Nationwide EMS calls have dropped 26% since the start of the pandemic

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

 

IMAGE: THIS GRAPHIC REPRESENTS OVER 37 MILLION EMS CALLS (ACTIVATIONS) ACROSS THE US. THE NUMBER OF STATES SUBMITTING TO THE NATIONAL EMS REPOSITORY INCREASED OVER THE STUDY PERIOD (2017 - 32... view more 

CREDIT: ©2020 SOCIETY FOR ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Since early March and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., 911 calls for emergency medical services have dropped by 26.1 % compared to the past two years, a new study led by a University at Buffalo researcher has found.

But the study also found that EMS-attended deaths have doubled, indicating that when EMS calls were made, they often involved a far more serious emergency.

"The public health implications of these findings are alarming," said E. Brooke Lerner, PhD, first author on the paper and professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Emergency Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.

PHOTO: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2020/06/035.html

"When people are making fewer 911 calls but those calls are about far more severe emergencies, it means that people with urgent conditions are likely not getting the emergency care they need in a timely way," she said. "The result is increased morbidity and mortality resulting from conditions not directly related to exposure to SARS-CoV2."

This finding covered the six-week period that began on March 2, and this trend persisted through the end of May.

Delaying care

"The doubling of deaths and cardiac arrests during this relatively short period of time, from March through May, demonstrates that people who need emergency health care may be delaying care such that their lives are actually in jeopardy," said Lerner.

Lerner pointed to two possible causes: fear of contracting the virus at health care facilities and the impulse to not burden health care facilities with non-COVID-19 issues.

"This may mean that future consideration needs to be given to how we message the risks associated with seeking medical care during a pandemic," said Lerner. "At the same time that we are stressing how to stay safe from COVID-19, it may also be necessary to stress how important it is to continue to seek care for serious conditions unrelated to the novel coronavirus." Lerner added that the findings echo those of studies in other countries, such as Italy, where there was an increase in heart attack fatalities during the height of the pandemic there.

A persistent trend

"The fact that this trend persists even as the pandemic in some areas has started to lessen in severity shows that the fear of accessing health care has continued," Lerner said.

One positive, unsurprising finding was that the rate of 911 calls related to injuries declined for the obvious reason that during times when regions were shutdown, there were fewer opportunities for driving and recreation-related injuries.

The study also revealed significant issues related to the financial viability of EMS in this type of environment.

"The financial strain on EMS agencies will have long-term ramifications for maintaining this important safety net for our communities, especially those agencies whose revenue is based solely on patient transports," said Lerner.

The study consisted of a comparative, retrospective analysis of standardized patient care records that are submitted by more than 10,000 EMS agencies across 47 states and territories nearly in real-time. Those data are submitted to the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) database, which stores EMS data nationwide.

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The study was published online June 17 in Academic Emergency Medicine. Co-authors are Craig D. Newgard, MD, of Oregon Health and Science University, and N. Clay Mann, MD, of the University of Utah School of Medicine.

The work was supported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Emergency Medical Services and the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

How conspiracy theories emerge -- and how their storylines fall apart

UCLA research uses artificial intelligence to analyze differences between a true story and a completely fabricated one

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES

 

A new study by UCLA professors offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.

The authors, from the UCLA College and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, illustrated the difference in the storytelling elements of a debunked conspiracy theory and those that emerged when journalists covered an actual event in the news media. Their approach could help shed light on how and why other conspiracy theories, including those around COVID-19, spread -- even in the absence of facts.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, analyzed the spread of news about the 2013 "Bridgegate" scandal in New Jersey -- an actual conspiracy -- and the spread of misinformation about the 2016 "Pizzagate" myth, the completely fabricated conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant was the center of a child sex-trafficking ring that involved prominent Democratic Party officials, including Hillary Clinton.

The researchers used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze the information that spread online about the Pizzagate story. The AI automatically can tease out all of the people, places, things and organizations in a story spreading online -- whether the story is true or fabricated -- and identify how they are related to each other.

Finding the puzzle pieces

In either case -- whether for a conspiracy theory or an actual news story -- the narrative framework is established by the relationships among all of the elements of the storyline. And, it turns out, conspiracy theories tend to form around certain elements that act as the adhesive holding the facts and characters together.

"Finding narratives hidden in social media forums is like solving a huge jigsaw puzzle, with the added complication of noise, where many of the pieces are just irrelevant," said Vwani Roychowdhury, a UCLA professor of electrical and computer engineering and an expert in machine learning, and a lead author of the paper.

In recent years, researchers have made great strides in developing artificial intelligence tools that can analyze batches of text and identify the pieces to those puzzles. As the AI learns to identify patterns, identities and interactions that are embedded in words and phrases, the narratives begin to make "sense." Drawing from the massive amount of data available on social media, and because of improving technology, the systems are increasingly able to teach themselves to "read" narratives, almost as if they were human.

