Archives for March 2021

How major US stock indexes fared Thursday

Stocks closed lower Thursday, as higher bond yields once again pulled down shares of technology companies and the energy sector sold off on a drop in oil prices.

The IT-heavy Nasdaq suffered its second-worst loss of the year, falling 3%. Bank stocks were among the best performers as investors bet that higher interest rates would translate into higher profits. The S&P 500 index fell 1.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.5%.

Bond yields moved higher again, to levels not seen since January 2020.

On Thursday:

The S&P 500 fell 58.66 points, or 1.5%, to 3,915.46

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 153.07 points, or 0.5%, to 32,862.30.

The Nasdaq fell 409.03 points, or 3%, to 13,116.17.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 68.81 points, or 2.9% to 2,267.59.

For the week:

The S&P 500 is down 27.88 points, or 0.7%.

The Dow is up 83.66 points, or 0.3%.

The Nasdaq is down 203.70 points, or 1.5%.

The Russell 2000 is down 85.20 points, or 3.6%.

For the year:

The S&P 500 is up 159.39 points, or 4.2%.

The Dow is up 2,255.82 points, or 7.4%.

The Nasdaq is up 227.89 points, or 1.8%.

The Russell 2000 is up 292.73 points, or 14.8%.

Amazon gets Thursday night games, NFL nearly doubles TV deal

The NFL will nearly double its media revenue to more than $10 billion a season with new rights agreements announced Thursday, including a deal with Amazon Prime Video that gives the streaming service exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football” beginning in 2022.

The league took in $5.9 billion a year in its current contracts. It will get $113 billion over the 11 seasons of the new deals that begin in 2023, an increase of 80% over the previous such period, a person with direct knowledge of the contracts told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the money figures were not made public.

Amazon has partnered with the league to stream Thursday night games since 2017, but it will take over the entire package from Fox, which has had it since 2018 after CBS and NBC shared the package for two seasons. Amazon streamed a Week 16 Saturday game between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals last year that was seen by an estimated 11.2 total viewers and had an average minute audience of 4.8 million. That was a record for the largest audience to stream an NFL game.

Games will continue to air on CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN, while ABC will have a limited schedule of games as well as returning to the Super Bowl rotation (two games) for the first time since the 2005 season. ESPN’s deal was scheduled to end after 2021, while the others expired a year later, but ESPN will have a bridge deal for 2022.

With the exception of Amazon, the new deals will begin with the 2023 season and expire after the 2033 schedule. Games on Amazon will also be carried on over-the-air broadcast stations in the cities of the participating teams, which is also the case with games aired on ESPN and NFL Network.

Besides the two Super Bowls, ESPN and ABC will also gain the rights to flex games to “Monday Night Football,” a right only previously given to NBC when flex scheduling was introduced in 2006.

The contract also expands digital rights for the other networks as well. ESPN+ will air one of the London games and NBC’s “Peacock” platform will also have exclusive games.

With the hefty new contracts the 32 NFL teams and their players can look forward to increased salary caps throughout the decade. The cap decreased by nearly $16 million this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The broadcast partners also figure to get an extra game per season, likely beginning this year. NFL owners are getting ready to implement a 17-game regular season.

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More AP NFL coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL

China summons technology firms over voice software security

HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese authorities summoned 11 companies including Alibaba and Tencent for talks regarding the security of voice software, as Beijing steps up scrutiny over the internet sector.

The internet watchdog the Cyberspace Administration of China said Thursday that the talks were about security assessments of technology used in voice-based social media and deepfake technology that can potentially manipulate and create synthetic audio content of people speaking.

The move comes as authorities in recent months have increased oversight over technology firms in the country, over concerns of anticompetitive behavior. Twelve technology companies, including Tencent and Baidu, for were fined for flouting anti-monopoly rules.

Companies called in for talks with the CAC included smartphone maker Xiaomi, TikTok parent company Bytedance and live-streaming firm Kuaishou.

Authorities urged them to comply with cybersecurity laws and conduct security assessments, improve risk prevention and control and “take effective rectification measures” for any previously unknown safety hazards.

The meeting also comes after China banned audio social media platform Clubhouse last month after Chinese users engaged in real-time discussions about political topics such as a crackdown on Uyghurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region. Chinese equivalents of Clubhouse have since sprung up in the Chinese market, with companies like Xiaomi relaunching a messaging app into a similar audio-social media platform.

China in 2019 banned online video and audio providers from using artificial intelligence technologies to produce “fake news” that authorities deem to be untrue.

EU agency: AstraZeneca vaccine safe, will add clot warning

LONDON (AP) — The European Union’s drug regulatory agency said Thursday that the AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t increase the overall incidence of blood clots and that the benefits of using it outweigh the possible risks, paving the way for European countries to resume dispensing the shots.

France, Italy and Germany promptly announced they will start using the vaccine again on Friday. Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands said they will do so next week, though Spain said it might exclude certain groups to minimize any danger.

More than a dozen nations around the world had suspended their use of the vaccine over the past week following reports of clots in a few dozen of the millions of people across Europe who have gotten the shot. The question was whether the vaccine had anything to do with the clots and whether any action needed to be taken.

