downtown artists and artistic directors, It promises “videos of solo performances, conversation, and other behind-the-scenes goodies,” Its catalogue so far features such fare as Taylor Mac reading scenes from “Gary”, Sarah Ruhl reading some of her poems, Mia Katigbak singing La Vie En Rose, Dominique Morisseau doing a monologue from Skeleton Crew, Suzan-Lori Parks singing “Colored All My Life,” Lucas Hnath reading material cut from his play “A Doll’s House Part 2″

Starting April 2nd, and every Thursday thereafter, ‘National Theatre at Home” will stream FOR FREE on its YouTube channel a production from its NT Live collection, recordings of their stage productions that are such high quality that they are normally presented in cinemas worldwide. The first production online April 2 (and for seven days after that) is “One Man, Two Guv’nors,” the slapstick comedy with a Tony winning performance by James Corden.

PBS has unlocked a selection of its shows in its Live From Lincoln Center and Great Performances series, from April until the end of May. These includes a few of my favorite things (yes, “The Sound of Music” — not the movie — as well as “Red” and “Present Laughter.”)

Playing on Air, a decade-old podcast of original radio plays, announces its star-studded season of ten plays, unfolding each week through the end of May.

There is new immersive theater for the age of self-distancing. For details on these and other virtual theater, again, check out Where To Get Your Theater Fix Online, Old Favorites and New Experiments

My reviews of Theater Wit’s Teenage Dick and Rattlestick’s The Siblings Play, both stage plays that were recorded right before the theaters were shut down, and now presented online.

Anne (Courtney Rikki Green) teaching Richard (MacGregor Arney), who has cerebral palsy, how to dance, in “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s update of Shakespeare’s play Richard III, streaming online through April 19.

Ed Ventura as Leon/Lee/Chookie. and Cindy De La Cruz as his sister Marie/Rie-rie/Sweet-pea, in “The Siblings Play” by Ten Dara Santiago, now available online

Other Theater News:

a closeup of the Coronavirus

Broadway and the Coronavirus: Updated Questions and Answers

Hey everyone. I just wanted to update you all that I’ve found out that I’ve tested positive for Covid-19. I’ve been in quarantine since Broadway shows shut down on Thursday, March 12th, and I’m feeling much better.… https://t.co/KwJSPgcRct

— Aaron Tveit (@AaronTveit) March 23, 2020

Congrats to playwright @willarbery, winner of $50K @WhitingFdn Award “intellectually audacious, formally sly, w/ the courage to let characters seize the stage with impassioned arguments” My review of his “Heroes of the 4th Turning”https://t.co/pSA2Ebywgj pic.twitter.com/OxCHztANU2

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 26, 2020

On #WorldTheatreDay2020, a look at the world’s gorgeous theaters. We can’t enter them right now, but we can still celebrate theater in our hearts (and online) Theater is more than buildings. It’s 2,500 years of history, & literature, & tradition & lovehttps://t.co/i2RtwDGU3H pic.twitter.com/3tdoqBYHHM

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 27, 2020

NY Theater Blog Roundup: Responding to COVID-19 in unexpected ways https://t.co/mRwicA4Sz5 pic.twitter.com/BX2ZgZchL3

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 29, 2020

Great idea from @BroadwayWorld & @jenashtep — #BWWBookclub. First up Jennifer’s book, Untold Stories of Broadway Vol. 1 — free on Amazon via Kindle, and then discuss each chapter on Broadway World’s message board weekly starting Monday, March 30https://t.co/D8hyYZyrPM pic.twitter.com/7QpVSsPIBJ

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 26, 2020

Advice and Uplift

Step-by-step advice for surviving isolation from an astronaut, a journalist, and a political prisoner, who each spent long stretches alone: Read. Exercise. Laugh.

Message from the medical personnel of an Emergency Room, via @MaudNewton, whose sister is an ER nurse. (My brother is an ER doctor) pic.twitter.com/1XmpE10gR2

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 28, 2020

Cheerful https://t.co/g7TKl7rMgH

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 29, 2020

Isolation latino style… pic.twitter.com/17AlnYHYIk

— Enrique Acevedo (@Enrique_Acevedo) March 28, 2020

What The World Needs Now….are virtual choirs and orchestras https://t.co/OrTJrNGMuH https://t.co/ijv1Z0wbOK

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 29, 2020

Rest in Peace

McNally as a young man

Terrence McNally

Playwright Terrence McNally standing in front of Martin Beck Theater where “The Rink” was playing in 1984, the Kander and Ebb musical for which he wrote the book, his first musical on Broadway

McNally receiving Doctor of Fine Arts from NYU in 2019

Playwright Terrence McNally, 81, from complications of the coronavirus. (“Theater Changes Hearts…”:My gallery of scenes from some of his 36 plays and 10 musicals, plus his Tony Award acceptance speech..)

We love this quote from Terrence McNally—his response to Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) asking, “Can theatre change the world?” We are sending love and light to his family, friends, and collaborators today.https://t.co/7pfmi99yqy pic.twitter.com/2A1vrEjU4q

— HowlRound Theatre Commons (@HowlRound) March 25, 2020

Mark Blum

Actor Mark Blum, 69, from complications of the coronavirus.A familiar presence on the NY stage: nine-time Broadway veteran (Assembled Parties), 26 Off-Broadway plays (Rancho Viejo, Amy and the Orphans),teacher (HB Studio)

With love and heavy hearts, Playwrights Horizons pays tribute to Mark Blum, a dear longtime friend and a consummate artist who passed this week. Thank you, Mark, for all you brought to our theater, and to theaters and audiences across the world. We will miss you. pic.twitter.com/NMVZFB5hPb

— Playwrights Horizons (@phnyc) March 26, 2020

David Schramm, 73, Broadway veteran and founding member of The Acting Company best known for playing Roy Biggs in the television series Wings

What the $2 trillion stimulus means for the arts and artists. Summer canceled too? Hope goes online. #Stageworthy News of the Week Congress passed, and the president signed, a $2 trillion stimulus deal that includes specific relief for arts organizations and artists, although advocates say not enough.

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gordonwilliamsweb · 5 years

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Despite A Birth By A Colorado Legislator, Paid Family Leave Bill Feels Labor Pains

DENVER — When Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado state senator, gave birth to a boy in January, she became only the second lawmaker in the state to have a baby during a legislative season.

The first, Sen. Barbara Holme, delivered just two days before lawmakers adjourned nearly 30 years ago. But because she was part of a Democratic minority at the time, no one worried much about the votes Holme was missing, much less her need for paid maternity leave.

“That was the year I was born,” said Pettersen, also a Democrat. “Unfortunately, we haven’t come very far from 1981.”

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Legislative Hurdles

Colorado Republicans have killed paid leave bills in years past. But last year, when Democrats took control, paid leave looked like a possibility.

A Broad Consensus

By February, bill sponsors had shifted to a compromise that would require companies to offer paid family and medical time off but would leave it up to employers to determine how to provide that.

It’s not nearly the benefit that paid-leave advocates had hoped for.

Waning Support

It’s unknown whether the backers of the ballot measure would continue to press the issue if the legislature passes the compromise bill instead of the full state-run benefit advocates sought.

Pettersen has pledged to bring her infant son, Davis, to the chamber floor for the crucial vote — a tangible display of what’s at stake.

Despite A Birth By A Colorado Legislator, Paid Family Leave Bill Feels Labor Pains published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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unixcommerce · 5 years

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Quiz: Do These 10 Labor Laws Apply to Your Small Business?

Running your business and making a profit are challenging enough. But you also must be aware of labor laws that apply to your small business. In this quiz we test your knowledge about laws that could affect small businesses like yours.

In the United States Several well-established labor laws go back decades. Originally most were designed to protect workers. There’s a silver lining for businesses. Yes, compliance can occasionally feel tedious, but step back and look at the big picture. Reasonable laws give us certainty. There’s less guesswork. They level the playing field and provide a framework for you to operate a safe, productive and respectful workplace.

The labor laws and regulations start at the Federal level, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). But there’s a whole patchwork of state labor laws, too. Even cities may have employment ordinances.

See how much you know about these labor laws – take the quiz!

Quiz: Labor Laws That Apply to Small Business

Results

–

#1 I must provide a safe workplace for employees, true or false?

True

False

According to Employer.gov, “You must provide a workplace free of known health and safety hazards and comply with certain safety standards, rules, and regulations, which may vary depending on your industry and nature of operations. Your employees have the right to refuse dangerous work, provided certain conditions are met.”