The visual representations of those story frameworks showed the researchers how false conspiracy theory narratives are held together by threads that connect multiple characters, places and things. But they found that if even one of those threads is cut, the other elements often can't form a coherent story without it.

"One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory narrative framework is that it is easily 'disconnected,'" said Timothy Tangherlini, one of the paper's lead authors, a professor in the UCLA Scandinavian section whose scholarship focuses on folklore, legend and popular culture. "If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart."

Which elements stick?

In contrast, he said, the stories around actual conspiracies -- because they're true -- tend to stand up even if any given element of the story is removed from the framework. Consider Bridgegate, for example, in which New Jersey officials closed several lanes of the George Washington Bridge for politically motivated reasons. Even if any number of threads were removed from the news coverage of the scandal, the story would have held together: All of the characters involved had multiple points of connection by way of their roles in New Jersey politics.

"They are all within the same domain, in this case New Jersey politics, which will continue to exist irrespective of the deletions," Tangherlini said. "Those connections don't require the same 'glue' that a conspiracy theory does."

Tangherlini calls himself a "computational folklorist." Over the past several years, he has collaborated regularly with Roychowdhury to better understand the spread of information around hot-button issues like the anti-vaccination movement.

To analyze Pizzagate, in which the conspiracy theory arose from a creative interpretation of hacked emails released in 2016 by Wikileaks, the researchers analyzed nearly 18,000 posts from April 2016 through February 2018 from discussion boards on the websites Reddit and Voat.

"When we looked at the layers and structure of the narrative about Pizzagate, we found that if you take out Wikileaks as one of the elements in the story, the rest of the connections don't hold up," Tangherlini said. "In this conspiracy, the Wikileaks email dump and how theorists creatively interpreted the content of what was in the emails are the only glue holding the conspiracy together."

The data generated by the AI analysis enabled the researchers to produce a graphic representation of narratives, with layers for major subplots of each story, and lines connecting the key people, places and institutions within and among those layers.

Quick build versus slow burn

Another difference that emerged between real and false narratives concerned the time they take to build. Narrative structures around conspiracy theories tend to build and become stable quickly, while narrative frameworks around actual conspiracies can take years to emerge, Tangherlini said. For example, the narrative framework of Pizzagate stabilized within a month after the Wikileaks dump, and it stayed relatively consistent over the next three years.

"The fact that additional information related to an actual conspiracy emerged over a prolonged period of time (here five and half years) might be one of the telltale signs of distinguishing a conspiracy from a conspiracy theory," the authors wrote in the study.

Tangherlini said it's becoming increasingly important to understand how conspiracy theories abound, in part because stories like Pizzagate have inspired some to take actions that endanger other people.

"The threat narratives found in conspiracy theories can imply or present strategies that encourage people to take real-world action," he said. "Edgar Welch went to that Washington pizzeria with a gun looking for supposed caves hiding victims of sex trafficking."

The UCLA researchers have also written another paper examining the narrative frameworks surrounding conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. In that study, which has been published on an open-source forum, they track how the conspiracy theories are being layered on to previously circulated conspiracy theories such as those about the perceived danger of vaccines, and, in other cases how the pandemic has given rise to completely new ones, like the idea that 5G cellular networks spread the coronavirus.

"We're using the same pipeline on COVID-19 discussions as we did for Pizzagate," Tangherlini said. "In Pizzagate, the targets were more limited, and the conspiracy theory stabilized rapidly. With COVID-19, there are many competing conspiracy theories, and we are tracing the alignment of multiple, smaller conspiracy theories into larger ones. But the underlying theory is identical for all conspiracy theories."

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FASHION, FEATHERS AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
THE MATTINGLEY PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE FIGHT FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS

By Philip McCouat

In this article, we highlight an extraordinary set of photographs, taken in Australia over 100 years ago, which played a significant role in international efforts to achieve legislative protection of wild birds. The photographs surfaced at the height of a vigorous campaign, on both sides of the Atlantic, which had been prompted by the phenomenal growth in the “plumage trade” – the use of bird feathers and other body parts in women’s hats and clothing.
​
While this fashion mainly blossomed in the closing years of the 19th century, its roots go back thousands of years, to the general attitudes held about animal protection in the Western world. So it is there that our story must start.

GENERAL ATTITUDES TO ANIMALS IN THE WEST


Humans have long had complex and often inconsistent attitudes to the welfare of other animals (and even each other). In Western society, significant concerns about animal welfare have generally been slow to develop. According to traditional Christian beliefs, particularly in the Old Testament, it was at least recognised that appropriate care for domesticated or breeding animals could be justified as being in the commercial interests of their owners [1]. However, the overriding consideration was that humans had been given dominion “over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”[2]. These “lower order” animals were generally considered to lack rationality (or sometimes even sentience) and basically existed for the convenience, exploitation and pleasure of humans.