OSHA is the main law that covers most employers, but other laws may apply to specific industries (e.g., mines). Also, 22 states have their own occupational safety divisions which are monitored by OSHA. Read.

#2 How much is the hourly minimum wage under U.S. Federal law?

$15.00

$11.00

$7.25

$3.00

Under U.S. Federal law, the minimum wage an employer can pay employees is $7.25 per hour.

Tipped employees may have lower hourly rates; however, their combined average tips and wage must equal the minimum.

Keep in mind that 30 states (including the District of Columbia) and some municipalities like New York City require a higher wage than the Federal minimum. A state map of minimum wages can be found at the Department of Labor website, here.

#3 Hourly workers who work overtime are entitled to double their rate of pay – true or false?

True

False, mostly

Under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, hourly workers who work more than 40 hours in a week are entitled to time-and-a-half (in other words, one and a half times their regular pay rate) for overtime hours.

State laws may require a different overtime rate. For example, California requires overtime of twice the rate of pay for any hours over 12 in a day.

#4 Is my small business required to display posters advising workers of labor law rights?

Yes, for certain laws

No, small businesses are exempt from all poster requirements

The correct answer is yes, you must display posters if the law requires one and if it applies to your type of business.

The Department of Labor has a helpful poster advisor tool to tell you which posters you must display. There are also state laws that could apply.

#5 Can kids under age 14 be employed?

Yes, always

Only for limited types of jobs

No, never

Yes, kids under 14 can be employed, but only under limited circumstances. Children under age 14 are permitted to:

deliver newspapers,

babysit,

work as an actor or performer,

work in a business owned by their parents, or

do limited agricultural work.

Other exceptions may apply, but those are the most common. Hours are greatly restricted, and work may not interfere with schooling. This is under Federal law. State laws may impose further limitations.

#6 A teenager aged 16 or 17 is limited to 8 hours of work a week, true or false?

True

False

In general this is false.

Under Federal law, teenagers between 16 and 17 have no restrictions on the number of hours they can work.

Some state laws restrict hours. But even those generally allow more than 8 hours a week. For example, the State of Washington limits 16-17 year olds to 20 hours a week — and more when school is not in session.

Always check the laws in your state.

#7 Is there a minimum age for when my minor kids can work in my business?

Yes

There are no minimum age restrictions under Federal law. But please put your child’s health and welfare first.

Also, other legal restrictions still apply. For example, your minor children cannot work in your business if you are engaged in a hazardous industry. State laws may also apply. Read more.

#8 Is a small business required to offer family leave to employees?

Yes, all businesses must offer family leave

Possibly, depending on your location and size

No, never

The correct answer is: possibly. It depends on the size of your business and where you are located.

Under U.S. Federal law you must offer family leave if your business has 50 or more employees. However, some states and a few municipalities require family leave even by smaller businesses.

What’s more, this is an area of the law that is rapidly changing. So it’s important to stay abreast of laws in your area. Read more.

#9 Am I required to hire a disabled person even if someone else is better qualified?

Yes

The correct answer is, no. You are not required to hire a disabled person if someone else is better qualified — as long as you do not base your decision on the disability.

However, Federal law will not permit you to discriminate against a disabled person.

Also, if a disabled person asks for a reasonable accommodation to do the job, you must give it.

The Federal law applies to employers with 15 or more employees. State requirements may apply to smaller employers.

Over 50 million Americans have disabilities. Many employers have found disabled employees to be excellent workers who contribute much to the workplace.

#10 Every business must use E-Verify to prove workers have the right to work in the U.S. – true or false?

True

False

False.

E-Verify is a good electronic system that can help you comply with the law. However, e-Verify is currently voluntary and not required except for government contractors or if required by state law.

However, as an employer, you are required to verify that you are hiring workers legally authorized to work in the United States. This means you must file Form I-9 and verify certain related information.

But whether you use e-Verify to help you in that process is your choice.

finish

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This article, “Quiz: Do These 10 Labor Laws Apply to Your Small Business?” was first published on Small Business Trends

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courtneytincher · 5 years

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Yet Another Journalist Who Accepted Favors From Jeffrey Epstein