While universally accepting this hierarchical model, later Christian writers presented mixed views about its practical implications. In his City of God, 4th century scholar St Augustine interpreted the Biblical incident of the Gadarene swine – in which Jesus sent devils into a herd of pigs, forcing them drown themselves in the sea – as showing that “there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees”; and that “Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition”. Similarly, the 13C philosopher Thomas Aquinas stated that cruelty to animals was not wrong in itself, and that it should only be condemned if it encouraged cruelty to humans [3]. On the other hand, St Francis of Assisi famously argued that animals were worthy of human kindness because of their status as fellow creatures of God.

By the 18th century, various notables were calling for a more compassionate approach [4], with individual preachers, moralists and philosophers urging that greater attention be paid to animals’ concerns. They were joined by writers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Barbauld (see our article Science becomes Art), Byron, Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth and Robert Burns.
​
The satirist Hogarth also criticised the continuing abuses with his Four Stages of Cruelty, suggesting that cruelty to animals, such as in cock throwing, was the first stage in the development of violent criminals.​





Fig 1: Hogarth. The Four Stages of Cruelty: Stage 1, physical abuse of animals (1751)


Within the larger population, however, such calls received only limited acceptance, and generally uncaring attitudes to animals continued into the 19th century [5]. While the British Parliament passed an 1822 Bill to “prevent the cruel treatment of cattle” – with a sharp eye on their commercial value -- other Bills to prevent bullbaiting or cruelty to horses, asses or oxen met with little success. Later efforts to outlaw dogfights and bullbaiting also failed, prompting the formation of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824) [6]. Most of these animal tortures were finally outlawed by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835 but this did not apply to wild animals. Birds, which for many centuries had been hunted for food or “sport”, were still quite literally in the firing line.

FEATHERED HATS AND THE PLUMAGE TRADE

The unprotected position of wild birds assumed special significance in the light of an extraordinary development in the latter part of the 19th century. This was the creation of the creation of a fashion industry, not limited to the upper classes, but across a wider spectrum of society. One notable aspect of this was the extensive use of bird feathers in ladies’ fashions, particularly their hats. In fact, not just feathers, but also wings, heads and even entire bodies of birds became extremely popular [7]. Hats crowned by the feathers of the great crested grebe [see our article on Carpaccio], or gowns with several dead robins sewn onto the skirt were considered very chic.

The use of feathers as a fashion accessory was of course not new –ostentatiously plumed hats had been worn by the fashionable wealthy back in the 18th century (Fig 2), and they had become a symbol of exotic beauty. However, what developed in the late 19th century, in cities such as Paris (the manufacturing centre), London (the biggest market) and New York, was an explosive growth in this fashion, crossing class and geographical boundaries, on a scale which today seems almost inconceivable. This change was driven by a wide range of factors – the economic boom resulting from the Industrial Revolution, the growth of department stores, the proliferation of ready-to-wear garments, catalogue-based mail order, the birth of fashion weeklies, and the rise of fashion houses and personalities.

READ ON http://www.artinsociety.com/feathers-fashion-and-animal-rights.html

Small-business owners could face jail time as DOJ launches investigation into coronavirus loan program

Published: May 2, 2020 By Chris Matthews
A59ssistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski leads the criminal probe

AFP/GETTY IMAGES


The Justice Department has opened an investigation into companies that applied for emergency loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, and businesses that provided misleading information could face jail sentences, experts say.

The new government program aims to help small businesses hurt by the coronavirus crisis.


“Whenever there’s a trillion dollars out on the street that quickly, the fraudsters are going to come out of the woodwork in an attempt to get access to that money,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski told Bloomberg News Thursday.

As head of the department’s criminal division, Benczkowski could oversee prosecution of small-business owners or other executives who have certified documents submitted to the Small Business Administration. Prosecutors have contacted 15 of the 20 largest loan processors and the SBA as part of the investigation.


Small-business owners who have applied for or received PPP funds should “definitely take it as cause for concern,” Derek Adams, a former Justice Department trial attorney, told MarketWatch.

The PPP was established by Congress in its $2.2 trillion CARES Act to protect small-business owners and their employees from the economic impact of efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19. It allows businesses with fewer than 500 employees to apply for forgivable loans that cover two months of payroll and other expenses, if “the uncertainty of economic conditions as of the date of the application makes necessary the loan request to support the ongoing operations of the recipient,” according to the CARES Act.


But last week the government issued further guidance saying that applicants must exhaust other avenues of liquidity that would enable them to support ongoing operations. “This suggests a more robust analysis than what a lot of folks initially anticipated,” said Adams. “Businesses should do a fresh analysis to understand if they can support this certification before May 7,” a government-set deadline for paying back loans.

More than 20 public companies like IDT Corp. IDT, -4.80% and Hallmark Financial Services Inc. HALL, -4.40% so far have said they were returning the PPP loans.

Read more: Treasury gives big public companies until May 7 to return loans meant for small businesses

And see:These public companies are returning emergency loans meant for small businesses


Companies that are found to have misled the government about the necessity of the loans could face penalties ranging from a loss of loan forgiveness to jail time. “When you’re making a certification in connection with receiving this loan, you face criminal liability” under statues that proscribe lying to government as well as mail fraud and wire fraud, Adams said.