Photo Illustration by The Daily BeastName-brand journalist Edward Jay Epstein was seduced by the charms of accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein more than three decades ago. Yet even after the Miami Herald, multiple lawsuits and law enforcement authorities detailed how he sexually abused dozens of teenage girls and sometimes raped them, the late Jeffrey Epstein’s spell apparently remains strong.“Look, take this about Jeffrey. He is the poster boy for rehabilitation,” said the 83-year-old Epstein (no relation to the convicted sex offender who authorities said hanged himself in his jail cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center a month after his July arrest on new federal charges of sex trafficking with minors). “He went to prison [after pleading guilty to reduced charges in 2008]. He served his term [13 months, nine of them on work-release that allowed him daytime visits to his Palm Beach, Florida, office]. He got out. The U.S. attorney’s office said he stuck completely to the terms of his parole. He registered as a sex offender—which is no fun, but which was something he was supposed to do. And he made $500 million.”In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Edward Epstein added: “I did hang around with Jeffrey because I was fascinated with him. For one thing, the women around him were some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life. These were not underage women. They were women like [former model and Miss Sweden] Eva Andersson and [actress] Morgan Fairchild. None of them were really girlfriends of his, but they hung around him…“I don’t understand Jeffrey,” Edward continued. “I can’t conceive of why he would go out with an underage woman, unless your theory’s right that he’s a pedophile…It wasn’t like he was some sort of ugly gnome that couldn’t get a girl…When I knew him, I never saw so many good-looking women who stayed in his little orbit.”New York Times Reporter Solicited $30,000 for Charity From Jeffrey EpsteinEdward Epstein also cast doubt on the notion—advanced by the November 2018 Miami Herald investigation of Jeffrey’s extraordinarily lenient 2008 sentence for soliciting prostitution and sex trafficking with a minor, an article that ultimately prompted the resignation of Donald Trump’s labor secretary, former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, and new federal charges from the Southern District of New York—that Jeffrey destroyed dozens of young lives.“I’m not sure he destroyed their lives,” Edward said. “He paid them money, and they went on for six or seven years giving him massages. I don’t know if that destroyed their lives. Getting a massage or getting a girl to masturbate you doesn’t necessarily destroy your life.” (One of Jeffrey’s victims, Jennifer Araoz—who is now suing his estate and says the financier raped her at age 14—told a courtroom after Epstein’s suicide, “The fact that he felt entitled to take away my innocence…hurts me so much.”) Edward added: “Everything about Jeffrey was a con. I never thought, ‘here’s an honest guy.’ I just thought here’s a New York character…I think it’s a terrible thing, and a stupid thing, and a perverse thing, to have any sex with underage girls…I don’t believe many of the stories about Glenn Dubin, Prince Andrew—I don’t believe that they’re stupid enough, if they knew the girl was underage, why would anyone? You could be compromised, you could be blackmailed, especially by Jeffrey. Bill Clinton? They’d have to be out of their minds.”Edward stressed: “I never even discussed these things with Jeffrey”—whom he described as an unreliable witness and “a liar,” once claiming to Edward that he was, among other things, a private detective, and, another time, that he flew every month to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. “Maybe he was a calculated liar, but I had a feeling it was pathological.”“If you say he’s a pedophile and he’s going out with children, that’s not anything I know,” Edward said, noting that he never rode on Jeffrey’s jet, visited any of his homes beyond the East 71st Street townhouse, or was offered a massage. “Nineteen is ‘teenage’ too.” Pressed in the interview to account for credible allegations in official government documents as well as the media, Edward conceded that young women working for Jeffrey “recruited underage girls…mainly from massage parlors, by the way—that’s what his lawyers say, but that doesn’t make it any more legal,” Edward said. “I can’t imagine what happened, ok? I think he asked for younger and younger women. That’s just my guess.”Yet Edward suggested that Jeffrey’s July 2019 arrest and the new charges—a decade after he served his original time—were an act of bad faith on the federal government’s part.“If he bribed [Acosta or other officials] to get the deal, then obviously that’s a whole other criminal business,” Edward said. “But if they gave him the deal, if he negotiated and got it, then that was the price that society agreed on, and that was the price that he paid.”Despite news reports about a U.S. Marshals investigation of Jeffrey’s 2018 plane trips with apparently underage girls as young as 11 or 12, Edward said he’s unaware that his onetime friend was acting suspiciously and possibly violating the terms of his sentencing agreement. Edward Jay Epstein, who has contributed articles to The Daily Beast, spoke by phone as Graydon Carter’s new online magazine, Airmail, published My Tea with Jeffrey Epstein, a lengthy and oddly non-judgmental chronicle of Edward’s 32-year, on-again, off-again friendship with the mysterious, Gatsby-like financial adviser.After Jeffrey’s arrest in July, Edward refused a request from The Daily Beast to discuss his unusual pal.He did so, he explained, “because Jeffrey was alive, and I didn’t want to add to the misery of someone who was in prison.”Known for his book-length investigations of the JFK assassination, the financial shenanigans of Hollywood, and the secret wars between the American and Russian spy agencies, Edward Epstein said he befriended the self-avowed financial whiz in the late 1980s, accepted personal favors from him—including first-class plane tickets and free lodging—but then didn’t speak with him for 24 years. (At least one other journalist has admitted taking favors from Jeffrey Epstein—former New York Times business reporter Landon Thomas Jr., who wrote a puff piece about him while he was facing criminal charges and successfully solicited a $30,000 charitable donation from Epstein for a Harlem school.)The breach with Edward occurred after Jeffrey cut him off over Edward’s thinly-veiled 1989 Manhattan, inc. “Wall Street Babylon” column (in which Jeffrey wasn’t named but was described in detail) that exposed some of his dubious business practices and brought unwelcome attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the Airmail article, Edward wrote about a “frantic call from an executive at Simon & Schuster” who had met Jeffrey at Edward’s December 6, 1988 birthday dinner.“He told me that he had given Epstein $70,000 to invest in a deal to take over the chemical company Pennwalt. After sending the money, he had not received the necessary papers, and Epstein was no longer returning his calls. He phoned one of the principals in the deal, who said he had never heard of the executive,” Edward wrote.Edward recounted how he used a computer program Jeffrey had provided him to browse through Jeffrey’s financial transactions, where he found dozens of demands for the return of investment money and evidence of a twice-bounced check.Send The Daily Beast a Tip“As I read through this material, I found nothing about the publishing executive’s money, but I grew increasingly queasy about Epstein,” Edward wrote, adding that he never discovered anything about the Simon & Schuster exec’s money.On the phone, Edward repeatedly refused to identify the publishing mogul, who he recalled had offered Jeffrey and his date at the birthday dinner a ride to Palm Beach on his corporate jet.“I feel guilty about the whole thing because I introduced them,” Edward confided. “I’m not gonna tell you who it is—and the only reason is that I don’t want him screaming and shouting at me…He’ll go ballistic. You can guess who it is…To tell you the truth, he was a friend of mine and at a certain point he told me he did get his money back.”Attempts to reach Simon & Schuster’s larger-than-life former chief executive, Richard E. Snyder, were unsuccessful, so The Daily Beast cannot confirm whether he is the publisher in question.Describing their falling-out in the Airmail article, meanwhile, Edward wrote that he didn’t identify Jeffrey in his Manhattan, inc. column “because he refused to speak to the fact-checker.”“You caused me a lot of trouble,” Edward—in his Daily Beast interview—recalled Jeffrey fuming in a furious phone call over the column, which suggested he had improperly used inside information in one of his deals. “I never disliked Jeffrey, by the way,” Edward said. “He disliked me, but I never disliked him.”Their relationship—which had included invitations to parties at Edward’s Upper East Side apartment and piano-concert soirees at the home of music and art philanthropist Stuart Pivar—suddenly resumed in 2013, Edward Epstein said, after he published a New York Review of Books essay about his old college professor and mentor Vladimir Nabokov, and Jeffrey invited him to his East 71st Street mansion to discuss the author of Lolita, Jeffrey’s favorite novel.Jeffrey boasted that he kept copies of Nabokov’s masterpiece in various bedrooms of his residences and aboard his private jet, nicknamed by the press the “Lolita Express.”Their relationship continued well into 2019, with personal visits, tea at the mansion, walks in Central Park and email exchanges, Edward said. “The last time I communicated with him was actually over emails, when Robert Kraft was arrested,” he recounted, citing Jeffrey’s curiosity about the New England Patriot owner’s February arrest for receiving handjobs in a Florida massage parlor. “His position was pretty interesting: If Robert Kraft and all the people going to that parlor were committing a crime, can the police just sit there and watch lots of people committing crimes and not interfere? That was the question I asked him.“And he answered that ‘the police were going through my garbage and everything, and if they had found that the girls were underage’—and he never himself admitted that they were underage—‘they should have stopped it.’ In other words, Jeffrey’s point was that the girls were acting illicitly if they were underage.”The Airmail article—actually Chapter 46 of Edward’s unpublished memoir, he said—also reports ethically problematic details about its author: that Edward accepted free lodging in the Santa Monica, California, apartment that Jeffrey rented for then-girlfriend Eva Andersson, and also accepted free first-class airline upgrades—which turned out to be illegal—from Jeffrey, who was later the subject of one of his columns for the now-defunct business magazine Manhattan, inc.In Airmail, Edward recounted an early meeting with Jeffrey in 1987: “As we finished the tea, I mentioned I was leaving for Spain on Monday. ‘How do you go?’ he asked. ‘Iberia Airlines,’ I said, adding that I always flew coach. ‘If you like, I can upgrade you to first class. Much better food.’ ‘How?’ ‘Drop your ticket off with my doorman tomorrow morning. It won’t cost you a penny.’Edward told The Daily Beast that he took advantage of Jeffrey’s plane-ticket largesse a few more times after that, until an official at a Japanese airline rejected his first-class ticket because it was bogus, and sent him back to the economy cabin.Edward said he understood that Jeffrey somehow had gained access to various airlines’ computer systems and was able to claim first-class seats.After the Japanese airline embarrassment, “I certainly did confront him,” Edward said, describing the fake first-class tickets as “theft of services.” “He said ‘don’t ask me anything. It works one-third of the time.’ ”Asked if it gave him pause as a journalist to be accepting favors and freebies from a potential subject of his journalism—and one who Edward acknowledged clearly wanted to be written about—he breezily replied: “I wasn’t writing about Jeffrey, but it gave me great pause,” but only because the first-class plane tickets turned out to be fake.“I didn’t plan to write anything about him [back in the late ‘80s]. He was no one,” Edward said by way of justifying his acceptance of Jeffrey’s gifts. “Yeah, Jeffrey wanted a column, but I had no intention of writing it…And if I wrote it, I’ve never written a favorable column about anyone…I take that back. I have written one or two favorable columns. But normally, you know, people hated me…I would never have accepted a favor if I planned to write a column about him. But an interview’s a favor. When [former International Monetary Fund director and alleged rapist] Dominique Strauss-Kahn gave me an interview, it’s a favor to a journalist to get an interview, because otherwise you can’t sell the story.”Of course, as Edward Epstein acknowledges, he did end up writing about Jeffrey in the column that interrupted their relationship.But he said he has no regrets. “If you asked me this a few years ago, I would have said I regret writing that piece that got him angry at me. But now I’m sort of happy I wrote that piece and he stopped speaking to me because at least I have no connections to his perverse acts…Whatever he did, it was pretty bad.”“I hung around—and gone on vacation with—lots of dubious characters,” he said, adding with a laugh. “Remember there was a character on the radio called Boston Blackie? His logo was ‘friend of those who have no friends.’…I don’t make personal judgments. That’s not my business.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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consource · 5 years

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“Cruel War Against Nature Itself”: Slavery and The Deleted Portions of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence

By Sebastian van Bastelaer, ConSource Program Manager

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence, with its soaring prose regarding the universal rights of mankind, is one of the most recognizable passages in history. As the events of 1776 continue to recede into the past, its immortal phrases—“We hold these truths to be self evident,” “all men are created equal,” “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—remain resonant.

What about the rest of the document? Following the preamble is an indictment spelling out charges against King George III, asserting, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.”[i] Jefferson spelled out the many indignities that the King and his government had inflicted on Americans. While these are generally familiar to scholars of the Revolution, they are often overlooked by the general populace.

It is easy to understand how the core of the document has generally escaped the attention of most Americans. This indictment focuses on specific constitutional and political issues seemingly mired in the late eighteenth century, .. Indeed, reading the indictment without a sense of its context and its historical roots is like reading correspondence from a marital squabble long since resolved, whether by divorce or by reconciliation. And yet, such sophisticated scholars as John Phillip Reid and Pauline Maier insist that that indictment was the core of the Declaration. For Maier, the preamble that we all revere was but the intellectual launching pad for the Declaration’s real purpose – declaring independence because George III had betrayed his kingly responsibilities and was acting like a tyrant. For Reid, the preamble was beside the point, for on his reading it’s the indictment that is the reason for the Declaration’s existence.