Neil Barofsky, the former special investigator general for the 2008 financial-crisis bank bailouts told MarketWatch that the announcement was “an important first step” in the process of overseeing the nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus stimulus that Washington has delivered to date, but “it won’t be nearly enough given the opportunities for fraud in the program.” Barofsky has called on Congress and the White House to stand up further oversight mechanisms quickly, to head off fraud as these programs get off the ground.

He also said that given limited prosecutorial resources, the government should not focus on cases where businesses may have overstated the need for the funds or their lack of access to other financing, but on “outright cases of fraud around false payroll numbers,” and other financial data.

The Trump administration, however, appears eager to dissuade big businesses from taking funds, given the widespread demand for these loans that is set to exhaust the $670 billion allocated to the program.

Mark Cuban endorses Joe Biden on Fox News because ‘he actually wants to run a country’Published: June 24, 2020 at 5:19 p.m. ET
By
Nicole Lyn Pesce

139
The billionaire tells Sean Hannity that President Trump wants to ‘run a campaign’ rather than provide leadership


Mark Cuban has expressed support for Joe Biden in the November presidential election.


‘Donald Trump doesn’t want to run a country. He wants to run a campaign. Joe Biden actually wants to run a country.’

That was billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban explaining why he’s voting for Joe Biden over President Trump in November.

The “Shark Tank” host with a net worth of $4.3 billion, according to Forbes, backed the presumptive Democratic nominee while speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. As Hannity pressed him on whether Biden “has the strength, the stamina, the mental acuity, the alertness to be taking on what is the toughest job in the world, being the president of the United States,” Cuban responded, “One hundred percent. Absolutely.”

Cuban listed the Affordable Care Act as former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Biden’s “biggest accomplishment,” adding that “it’s unfortunate the [Trump administration is] trying to dismantle it.”

The Trump administration is pushing for a total repeal of the ACA, and is backing a lawsuit against it that’s set to go before the Supreme Court this fall. The latest suit argues that the “individual mandate” that Americans buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

Cuban also praised Biden’s support for entrepreneurs like himself. “The one event in the White House that Joe Biden put on and spoke about his support for entrepreneurship is one more event than he [Trump] has ever done for entrepreneurs in the White House or anywhere else,” he said.

Cuban backed Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election but has also served Trump in an advisory role on his “Opening Our Country” economic council in April.

Read more:‘It’s going to be brutal,’ billionaire Mark Cuban says of economy’s recovery from coronavirus, and ‘there’s no way to sugarcoat it’

Watch the interview below, via a tweet from former Trump ally and aide Anthony Scaramucci, who endorses Cuban’s comment with the word “Bingo”:

Sweden didn’t impose a lockdown, but its economy is just as bad as its neighbors

Published: June 25, 2020 By Steve Goldstein

Shoppers walk past an H&M fashion store in central Stockholm, Sweden, on April 2, 2020. GETTY IMAGE

It is a common refrain from critics of the lockdown. Don’t let the cure — locking down the economy — be worse than the disease it is preventing.

If that is the case, then, Sweden should be a case study in how to manage the disease.


It famously didn’t lock down. Bars and restaurants remained open, as did hairdressers and gyms. The University of Oxford’s government response tracker puts into numbers the light-touch effort, showing Sweden was one of the least restrictive countries in the world.


The University of Oxford’s government response tracker, taken from late March when most countries started locking down.

On the health front, Sweden has paid a heavy price. According to Johns Hopkins University data, Sweden has suffered 50.7 deaths per 100,000 people. That isn’t the worst in the world — Belgium and the U.K. are higher, for example — but far above the 10.4 deaths per 100,000 in Denmark, the 5.9 deaths in Finland and 4.7 deaths in Norway.


But there is also an economic question. Did Sweden benefit economically from avoiding the lockdown?

The economic data doesn’t suggest that. Dhaval Joshi, chief European investment strategist at BCA Research, pitted Sweden against Denmark, noting they speak near-identical languages and share a broadly similar culture and demographic, yet Denmark imposed one of the most aggressive lockdowns globally.




In both countries, the unemployment rate rose 2 percentage points (though Sweden has one extra month of data) and the consumer confidence numbers plunged in both, he said.

Sweden’s consumer troubles can be seen in other data, too.

Passenger car registrations in Sweden fell 37% year-over-year in April and 49% in May. In Denmark, they fell 37% in April and 40% in May.

Sweden’s services industry confidence index in May of -46.9 was actually worse than the EU-wide -43.3 reading, and Denmark’s -41.9.

Why didn’t Sweden benefit economically?

“The simple answer is that in a pandemic, most people will change their behavior to avoid catching the virus. The cautious behavior is voluntary, irrespective of whether there is no lockdown, as in Sweden, or there is a lockdown, as in Denmark,” Joshi said.