The indictment presented by Jefferson for the Second Continental Congress demands attention, though, because it gives context and legal reasoning for independence. The Revolution was about something – and the charges against the King distill that something. The indictment undergirds the inspiring language of the preamble and convinces a skeptical world – and, perhaps, a skeptical or heedless posterity – of the necessity of Congress’ actions.

Further, the overlooked part of the Declaration reveals the political arguments and commitments articulated by and speaking for the Thirteen Colonies. The grievances that made it into the final draft reflect the Americans’ priorities—the administration of justice, the operation of colonial assemblies, trade and tax policies, safety from domestic insurrections, and wars with Native Americans. The words and phrases and whole passages that did not survive Congress’s editing process also deserve our attention. Although in the summer of 1776 the colonies presented a united front against Britain—in fact, on July 19, fifteen days after the signing, the Continental Congress inserted the word “unanimous” to the Declaration after New York’s assent—divisions among the states and sections, and the interests of individual delegates, influenced the final outcome.

Jefferson’s original draft, which to his dying day he insisted was the best version, came under scrutiny soon after he finished his work. His fellow members on the “Committee of Five” tasked with declaring independence—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston—made few revisions.

Yet when the full Congress took up his work, they carried out a thorough edit that Jefferson later called a “mutilation,” Cutting about one-quarter of the text. Most changes were minor and semantical. The phrase “certain inalienable rights” replaced “inherent inalienable rights,” for example, and the line announcing independence was replaced by the language of the Lee Resolution. Other emendations and deletions proved more explosive. Left on the cutting-room floor was one particularly venomous attack on George III, as even the fiercely pro-independence John Adams found it distasteful. Moreover, delegates of Scottish dissent demanded the cut of a reference to “Scotch & other foreign mercenaries.”

The most significant change has caused much misunderstanding to this day. In his original draft, Jefferson had included a long passage blaming King George III for the slave trade. The “piratical” system in which “MEN should be bought and sold,” Jefferson argued, was the fault of the British king, who was merely interested in protecting the commercial interests of slave traders. Citing George III’s vetoes of colonial attempts to limit or abolish the slave trade, he insisted that the king’s protection of the slave trade was a “cruel war against human nature itself.”

Jefferson’s earlier writings had included a similar charge. In his 1774 tract A Summary View of the Rights of British America, he had written: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object …it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative.”[ii]

Why did Jefferson included this denunciation of the slave trade in the Declaration? After all, he was a lifelong slaveowner who had never followed up on his early, idealistic promises to abandon slavery. The questions continue to fly. Was he trying to forestall charges that Americans were hypocrites by foisting the blame for slavery on George III? Was he trying to lay groundwork for a later American attempt to abolish slavery once the mon arch lost his power to interfere with American efforts to end the slave trade? Was he so carried away by the task of framing the Declaration that he simply did not realize that delegates from Southern states would adamantly oppose any blow struck by the Declaration against slavery?

Regardless of Jefferson’s underlying motives, the passage’s inclusion was intended to make a strong point. Its length and tone underscored its importance: historian Garry Wills wrote, “The slavery clause, is, admittedly, emphatic by its position—last in the war-atrocities list, penultimate in the whole list of grievances (followed only by the summary charge of not redressing the grievances).”[iii] Jefferson was not alone in grasping the importance of this accusation; John Adams thought it was the best part of the entire Declaration.[iv]

Why, then, did it fail to make the cut? One key reason was that Jefferson, after all, was not writing just for himself but drafting a document that would speak both for the Second Continental Congress in particular and America in general. Dooming his passionate denunciation (whether self-serving or not) to excision were the interests of his fellow delegates and the states that they represented. Slavery was still legal in every one of the thirteen colonies present in the Continent al Congress, and most Americans regarded it as part of the order of nature in all societies – ancient and modern alike. Southerners regarded slavery as a useful source of labor and an equally useful economic and legal institution; Northerners recognized that they might well profit indirectly from slavery by their shipping’s participation in the slave trade both domestic and international: “tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them for others.”[v] Recognizing this whirling confusion of reasons and interests cutting against the slavery passage, Congress removed the contentious paragraph.

This particular change made to Jefferson’s “rough draught” demonstrates that deep and contentious divisions within Congress, some of which would persist for nearly a century, would continue to threaten independence and American unity. In essence, the episode in 1776 foreshadowed similar conflicts in 1787 in another body that met in the same building, in the same room – the Federal; Convention of 1787. Analysts of Americans’ continuing struggles with the issues of slavery and racism have concluded that opposition to slavery among American people and politicians alike was present but mild, confronting fierce and determined defense of slavery by politicians in key states. As long as the moral case against slavery could not defeat the economic, legal, and political claims in its defense, such moral claims as that implicit in Jefferson’s “slavery passage” were doomed to defeat. But they continue to challenge us today, as we struggle with slavery’s and racism’s odious and insistent legacies.

Sources:

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence (1776).

Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774).

Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Publishing, 1997).

John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: The Free Press, 1977).

James Munves, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence: The writing and editing of the document that marked the birth of the United States of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978),

John Phillip Reid, “The Irrelevance of the Declaration,” reprinted in Hendrik Hartog, ed., Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law (New York: New York University, 1981, pp.48-81.

Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2017).

[i] Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence (1776).

[ii] Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774).

[iii] Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2017), 310.

[iv] Miller, The Wolf by the Ears, 8-9.

[v] Cited in Munves, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, 108.

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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How World War II Almost Broke American Politics

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-world-war-ii-almost-broke-american-politics/

How World War II Almost Broke American Politics

poster=”http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201906/3370/1155968404_6045392514001_6045390969001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404″

true

History Dept.

Today we celebrate the war as a feel-good moment of unity. The truth is, the country had harsh divisions we’d recognize today.

When Allied forces launched a dramatic air and sea assault on German-occupied France 75 years ago Thursday, the very scale and audacity of the operation were awe-inspiring. In the early-morning hours of June 6, hordes of planes dropped over 10,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines; hundreds of warships and thousands more landing craft would soon deliver 130,000 troops to the beaches of Normandy—most of them British or American—on the first day of the assault.

It was a remarkable achievement—and one of the reasons why, so many years later, Americans in a divided country now think of THE WORLD WAR II years as a beacon of feel-good unity and patriotism: Glenn Miller tunes on the radio, war bond posters in every window, Rosie the Riveter at her station “all the day long whether rain or shine, she’s a part of the assembly line.”

Story Continued Below

That image, however—the war as a moment of American domestic comity—might come as a surprise to anyone who lived through those years. In fact, the nation that waged that war was racked by deep political divisions, some with echoes that are still reverberating today.

In the years leading up to its entry into World War II, the United States was bitterly divided over the New Deal and vehemently at odds over whether it should enter the conflict erupting in Europe. Even during the war, the country remained beset by racial and ethnic animosities that pitted Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Jews and white Americans against people of color. Partisan rancor posed a steep barrier to the extreme measures that mobilization required: mass taxation, rationing, wage and price fixing, conscription and surveillance. The business community sharply resisted the shift from civilian to military production. Organized labor loudly demanded its share of wartime prosperity. Even as the country fell in line with this vast expansion of state authority, outwardly uniting behind the war effort, discord boiled just beneath the surface, revealing itself in violent homefront outbursts and acid displays of political demagoguery.

The war almost tore America apart. And yet, it didn’t. The country ultimately rallied behind its popular but controversial wartime president to transform itself into the “arsenal of democracy.”

It’s easy to forget how unlikely an achievement it was. Just four years before D-Day, as Franklin Roosevelt launched his campaign for an unprecedented third term as president, America’s military lay in shambles. With just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army ranked 18th in the world—smaller than that of even Switzerland and Bulgaria. When FDR arrived at Ogdensburg, New York, in the spring of 1940, several months before he signed into law a selective service act that instituted a new draft of fighting-aged men, he encountered a woeful scene. Ten thousand troops drilled without equipment, broomsticks substituting for rifles and trucks for tanks. The men “haven’t got the bodies soldiers must have,” worried a seasoned military hand. “They haven’t got the psychology of the soldier.” They were “short-winded and with legs that won’t stand up to a hard match.” The following year, when Japan attacked and largely obliterated the Navy’s Pacific fleet, little remained of America’s capacity to prosecute the war.

The story of how Americans surmounted their fractured political culture to mobilize for D-Day remains a trenchant example, in our own age of discord and division, of how a country desperately wanting for consensus can rally together in a moment of common purpose.

***

“Our bond with Europeis a bond ofrace, and not of political ideology,” the famed aviator and outspoken isolationist Charles Lindbergh informed a national radio audience in October 1939. “Racial strength is vital, politics is a luxury.” Urging listeners to close ranks with Germany in common struggle against “Asiatic intruders”—Russians, Persians, Turks and Jews—who would defile America’s “most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood,” Lindbergh tapped into a deep well of popular nativism. It was a theme he hammered relentlessly from his perch as a spokesperson for the America First Committee, an anti-interventionist organization that marshalled considerable support from prominent names in business and industry to oppose aid to Britain and France. The “three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” he intoned in a speech two years later.

It wasn’t just Lindbergh. The anti-interventionist movement enjoyed widespread support in 1939 and 1940, and Lindbergh’s brand of anti-interventionist politics—bordering on being pro-Nazi, and laced with a conspiratorial distrust of Jews—was common in circles opposed to Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies. The America First Committee included outspoken anti-Semites like Avery Brundage, the former head of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had visited ignominy upon the athletic community when he booted two Jewish runners from the track team at the Berlin games in 1936. In Kansas, the America First state chairman told followers that Eleanor Roosevelt, the leading liberal light in FDR’s White House, was “Jewish,” and Winston Churchill, a “half-Jew.”

Even the most respectable opponents of Roosevelt’s mobilization policy verged on extremism. In an editorial entitled “A Plea for Realism,” theWall Street Journalargued in 1940 that “our job today is not to stop Hitler,” who had “already determined the broad lines of our national life at least for another generation.” Instead, Americans would better direct their focus to “modernize our thinking and our national planning,” a none-too-subtle nod to Nazi state planning and central power.

Isolationist politics were consistent with the increasingly shrill nature of opposition to the New Deal in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. Though his overwhelming popularity largely inculcated FDR against political attacks in the first several years of his presidency, by the late 1930s his back was up against the wall. A failed attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, followed by an unsuccessful purge of conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries, had left the president bruised and battered.

With his domestic policies stalled, conservative opponents of the New Deal felt at greater liberty to attack FDR in sometimes sharp tones, particularly after he broke with over 150 years of tradition and announced his bid for a third term. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, campaigning unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination, warned there was “a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or Nazi bunds.” When Roosevelt asked Congress to pass a conscription act in 1940—a bold move in the heat of a presidential campaign—Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish denounced the measure as “the very essence of Nazism and Hitlerism in the United States.” (The bill passed comfortably with moderate Republican support, but when it came up for reauthorization a year later, the new Congress passed it by just one vote.)

Even Wendell Willkie, the moderate internationalist who wrested the GOP nomination from Taft, unleashed a torrent of vicious charges in the closing days of the campaign, likening the president’s third term as “our very rapid drift toward totalitarianism” and decrying both “state socialism” and “national socialism” (a clear equation of the New Deal with German fascism). “I cannot say that my opponent isconsciouslyaiming at State socialism,” he cautioned, but “every major economic policy of the New Deal is pushing in that direction.” Roosevelt won his third term, but even after the United States formally entered the war, political culture remained coarse. It wasn’t always clear that Americans would achieve the necessary unity to mobilize and win.

***

Widespread support for isolationismended with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By a unanimous vote in the Senate and with the lone opposition of Rep. Jeanette Rankin in the House, Congress declared war on the Axis powers, and most Americans quickly rallied behind the war effort. In the four short years between the exercises at Ogdensburg and the invasion of Normandy, Americans came together in mass numbers to raise, equip transport and feed a powerful Army and Navy that included 16 million men and 250,000 women. In total 17 million men and women worked in war production plants, furnishing America and its allies with critical war materiel. At Henry Kaiser’s famed shipyards, workers labored to produce “Liberty Ships”—a process that took 355 days in 1941 but, courtesy of managerial ingenuity and back-to-back shifts, fell to just 56 days by the war’s end. At Willow Run, Ford’s sprawling factory in the woods of Michigan, massive conveyor belts transported an endless train of parts that workers then assembled into bombers. “It is the promise of revenge for Pearl Harbor,” theDetroit Free Presscrowed in 1942.

To finance the war effort, some 85 million citizens lent money to the government by purchasing war bonds, thereby becoming holders of America’s rapidly expanding debt. Roughly 42 million people paid federal income taxes for the first time in living memory after 1942, through a new withholding system that survives to this day. In total, Americans willingly diverted over 20 percent of their monthly income to taxes and bonds—a considerable investment in their country’s future and an important contribution to efforts to keep prices in check.

Ordinary people, including many who had worried in recent years whether the New Deal had bloated the size of government in dangerous ways, now sanctioned the expansion of state authority in all walks of life. Powerful new agencies like the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply controlled the flow of commodities like sugar, meat, rubber and steel and rationed consumer access to basic household items. Businesses engaged in war production agreed to allow unions to organize their work forces, while unions, in turn, agreed to government caps on wage increases—a measure intended to keep wartime inflation in check.

Unlike the Civil War or World War I, the Second World War saw no mass resistance to civilian conscription, no major tax revolts or protests against the expansion of the president’s wartime powers. Remembering the ugly example of World War I, when the federal government viciously scapegoated German Americans and pacifists and attempted to manipulate public opinion, FDR and his advisers generally avoided blunt persuasion and emotion to sell the war. “No hysteria,” Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., directed. “No appeal to hate or fear.”

The administration’s desire for unity did not, of course, erase deep-seated racial, ethnic and religious tensions—tensions that flared up as Americans came to chafe at the imposition of greater government control and taxation in the war years. Drawing on the work of thousands of unpaid auxiliary volunteers, the Office of War Information kept close tabs on rumors throughout the war—a surveillance effort that would likely alarm many privacy advocates today. The OWI found that Jews, African Americans and Japanese detainees were the subject of rampant gossip, usually tied in some way to rationing, military service or war production. A police officer in Maricopa, Arizona, reported that his neighbors believed “the Jews in New York are sorting the rubber turned in during the rubber drive and are getting $400 a ton for some of it.” Another OWI informant in Indiana overheard people complain that “the G.D. Jews … are ruining this country. The whole war is a farce. There’s plenty of sugar and plenty of rubber.” Another informant told of a friend who complained, “Roosevelt is putting Jews everywhere. Jewish doctors are on the Examining Boards and they except their own boys.”

If Jews were widely rumored to be profiting from wartime mobilization and skirting military duty, in the South, white communities were rife with rumors that African Americans were stockpiling weapons in advance of a massive race riot. Black domestic workers were rumored to be forming “Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs,” preparing for the day when white women would staff black women’s kitchens. Black soldiers were said to be consorting with, and even marrying, young white women. These fears of caste inversion reflected an ugly response to the limited but appreciable wartime mobility African Americans achieved both in the military and civilian sectors.

Finally, on the west coast, OWI informants encountered widespread rumors that Japanese Americans confined to internment camps were living high off the hog in the camps: consuming meat, sugar and other items that fell under scarce rationing, burning gasoline during long joy rides and buying up household luxuries. Despite government controls on wages and prices, the combination of a flush economy and scarce goods created a hike of 25 percent in the Consumer Price Index between 1939 and 1943. In retrospect, with the miseries of the camps now a subject of national shame, it’s a bitter irony that their occupants were accused of high-living, but anti-Japanese rumors struck at the fear thatsomeonewas benefiting from the wartime economy at the expense of everyone else. Anti-Japanese incitement was not merely the stuff of popular chitchat. In a typical display of demagoguery, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings that lent a powerful platform to the purveyors of anti-Japanese provocations. “You have got a number of people here that have got boys in the Army … that have been killed,” one man testified in 1943, “and they walk into a drug store for a Coca-Cola or something and all the Japanese have all the seats.” Rep. Karl Mundt echoed this slur, complaining that “we are feeding their Japanese better than our white citizens.”

Rumors sometimes incited violence. In Detroit in June 1943, word spread among white neighborhoods that a group of black hoodlums had slit the throat of a white soldier and raped his girlfriend. The rioting that ensued claimed 34 lives, injured 675 others and took an expensive toll on property. Later that summer, when a white policeman shot a black soldier in Harlem, variations on the story circulated widely in the black community, leading to a massive commodity riot that left hundreds of storefronts shattered and looted. In both cases, underlying tensions related to wartime mobilization expressed themselves in violent conflagrations.