“People will shun public transport, shopping, and other crowded places, and even think twice about letting their children go to school.”

Opinion: The coronavirus-led economic recession may be over, but the depression has barely begun

Working people, small businesses and local governments need more income now, or other dominoes will fall

Small-business revenue is down 19% from pre-COVID days, and is flat over the past month despite the heralded re-opening of the economy. Something is seriously wrong. OPPORTUNITY INSIGHTS/TRACKTHERECOVERY.ORG

Published: June 26, 2020 By Rex Nutting

Now that businesses are reopening and calling back furloughed workers, the COVID-19 recession may already be over. The depression has barely begun.

The economy is growing again, but, with 2 million people filing for unemployment checks last week and about 30 million workers already on the dole, it’s still struggling mightily.


There’s no official definition of a depression. Still, today’s economy seems to be a close fit: Millions of workers are losing their jobs permanently. Thousands of small businesses are closed permanently or operating at only a fraction of profitable levels. Debts are mounting, and incomes are not growing fast enough. State and local governments are slashing jobs and services. And only massive, but temporary, federal support prevents millions of families from falling into poverty.

It’s no time to declare Mission Accomplished.


Also read: ‘Make no mistake…the pandemic morphed into a Depression-like crisis,’ says UCLA economist, who predicts U.S. economy won’t recover from coronavirus until 2023
No quick recovery

It’s not just that the coronavirus pandemic is reaching new heights after a bungled reopening. That was to be expected. States experiencing rapidly growing case numbers are already seeing softer growth and even economic contraction in some cases, says Aneta Markowska, chief economist at Jefferies.


Growth at small businesses has lost momentum nationally, she said.

Some policy makers agree that the reinvigorated pandemic will hurt the economy for the rest of this year.

“We’ll be in a situation where the economy is growing more slowly than we might have hoped a few months ago,” Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren said in an interview with Yahoo Finance this week. He expects the unemployment rate to remain above 10% for the rest of the year.

Some economic forecasters are beginning to agree with Rosengren and other more pessimistic voices, and are dialing back their expectations for a V-shaped recovery that would return the economy to its pre-COVID level within a year.


“Many factors point to what is more likely to be a quarter-to-quarter ‘V’ that does not have staying power, including that COVID is not vanquished, trade remains in contraction, business investment is collapsing, financial conditions are not loose, and equity markets are disconnected from the real economy, potentially contributing to uncertainty enhancing financial turbulence,” says a team of economists at Citi Research led by Catherine Mann.



A longer-term worry is that vital parts of the economy — workers, businesses, lenders, creditors, and state and local governments — won’t get the support they need to survive financially until the virus is beaten.

Bizarrely given the election calendar, there is little urgency in Washington for another round of stimulus payments, especially among Republicans. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin wants the government to send out another check to everyone before Election Day (and Donald Trump apparently agrees), but anonymous White House aides and Republican senators have quashed that idea. Democrats in the House have passed a bill, but that proposal too is dead on arrival in the Senate.

In the end, something will be done, but the fiscal response will be timid and underwhelming, as always.
The pandemic is getting its fuel; the economy is not

Here’s the thing: Both the coronavirus pandemic and the economy need fuel in order to grow, but right now, only the pandemic is getting enough.

Both the pandemic and the economy rely on the most basic human behaviors to thrive: our sociability. The pandemic is getting all the fuel it needs to race out of control from the reckless way unmasked and unrepentant Americans are getting back together to work, play, shop and pray.

These are also the behaviors that would literally sustain the American people (if done in a way that promotes public health).

Consumer spending, which has traditionally been the bedrock of the economy, can’t save us this time because the economy is being starved of its starter fuel: income.

In macroeconomics, it all starts with income. If you have income, you can spend, which then becomes income to the shopkeeper and her employees. And their spending then becomes someone else’s income, and so on and so forth.
Starved of income growth

But in America today, incomes are not growing fast enough, especially for working families, small businesses, and state and local governments.

No income, no spending; no spending, no growth. In fact, incomes may be falling as one-time government payments, expanded unemployment benefits and support for small businesses expire or are scaled back.

There’s another reason why consumer spending can’t spark a strong recovery: The upper-middle class and the rich aren’t spending the way they normally do, according to credit-card data analyzed by Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights. They aren’t going out to the theater, or dining out or taking expensive vacations because it’s too dangerous. Furthermore, why engage in conspicuous consumption if no one can see you do it?

If the only people whose incomes haven’t plunged are unwilling to spend until the virus has been beaten, how can the businesses that cater to the carriage trade avoid layoffs and bankruptcy?

If Washington won’t provide more support to working-class families now, there won’t be enough consumer spending to keep struggling Main Street businesses alive much longer. And if those businesses fail, other dominoes will fall. That’s what’s bothering the equity markets.

Read:Consumer sentiment slips in late June as confidence in U.S. economic policies slumps to Trump-era low
State and local governments on the ropes

The most immediate concern is the huge decline in state and local governments’ tax receipts, especially sales and hotel taxes. Current estimates suggest state government’s receipts for the upcoming fiscal year may be down by 10% to 20%, or about $500 billion, with local governments down an equal amount.

The fiscal year for most states starts next week, and without massive support from Congress, most will be cutting services and employment severely. Already, 1.57 million state and local government workers have lost their jobs.

Read:A warning to muni bond investors: Coronavirus recession will decimate state finances

Also:State sales-tax receipts plunge as much as 41% in April amid coronavirus shutdowns — and May could be worse

“It can really weigh on the economy if the states are in tight financial straits,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, at a congressional hearing last week. Already, states and local governments are cutting back on their infrastructure spending and other services.

State and local government spending collapsed after the Great Recession of 2008-2009 as well, which was a major factor in the slow recovery.

The Democrats’ $3 trillion Heroes Act, languishing in the Senate, would provide significant grants to state and local governments to help them avoid spending and employment cuts, but Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has said bankruptcy is a better option.

America seems to be exceptionally bad at public health, but it isn’t much better at economic policy.

Rex Nutting is a MarketWatch columnist.

Exclusive: Obscure Indian cyber firm spied on politicians, investors worldwide

Jack Stubbs, Raphael Satter, Christopher Bing

Fahmi Quadir, founder of Safkhet Capital, poses in New York City, New York, U.S., June 9, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Jack Stubbs, Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing

LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A little-known Indian IT firm offered its hacking services to help clients spy on more than 10,000 email accounts over a period of seven years.

New Delhi-based BellTroX InfoTech Services targeted government officials in Europe, gambling tycoons in the Bahamas, and well-known investors in the United States including private equity giant KKR and short seller Muddy Waters, according to three former employees, outside researchers, and a trail of online evidence.

Aspects of BellTroX’s hacking spree aimed at American targets are currently under investigation by U.S. law enforcement, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

Reuters does not know the identity of BellTroX’s clients. In a telephone interview, the company’s owner, Sumit Gupta, declined to disclose who had hired him and denied any wrongdoing.

Muddy Waters founder Carson Block said he was “disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that we were likely targeted for hacking by a client of BellTroX.” KKR declined to comment.

Researchers at internet watchdog group Citizen Lab, who spent more than two years mapping out the infrastructure used by the hackers, released a report here on Tuesday saying they had "high confidence" that BellTroX employees were behind the espionage campaign.

“This is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed,” said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

Although they receive a fraction of the attention devoted to state-sponsored espionage groups or headline-grabbing heists, “cyber mercenary” services are widely used, he said. “Our investigation found that no sector is immune.”

A cache of data reviewed by Reuters provides insight into the operation, detailing tens of thousands of malicious messages designed to trick victims into giving up their passwords that were sent by BellTroX between 2013 and 2020. The data was supplied on condition of anonymity by online service providers used by the hackers after Reuters alerted the firms to unusual patterns of activity on their platforms.

The data is effectively a digital hit list showing who was targeted and when. Reuters validated the data by checking it against emails received by the targets.


On the list: judges in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers in France and environmental groups in the United States. These dozens of people, among the thousands targeted by BellTroX, did not respond to messages or declined comment.

Reuters was not able to establish how many of the hacking attempts were successful.

BellTroX’s Gupta was charged in a 2015 hacking case in which two U.S. private investigators admitted to paying him to hack the accounts of marketing executives. Gupta was declared a fugitive in 2017, although the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on the current status of the case or whether an extradition request had been issued.

Speaking by phone from his home in New Delhi, Gupta denied hacking and said he had never been contacted by law enforcement. He said he had only ever helped private investigators download messages from email inboxes after they provided him with login details.

“I didn’t help them access anything, I just helped them with downloading the mails and they provided me all the details,” he told Reuters. “I am not aware how they got these details but I was just helping them with the technical support.”

Reuters could not determine why the private investigators might need Gupta to download emails. Gupta did not return follow-up messages. Spokesmen for Delhi police and India’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

HOROSCOPES AND PORNOGRAPHY

Operating from a small room above a shuttered tea stall in a west-Delhi retail complex, BellTroX bombarded its targets with tens of thousands of malicious emails, according to the data reviewed by Reuters. Some messages would imitate colleagues or relatives; others posed as Facebook login requests or graphic notifications to unsubscribe from pornography websites.

Fahmi Quadir’s New York-based short selling firm Safkhet Capital was among 17 investment companies targeted by BellTroX between 2017 and 2019. She said she noticed a surge in suspicious emails in early 2018, shortly after she launched her fund.

Initially “it didn’t seem necessarily malicious,” Quadir said. “It was just horoscopes; then it escalated to pornography.”

Eventually the hackers upped their game, sending her credible-sounding messages that looked like they came from her coworkers, other short sellers or members of her family. “They were even trying to emulate my sister,” Quadir said, adding that she believes the attacks were unsuccessful.