In Los Angeles that same summer, scores of off-duty sailors viciously attacked young Latino men who sported “zoot suits”—flashy attire that typically included baggy, trousers, wide-lapeled jackets, watch fobs and flamboyant hats. Forming “taxicab brigades,” the sailors systematically located and savagely beat and “de-zooted” the young men, whose attire probably violated rationing restrictions against pleats and on the length of material permitted for men’s clothing. Once again, a minority population bore the brunt of popular dissatisfaction with sacrifices imposed by the wartime state.

***

Partisanship among politiciansalso increased markedly during the war years. In 1944 it was all but a foregone conclusion that FDR would run for a fourth term. As a popular and probably apocryphal story went: When the president visited North Africa, a soldier who happened upon his open-top car cried out, “Oh my God!” “Just for one more term, son,” FDR purportedly quipped.

For many Americans, and particularly for Republicans, who had been shut out of the White House since 1933, it seemed no laughing matter. A fourth term would crown the president a king—and the king, they were convinced, was a communist. The conservative press railed against “the New Deal-Communist axis” (New YorkDaily Mirror) and claimed “the people who support the New Deal … are supporting the Communists and building them up for the day when they plan to bring the Red Terror sweeping down upon America” (Chicago Tribune). John Bricker, the GOP nominee for vice president, warned that “insidious and ominous are the forces of communism linked with irreligion that are worming their way into national life. … First the New Deal took over the Democratic Party and destroyed its very foundation. Now these Communist forces have taken over the New Deal.” Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, FDR’s opponent in 1944, called the president “indispensable to Earl Browder,” the American communist leader. In case voters missed the point, he later clarified: “In Russia a Communist is a man who supports the Government. In America a Communist is a man who supports the fourth term so our form of government may more easily be changed.”

It was a filthy fight, and all the more so with so many soldiers and sailors fighting abroad. The president won comfortably, but with a smaller margin than in any of his previous elections. In other ways, the spirit of unity and comraderie that we remember may over-sentimentalize a more complicated story. Then and later, private sector barons who turned out tanks and rifles for the Army, and who staffed wartime agencies as “dollar a year men,” congratulated themselves on the victory of free markets over the state economies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. “If Free Enterprise has not flourished here,” wrote theSaturday Evening Post, “the cause of world freedom might be lost for centuries.” Capitalism, it claimed, was “the last bulwark of civilization,” and the reason America prevailed was “mass employment, mass production, mass advertising, mass distribution and mass ownership of the products of industry.”

This spirit of triumphalism masked a darker reality: In 1940 and 1941, the Roosevelt administration faced widespread resistance, particularly from auto companies, to switch from civilian to war production. The reason Chrysler converted to tank building, and Ford to bombers, was that the government was compelled to offer “cost-plus” contracts that guaranteed defense manufacturers a profit, no matter the efficiency of production. America’s triumph in World War II did not derive from the magic of private-sector genius. It owed to precisely the brand of top-down, state planning that business leaders disdained during the New Deal era but learned to love when it delivered reliable profits in war years.

Organized labor, too, proved capable of exerting self-interest. With the economy operating at full employment, people implicitly understood that it was a seller’s workplace. Absenteeism climbed as high as 25 percent in key defense industries, and wildcat strikes became a chronic headache for employers. When John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers took his members out on strike in 1943, FDR used troops to seize at least one mine and threatened to have strikers drafted into military service.

It should not surprise us that people could act both for the greater good and out of personal motivation. Wars are seldom one-dimensional political events, and people fight and mobilize for them out of a mix of emotions. A survey in 1942 found that 90 percent of respondents could not name a single provision of the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the United States and Great Britain that delineated a clear and high-minded vision for the post-war world. A majority of those surveyed openly volunteered that they had “no clear idea what the war is all about.” Neither could they name all of FDR’s Four Freedoms, principles that the president laid out before Congress in 1941. That didn’t mean that people acted without ideology. Surveys found that citizens bought war bonds and volunteered for military service out of a vague but very clear sense of patriotism, duty to their communities and to the soldiers and sailors who hailed from those communities and a sense of moral purpose that may not have found easy reference in a political document. At the same time, surveys also showed that Americans believed they were fighting for a better standard of living in the post-war period—for the promise of homes, jobs and an end to Depression-era scarcity and wartime rationing. The motives that drove ordinary people were both high-minded and parochial. It wasn’t either/or.

A country that could scarcely outfit its small Army with rifles in 1940 emerged within four years to outfit one of the most formidable militaries in modern history. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill had likened the United States to a “gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.”

Seventy-five years ago, Operation Overlord proved Churchill right, as Americans saw the culmination of a collective effort unprecedented and since unseen—made all the more remarkable by its successful navigation of very real divisions that threatened, but did not break, the public spirit.

#American #Foreign #Politics

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ncmagroup · 5 years

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By Laura Handrick

A new hire checklist helps to ensure that you don’t miss any important steps when you add new employees to your team. If you’re adding an employee to your business for the first time, you may be unsure of what’s required. To help you, we’ve provided a free downloadable checklist that includes these important hiring tasks that you can check off as you complete them.

If you want to ensure a smooth onboarding process, use an integrated HR management software like Zenefits. Employees can complete 100% of their onboarding online—including signing offer letters, filling out I-9 and W-4 forms, and enrolling in benefits—all before their first day. Zenefits automatically populates this information to its payroll, benefits, and time-tracking tools so your employees can get set up in minutes.

New Hire Checklist Template

Using the 10 checklist steps we’ll describe below, we’ve created this simple template you can download and customize. Use it to ensure you’re prepared for your first employee. If you’re hiring a 1099 contractor instead of a W2 employee, read our article on using an employment contract to hire a contractor instead.

Download the New Hire Checklist Template as a DOC or PDF

Once you’ve set up your employer identification number (EIN), taxes, and workers compensation’ (steps one through five below), you can modify the template above by omitting most of what’s in the first section since you’ll already have completed those first few steps.

The rest of the template can be used for each additional new hire to make sure you don’t miss a critical hiring step.

The 10-step New Hire Checklist

There are five essential things you need to do before you hire your first employee, from obtaining an EIN to setting up taxes and insurance. Then, there are another five tasks like obtaining I-9 forms and other documents that you need to complete with your first and all subsequent new hires.

If you have already started that first new employee, you really need to get these done before your first payroll. We’ve documented these 10 tasks into a step-by-step checklist template that you can download and customize.

For Your First New Hire

Step 1: Obtain an Employer Identification Number

EINs are used by the IRS for tax administration. Before you hire your first employee, you’ll have to apply for an EIN on the IRS website. Due: Before you hire your first employee

Step 2: Register for State Taxes

If you haven’t already, make sure your business is registered for state and local taxes. Your state will likely provide you with an ID or number that you will need later when submitting payroll taxes. Due: Before your first hire (in most states)

Step 3: Obtain Workers’ Comp Insurance

Most states require businesses with one or more employees (besides owners) to purchase workers’ compensation insurance. This can typically be purchased through the state or through a private carrier. To find your state’s policy and agency, check out the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). Payroll software or a PEO can help you set up your workers’ comp. Due: Before your first hire (in many states)

Step 4: Post Required Notices and Posters

Depending on the state you’re located in and your industry, you’ll likely be required to post labor law notices around the workplace. These are called labor law posters and include things like at-will employment, minimum wage rates, and anti-discrimination laws. Most federal and state agencies will provide these posters for free (or at least give you PDFs to print out). The United States Department of Labor has an interactive questionnaire that will help you figure out which federal poster you need. You’ll also want to check with your state office for other required notices. Due: On or before your employee’s first day

Step 5: Determine the State Unemployment Tax Rate

Your state unemployment insurance (SUI) tax rate often varies from year to year, depending on salaries or wages. You should be given your SUI tax rate each year in the mail, or log into your state tax registration website to find it. New businesses will use a default rate. Due: Before your first payroll

For All Subsequent New Hires

Step 6: Conduct Any Pre-screening or Background Checks (Optional)

While not required, it’s a good practice to ensure the employee you’re hiring has been truthful during the application and interview process. Therefore, consider conducting post-offer, pre-hire background tests or drug screening (if legal in your state), so there are no surprises. Due: Post-offer and pre-employment

Step 7: Obtain Signed Federal W-4 Form

Have your employee fill out and sign a Federal W-4 form on or before his or her first day of work. The W-4 is where an employee specifies his or her tax withholding preferences. You can find the form here on the IRS website. You do not have to submit this to the IRS but should keep a copy on file. Due: On employee’s first day

Step 8: Obtain Signed State W-4 Form (If Required in Your State)

This is relevant only to states that collect income tax (such as California, New York, and Illinois). You can find your state’s W-4 form or equivalent on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Due: On employee’s first day

Step 9: Have Employee Complete Form I-9

The Form I-9 verifies an employee’s eligibility to work in the U.S. You do not have to submit this to the government, although you do have to keep it on file for three years after the date of hire (or one year after an employee’s termination, whichever is later). Due: Within three days of hiring

Step 10: Register with the New Hire Reporting Program

All businesses need to report their new employees to their state’s New Hire reporting program. The purpose of this registry is to help the government enforce child support payments, among other purposes. Each state has its own center, which you can find on the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) website. Due: Within 20 days of hiring

A Final Step: Document Storage

As a final step in our new hire checklist, you’ll also want to designate a safe place to store personnel files. In particular, I-9s and W-4s need to be kept on-hand. We caution against storing paper files in an unsecured location for confidentiality purposes, so we recommend using a secure electronic provider like Zenefits to house all of your employee files.