U.S. advocacy groups were also repeatedly targeted. Among them were digital rights organizations Free Press and Fight for the Future, both of whom have lobbied for net neutrality. The groups said a small number of employee accounts were compromised, but the wider organizations' networks were untouched. The spying on those groups was detailed in a report here by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2017, but has not been publicly tied to BellTroX until now.

Timothy Karr, a director at Free Press, said his organization “sees an uptick in breach attempts whenever we’re engaged in heated and high-profile public policy debates.” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said: “When corporations and politicians can hire digital mercenaries to target civil society advocates, it undermines our democratic process.”

While Reuters was not able to establish who hired BellTroX to carry out the hacking, two former employees said the company and others like it were usually contracted by private investigators on behalf of business rivals or political opponents.

Bart Santos of San Diego-based Bulldog Investigations was one of a dozen private detectives in the United States and Europe who told Reuters they had received unsolicited advertisements for hacking services out of India - including one from a person who described himself as a former BellTroX employee. The pitch offered to carry out “data penetration” and “email penetration.”

Santos said he ignored those overtures, but could understand why some people didn’t. “The Indian guys have a reputation for customer service,” he said.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Pal in NEW DELHI and Ryan McNeill in LONDON; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Chris Sanders and Edward Tobin

U.S. fireworks purveyor sees 'perfect storm' of forces behind explosive demand

EVERYBODY IS GUY FAWKES THESE DAYS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The piercing boom of illegal fireworks in New York is music to the ears of Joe VanOudenhove, who runs a legal fireworks business in Pennsylvania.

Shoppers look through fireworks for sale at Sky King Fireworks in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 24, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

VanOudenhove is by no means the only source of the nighttime explosions that have drawn a raft of complaints in New York, but his stores are enjoying an unprecedented pyrotechnics craze in a country constrained by the coronavirus.

“It’s a banner year for the fireworks industry,” he said. “The uptick in demand and sales of fireworks is coast to coast.”

VanOudenhove, the managing partner of Sky King Fireworks whose 20 stores in four states make it one of the largest purveyors of fireworks on the East Coast, estimates that recent sales are up from 50% to 200% from last year, more than anything he has seen in 25 years.

A “perfect storm” of forces is behind the burst of demand for the sky rockets, roman candles and other glittering and exploding consumer grade fireworks Sky King sells, VanOudenhove said.

But much of it has to do with families being starved for entertainment in a locked-down world without concerts or sporting events, he said.

“A few weeks ago, we had a family drive to Erie, Pennsylvania, from either New Jersey or New York somewhere and spend $150 on fireworks because they just wanted to get out of the house,” he said.

The fireworks rage has shattered the evening quiet of many a U.S. neighborhood, prompting a flood of complaints, especially in New York where calls to police about fireworks in the first half of June jumped one-hundredfold from last year.

VanOudenhove said on Friday he has not seen any out-of-state police around his stores since New York officials launched a fireworks crackdown on Tuesday.

Customers are asked to sign forms saying that they understand the rules of the fireworks’ final destination, he said.


And they keep coming.

“I don’t think we’ll see this again,” he said. “I think is a one-time deal.”


So seriously, what’s up with the fireworks everywhere these days?

Published: June 24, 2020 By Associated Press

Fireworks explode during Juneteenth celebrations above the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn on June 19. ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — They are a symbol of celebration, loudly lighting up the night sky and best known in the U.S. as the explosive exclamation point to Fourth of July festivities.

This year, fireworks aren’t being saved for Independence Day.

They’ve become a nightly nuisance ringing out from Connecticut to California, angering sleep-deprived residents and alarming elected officials.


All of them want to know: Why the fascination with fireworks, and where is everybody getting the goods?


“I had that same question,” said Julie L. Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.

Theories range from coordinated efforts to blame those protesting police brutality to bored people blowing off steam following coronavirus lockdowns. Most states allow at least some types of consumer fireworks, making them difficult to contain in cities like New York where they’re banned because people can drive a couple of hours away to buy them legally.


New York Mayor Bill de Blasio set up a multiagency task force in hopes of getting answers, after blasts from Brooklyn to the Bronx have people in the city that never sleeps desperate to actually get some.

Made up of police, firefighters and the Sheriff’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the task force will conduct sting operations to try to stop the sales of explosives that are proving dangerous. A 3-year-old boy was injured Wednesday while watching fireworks from her apartment window.

“This is a real problem. It is not just a quality-of-life problem and a noise problem,” de Blasio said.

Many Fourth of July celebrations will be smaller or eliminated entirely because of coronavirus restrictions. Yet the business of fireworks is booming, with some retailers reporting 200% increases from the same time last year, Heckman said.


Her industry had high hopes for 2020, with July 4 falling on a Saturday. Then came the pandemic and its closures and cancellations, leaving fireworks retailers worried they wouldn’t be able to scratch out much of a sales season.

Those fears have gone up in smoke.

“Sales are off the hook right now. We’re seeing this anomaly in use,” Heckman said. “What’s concerning to us is this usage in cities where consumer fireworks are not legal to use.”

Officials have the same concern.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said there are too many reports of fireworks being set off across the state, where they are mostly illegal.

“This is no way to blow off steam,” he told reporters Tuesday in Trenton, the capital.

New Jersey outlaws pyrotechnics except for sparklers and snakes, which produce smoke but don’t explode, though residents have easy access to fireworks at shops in Pennsylvania.

In Morrisville, Pa., Trenton’s neighbor, a big shop sits at the foot of the bridge leading to New Jersey. On Tuesday, the parking lot was nearly full, with cars primarily from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but others from New York, North Carolina and even Texas.

Officials in Oakland, Calif., say they have received more complaints of illegal fireworks and reports of celebratory gunfire this year than is typical before the Fourth of July. At least five fires have been linked to fireworks since late May, officials said.

In Denver, authorities seized up to 3,000 pounds of illegal fireworks discovered during a traffic stop this week.

Theories abound for why fireworks have gotten so popular.

Some speculate on social media that police are either setting them off themselves or giving them to local teens in hopes people blame those protesting racist policing. Another claim says police are just harassing communities of color.

“My neighbors and I believe that this is part of a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces,” tweeted the writer Robert Jones Jr., whose recent posts on fireworks have been retweeted thousands of times.

A video captured in New York appears to show fire department staff setting off the explosives outside their station.

Pyrotechnics expert Mike Tockstein, who has directed hundreds of professional fireworks shows, thinks there’s an easier explanation: the upcoming holiday and a nation filled with young people fed up with quarantines.

“I’ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories, and none of them are based in logic or data or facts,” said Tockstein, owner of Pyrotechnic Innovations, a California-based company that trains fireworks professionals.

“Fireworks are used across the entire country for a full month leading up to the Fourth of July,” he said. “There is a slight uptick, but I don’t think it’s anything more than people are stuck at home and hey, look, fireworks are available.”

One theory that can probably be blown up: organizers of canceled Fourth of July events passing surplus products to recreational users.

“Nothing could be further from the truth in that regard,” Heckman said, “because that would be a felony.”

Those who sell professional fireworks, which are much more dangerous for amateurs to fire, need licenses from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and goods are housed in secure facilities, often guarded.

“It’s like the Fort Knox of fireworks,” said Larry Farnsworth, a spokesman for the National Fireworks Association.

Retail use falls under the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The fireworks Heckman is seeing aren’t professional. Retail aerial fireworks are capped at under 2 inches in diameter and burst at just under 200 feet. Professional fireworks are wider and can explode hundreds of feet higher.

Still, they can be a bother at any height for young children, pets and veterans and others with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In Hartford, Conn., police say they have been responding to up to 200 complaints a day. Connecticut allows only fireworks that don’t explode or launch into the air, but they’re legal a drive away in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia has some restrictions on fireworks and warned of their dangers this week after a number of complaints.

“We understand the absence of in-person festivals may cause some to crave the excitement of an enormous fireworks display over the river. But the simple fact is that these are extremely dangerous products, and the risks far outweigh the momentary excitement of the explosions,” city Managing Director Brian Abernathy said.

The light shows could last a while longer. Many pop-up seasonal stores only opened this week. Tockstein predicts more people will buy fireworks in the coming weeks as they realize traditional July 4 displays won’t happen.

“I think with all these public events being canceled, more families will bring the celebration home for the Fourth of July,” Heckman said.

DERELICTION OF DUTY

White House does not commit to temperature checks in meeting with U.S. airlines

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) - Top U.S. airline executives met on Friday with Vice President Mike Pence and other senior administration officials but did not come away with any commitments from the White House on mandating temperature checks for airline passengers.

Pence met with the chief executives of United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, JetBlue Airways and the president of Southwest Airlines at the White House alongside Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Mark Redfield, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other officials.

Airlines want the U.S. government to administer temperature checks to all passengers in a bid to reassure the public.


The Trump administration is open to the idea of having the Transportation Security Administration conduct the tests, but there are still many unanswered questions, including what would happen to passengers who had high fevers and were denied boarding and how to pay for the screening.

Major airlines on Thursday said they would refund air fares to passengers denied boarding if the government conducted tests.

The CDC does not want to be responsible for travelers with high fevers, two people briefed on the meeting said.

The aviation industry, suffering an unprecedented downturn in travel, has urged the government to mandate measures that could help reassure passengers on the safety of travel. Airline executives told government officials that the public views temperature checks and face coverings as two key factors to boost confidence in air travel. Government officials plan to keep studying the idea, officials said.

Trade group Airlines for America said it looked “forward to working with the administration to identify and implement initiatives that help relaunch the U.S. airline industry.”

Representative Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said last week the Trump administration should not mandate temperature checks without adopting formal regulations.