Other New Employee HR Resources

As your business is starting to grow, you may want to consider looking at a few other employee-oriented resources in our HR section, including:

New Hire Employee Forms

Offer Letter Template

Non-disclosure Agreement

Non-compete Agreements

Employee Handbook Sample

Employment Agreement Template

Best HR Software Comparison Guide

Outsourcing HR

Best Payroll Software Comparison Guide

Federal Labor Laws Every Small Business Should Know

The Bottom Line

The 10 steps of our new hire checklist with the template above may feel overwhelming for the small business owner who is just beginning to hire staff. However, go through these steps in sequence to ensure you don’t violate any state or federal labor laws. Once the employee is hired, you can move forward with onboarding and training your new employee.

Go to our website: www.ncmalliance.com

New Hire Checklist & Free Template By Laura Handrick A new hire checklist helps to ensure that you don’t miss any important steps when you add new employees to your team.

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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As new hot spots emerge, the pandemic may be entering another phase. The simplest way to track the progress of any outbreak is by seeing how many new cases and deaths are reported in a given area each day. And in the United States, falling numbers in some of the hardest-hit places have offered glimmers of hope. Totals for the country have been on a downward curve, and in former hot spots like New York and New Jersey, the counts appear to have peaked. But infections and deaths are rising in more than a dozen states, as they are in countries around the world, an ominous sign that the pandemic may be entering a new phase. Wisconsin saw its highest single-day increase in confirmed cases and deaths this week, two weeks after the state’s highest court overturned a stay-at-home order. Cases are also on the rise in Alabama, Arkansas, California and North Carolina, which on Thursday reported some of the state’s highest numbers of hospitalizations and reported deaths since the crisis began. In metropolitan areas like Fayetteville, Ark.; Yuma, Ariz.; and Roanoke and Charlottesville, Va., data show new highs may be only days or weeks away. Outbreaks have accelerated especially sharply in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, leading the World Health Organization to say on Tuesday that it considered the Americas to be the new center of the pandemic. And although much of the Middle East seemed to avert early catastrophe even as the virus ravaged Iran, case counts have been swelling in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Reported cases are not perfect measures to chart the spread of the virus because they depend on how much testing is done. Death counts are less dependent on testing, though official numbers are typically undercounts. Both counts, though, can indicate how the outbreak is evolving, especially in places where lockdown rules are easing or where governments have been ineffective at slowing the spread, and offer early clues about new hot spots. That is why Wisconsin is being closely monitored. Two weeks ago, the conservative majority on the State Supreme Court overturned that state’s stay-at-home order, effectively removing the most serious restrictions on residents. It can take several weeks after changes in behavior — like the increased movement and interactions associated with the end of a stay-at-home order — for the effect on transmissions to be reflected in the data. In Wisconsin, there were indications that the virus was still spreading before the order was lifted. But in the weeks since restrictions were overturned, the case numbers have continued to grow. “It worries us,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison. “We wonder if this is a trend in an unfavorable direction.” Upon arriving at work, employees should get a temperature and symptom check. Inside the office, desks should be six feet apart. If that is not possible, employers should consider erecting plastic shields around them. If followed, the guidelines would lead to a far-reaching remaking of the corporate work experience. They even upend years of advice on commuting, urging people to drive to work by themselves, instead of taking mass transportation or car-pooling, to avoid potential exposure to the virus. The recommendations run from technical advice on ventilation systems (more open windows are most desirable) to a suggested abolition of communal perks like latte makers and snack bins. And some border on the impractical, if not near impossible: “Limit use and occupancy of elevators to maintain social distancing of at least 6 feet.” For millions of Americans left out of work by the pandemic, government assistance has been a lifeline preventing a plunge into poverty, hunger and financial ruin. This summer, that lifeline could snap, reports Ben Casselman. The $1,200 checks sent to most households are long gone, at least for those who needed them most, with little imminent prospect for a second round. The lending program that helped millions of small businesses keep workers on the payroll will wind down if Congress does not extend it. Eviction moratoriums that kept people in their homes are expiring in many cities. And the $600 per week in extra unemployment benefits that have allowed tens of millions of laid-off workers to pay rent and buy groceries will expire at the end of July. The latest sign of the economic strain and the government’s role in easing it came Thursday, when the Labor Department reported that millions more Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week. More than 40 million people have filed for benefits since the crisis began, and some 30 million are receiving them. The multitrillion-dollar patchwork of federal and state programs hasn’t kept bills from piling up or prevented long lines at food banks, but it has mitigated the damage. Now the expiration of those programs represents a cliff they are hurtling toward, for individuals and for the economy. “The CARES Act was massive, but it was a very short-term offset to what is likely to be a long-term problem,” said Aneta Markowska, the chief financial economist for the investment bank Jefferies, referring to the legislative centerpiece of the federal rescue. “This economy is clearly going to need more support.” Even the possibility that the programs will be allowed to expire could have economic consequences, Ms. Markowska said, as consumers and businesses brace for the loss of federal assistance. President Trump and other Republicans have played down the need for more spending, saying the solution is for states to reopen businesses and allow companies to bring people back to work. So despite pleas from economists across the political spectrum — including Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman — any federal action is likely to be limited. The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to give businesses more time to use money borrowed under the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers forgivable loans to small businesses that retain or rehire their workers. The bill’s fate in the Senate is uncertain, but a deal seems likely to be reached. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where it is difficult to maintain social distancing, including grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations. It also continues to emphasize how critical social distancing is. But masks have unexpectedly crossed over from public health measures to politically charged symbols, with many shops and restaurants banning customers who do not wear them — and a few others moving to ban customers who do. In Kentucky, a gas station told customers that no one was allowed inside its convenience store if they had their face covered. In California, a flooring store near Los Angeles has encouraged hugs and handshakes but does not permit face masks or protections. And a bar in Texas taped a poster to its front door this week that said “sorry, no masks allowed.” In New York, the hardest-hit state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday that he would issue an executive order authorizing businesses to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings. “That store owner has a right to protect themselves,” Mr. Cuomo said. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.” Dennis Townsend, a Republican supervisor in California’s rural Tulare County, said that as his conservative district reopened for business, masks had become a continuing point of contention. “People tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better be wearing masks in there.’ And then other people tell me, ‘OK, I’ll go to the stores, but they better not make me wear a mask,’” he said. Mr. Townsend said he was “not real big on wearing masks” himself but had done so when shopping. “What I tell people is that with every freedom we have comes additional responsibility,” he said. “We’ve had one freedom suppressed for a little while, but now it’s back, and that’s going to require additional personal responsibility on our parts.” Washington State says it has reclaimed $300 million in fraudulent unemployment claims. Washington State, which has been battling a deluge of fraudulent unemployment claims, has managed to claw back some $300 million in payments that went out to fraudsters, officials said Thursday. Suzi LeVine, the commissioner of Washington State’s Employment Security Department, said the recovery came from coordination among law enforcement agencies and financial institutions. She did not reveal exact numbers on recoveries or the total number of fraudulent claims and said that the state was continuing to work on additional collections while blocking more false claims. “The criminals have not gone away because we continue to see significant highly suspicious traffic,” Ms. LeVine said. The Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance said in a statement that it had also seen fraudsters trying to file large numbers of illegitimate claims, while the cybersecurity firm Agari said it had seen evidence of the fraudulent claims targeting states all over the country. Unemployment claims around the country have exceeded 40 million since the start of the pandemic. Democrats are mobilizing to turn the $2 trillion effort that Mr. Trump is overseeing into a political liability going into his re-election campaign. The attention has focused on a small business loan program that has been marred by glitches, changing rules and cases of big publicly traded companies receiving funds while smaller shops are left waiting. Top Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Biden have seized on examples of rich executives getting money through the Paycheck Protection Program as indicative of corporate cronyism. The Democratic National Committee and Democratic state parties in swing states held conference calls last week with reporters and other events highlighting stories of small business owners who did not get approved for loans. Pacronym, a progressive super PAC that focuses on digital advertising, began running a $1.5 million ad campaign in five swing states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that focused on struggling small businesses. Some Republicans are embracing the program. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican facing a tough re-election battle, has spent nearly $500,000 on ads that promote her role in “co-authoring” the program, according to data from Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, spent $175,000 on an ad featuring small business owners and employees describing jobs and businesses that were “rescued” by Mr. McConnell’s efforts on the stimulus package. The Trump administration has scrambled to rewrite the rules of the program on the fly as public backlash intensified. The Treasury on Thursday carved out $10 billion of money to be used for loans to underserved communities. Sports fans can attend games at outdoor venues in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said that starting Friday, sports fans could attend games at outdoor venues in most counties in Texas, so long as occupancy was limited to 25 percent. Fans cannot attend indoor sporting events. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said amusement parks, traveling carnivals and water parks could open June 12. And in California, more than a dozen Indian casinos, asserting sovereignty, defied Gov. Gavin Newsom and reopened last week. The Viejas Casino and Resort in Alpine, Calif., vowed to impose strict limits on the number of people gambling at once. A majority of Indian casinos in the state have chosen to stay closed and are coordinating their reopening with the governor’s office, which has proposed a date in early June. A French study found 1 in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19 died within a week of being hospitalized. One in 10 diabetic patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, died within a week of being hospitalized, according to a study published on Thursday by French researchers in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. Another 20 percent were put on ventilators to assist with breathing by the end of their first week in the hospital. Just 18 percent were discharged within a week. “I don’t want to scare people, but what is true is we did not expect to see such high mortality, with 10 percent of people admitted dying in the first seven days,” said Dr. Samy Hadjadj, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Nantes in France and one of the authors of the paper. A majority of patients in the study had Type 2 diabetes. Many people with diabetes also have cardiovascular disease, which raises the risk of death in Covid-19 patients. But the new study, which included 1,317 patients at 53 French hospitals, found that microvascular injuries — involving tiny blood vessels supplying the eyes, kidneys and peripheral nerves — were also linked to a higher risk of death. Obstructive sleep apnea also raised the risk of early death in these patients, while obesity and advanced age were linked to a greater likelihood of severe disease, the study found. “This is serious,” Dr. Hadjadj said. “If you have diabetes and are elderly or have complications, be very careful. Keep away from the virus. Go on with social distancing, wash your hands carefully, keep people away who can bring you the virus.” Dr. Hadjadj added, “You are not the kind of person who can afford to disregard these rules.” As more people under 40 test positive in Washington State, researchers fear they will spread the virus. People under 40 make up an increasing share of those who have tested positive for the virus in Washington State. Researchers in Seattle said that policymakers might need to focus on younger people to limit the spread. In a new analysis, the researchers said about half of new identified cases were among people under 40, up from one-third of infections earlier in the outbreak. Younger people may be more likely to work or participate in social activities, especially as restrictions are eased. While they do not face as high a risk of serious complications from infections, they can expose other people they encounter who may be older or who have hazardous underlying conditions, the researchers said. “Our findings indicate a justifiable concern regarding the phased reopening plan for Washington State in late May in light of the shift in Covid-19 incidence from older to younger age,” the researchers wrote in their report, posted on the preprint server medRvix. The researchers said government leaders may need to pursue specific advisories for children, teenagers and young adults to warn them of the risks of social interaction. Pennsylvania House Democrats say Republicans hid a lawmaker’s positive virus test. Democrats in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Thursday accused Republicans of keeping a lawmaker’s positive virus test a secret to avoid political embarrassment, even at the risk of exposing fellow legislators. A Republican House member, Andrew Lewis, confirmed on Wednesday that he received a positive test on May 20 and self-isolated. Mr. Lewis said that every lawmaker or staff member he was in contact with who “met the criteria for exposure” was notified. But Democrats disputed that, saying none of their own members were alerted even though some were near Mr. Lewis in committee meetings. The House Democratic campaign arm accused Republicans of hiding Mr. Lewis’s positive test “to protect their public talking points against science and facts.” Another Republican representative, Russ Diamond, who said he was notified of possible exposure through contact with Mr. Lewis, had previously spoken at a shutdown protest outside the Capitol and boasted on social media of not wearing a mask while shopping. In an emotional Facebook video recorded in his office at the Capitol, Representative Brian K. Sims, a Democrat from Philadelphia, said Mr. Diamond had “apparently been quarantining himself for weeks” but “didn’t explain that to any of us when he was in committee, talking with us or walking up and down the aisles or bumping into us or letting us hold the door open for him.” Mr. Lewis said he had kept his positive diagnosis private “out of respect for my family and those who I may have exposed.” Representative Ryan Bizzarro, a Democrat, disputed that Mr. Lewis had quarantined himself after his diagnosis. “We have footage of him being here,” he said. The Trump administration will not issue a midyear update to its economic forecasts this summer, breaking decades of tradition during the uncertainty of a pandemic recession, administration officials confirmed on Thursday. The decision will spare the administration from having to announce its internal projections for how deeply the recession will damage economic growth and how long the pain of high unemployment will persist. When the administration last published official projections in February, it forecast economic growth of 3.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021, and growth rates at or around 3 percent for the ensuing decade. It forecast an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent for the year. The virus has rendered those projections obsolete. Unemployment could hit 20 percent in June, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNN this week. The Congressional Budget Office said in April that it expects the economy will contract by 5.6 percent this year and end with unemployment above 11 percent. The White House is required by law to issue both an annual budget and a midyear update to it, called a “mid-session review.” Updating economic projections in the mid-session review is optional, but it is a practice that administrations — including Mr. Trump’s — have widely followed since the review was mandated by Congress in 1970. The review is required by law to give at least a partial window into how the administration expects the economy to perform this year and in the future. The decision not to release updated projections was first reported by The Washington Post. Trump administration officials have in the past resisted updating their forecasts in the face of evidence that the economy was not growing as fast as they had projected. The budget they released in February officially conceded for the first time that growth in 2018 and 2019 had not reached 3 percent, as they had predicted. Fears about contracting the virus from contaminated surfaces have prompted many to wipe down groceries, leave packages unopened and stress about elevator buttons. But what is the real risk? The C.D.C. recently tried to clarify its guidance: “It may be possible that a person can get Covid-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it, and then touching their own mouth, nose or possibly their eyes, but this isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” So does this mean we can get the virus from touching a doorknob, catching a Frisbee or sharing a casserole dish? The Times asked the experts. The best way we can protect ourselves from the virus — whether it is surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing our hands, not touching our faces and wearing masks. Starting Thursday, anyone in Britain who has potential symptoms will be tested and, if positive, asked to list all those with whom they have recently been in close contact for at least 15 minutes. Those people, in turn, will be contacted and asked to isolate themselves for 14 days. It is the latest national campaign that aims to prevent more infections. The results so far are mixed. What does it feel like to have Covid-19 and not need hospitalization? Rest and fluids are essential, but so is knowing when to call a doctor. Give yourself plenty of time to feel better. Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Karen Barrow, Scott Cacciola, Ben Casselman, Emily Cochrane, Patricia Cohen, Michael Cooper, Catie Edmondson, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Fuller, Trip Gabriel, David Gelles, Erica L. Green, Jenny Gross, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jennifer Medina, Sarah Mervosh, Talya Minsberg, Andy Newman, Nadja Popovich, Roni Caryn Rabin, Alan Rappeport, Dana Rubinstein, Margot Sanger-Katz, Anna Schaverien, Kaly Soto, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Vanessa Swales, Jim Tankersley and Katie Van Syckle. The post Coronavirus News in USA: Live Updates appeared first on Sansaar Times.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/05/coronavirus-news-in-usa-live-updates.html

#SEO #Local SEO training #daily news paper #daily news india #daily news newspaper #technology news a

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