The safety committee of the European Medicines Agency “has come to a clear scientific conclusion,” the head of the EMA, Emer Cooke, announced. “This is a safe and effective vaccine.”

She added: “If it were me, I would be vaccinated tomorrow.”

However, she said the agency “still cannot rule out definitively a link” between certain rare types of blood clots and the vaccine. The EMA recommended adding a description of these cases to the vaccine leaflets.

The debate raised fears that the safety questions would seriously undermine public confidence in AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which is key to efforts to immunize some of the world’s poorer countries, and further slow the lagging vaccination drive across the 27-nation EU at a moment when infections are rising at an alarming rate. Europe also relies on Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex said he would be getting an AstraZeneca shot on Friday “to show we can have complete confidence” in it.

Clots that form in the arms, legs or elsewhere can break free and travel to the heart, brain or lungs, causing strokes, heart attacks or other deadly blockages.

In its findings Thursday, the EMA said the overall number of clotting events of various sorts reported since the rollout is lower than what would be expected in the general population.

But those very common clots aren’t the kind causing concern. Instead, the EMA said it will continue to look closely at two rare types of blood clots. It cited seven reports of a type that appears in multiple blood vessels and 18 reports of a kind called cerebral venous thrombosis, which occurs in a vein that drains blood from the brain.

That’s out of the 20 million people who have received at least one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Britain and the EU.

Most of those cases were in people younger than 55 and the majority were women, the EMA said.

Experts said it will be critical to uncover if something predisposed those people to these rare clots. For example, before the pandemic, the brain-related clots almost always occurred in people with certain risk factors such as taking birth control pills, or any of a list of underlying conditions that affect clotting.

Sabine Straus, head of the EMA’s safety committee, said birth control pills are “a distinct possibility” that will be investigated.

She also said experts found “no evidence of a quality or a batch issue” linked to any particular manufacturing site.

Ann Taylor, AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer, welcomed the EMA’s findings and added: “We trust that, after the regulators’ careful decisions, vaccinations can once again resume across Europe.”

The World Health Organization previously said it saw no evidence the vaccine was to blame for the clots. AstraZeneca’s vaccine is central to COVAX, the U.N.-backed project to supply COVID-19 shots to poorer countries around the world.

AstraZeneca is expected to apply in the coming weeks for U.S. authorization for its vaccine. The U.S. now relies on vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Britain was not among the countries that suspended use of the vaccine. On Thursday, ahead of the EMA’s announcement, Britain’s drug regulatory agency said there is no evidence the formula causes clots, and it urged people to continue getting the shot.

Like the EMA, however, British regulators followed its counterparts on the continent in urging people to seek medical attention if they suffer headaches that last for more than four days after vaccination or bruising beyond the injection site after a few days.

The pause in vaccinations with AstraZeneca’s formula comes as tens of thousands of new daily cases have prompted new lockdown measures in Italy, caused hospitalizations in France to spike and led German officials to announce a third surge of COVID-19 has begun.

“Rarely has an immunization program been more important to the well-being of a population,” said Pauline Paterson, co-director of the Vaccine Confidence Project team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

In yet another setback, however, British officials said the country is facing a shortfall in vaccine deliveries that may delay the start of shots for people under 50 in the coming weeks.

The EU has an estimated 7 million unused doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Clinical trials are typically done in tens of thousands of participants. As a result, extremely rare side effects often aren’t detected until a vaccine has been used in many millions of people, long after the product has reached the market.

For example, it took nearly a year after vaccination campaigns began against the 2009 swine flu pandemic for European officials to notice an increase in narcolepsy in children and teenagers who got the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine.

“It’s right to investigate any potential signals of problems, but you can do that while you continue immunization,” said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton. “If we pause the vaccine rollout every time there’s a possible signal, it won’t be much of a rollout.”

Head cautioned that there are costs to going slowly: The longer the coronavirus is allowed to circulate widely, the more chance it has to mutate into a deadlier version.

“People may well be more hesitant to take an AstraZeneca vaccine when immunization resumes,” he said. “And this is at a time when we need to stop the virus circulating to the reduce the chances of further variants emerging.”

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Jordans reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard in Washington; Elaine Ganley in Paris; Danica Kirka in London; and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine, and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.

Best Rate Repair Provides ghgduuuehas Deck Repair Near Me

Best Rate Repair, a construction firm based in San Diego, California, is very happy to provide their professional services to residents of La Jolla, Spring Valley, San Ysidro, Bonita and the surrounding areas. Certified as a Master Deck Builder from the North America Deck & Railing Association, the business mainly repairs damaged decks or platforms made out of wood.

As noted on their website, Best Rate Repair cautions that wooden decks are vulnerable to unforeseen, extreme damages. Wildfires, for instance, are typical in California, especially during the summertime where the heat may reach over 100ºF (38º C). Wood rot because of water exposure is also typical in homes, especially Victorian-style ones which were built in the preceding century. As recorded by the Compass California Blog, these variables cause home owners in the entire country to invest $17,000 a year on repair fees.

Therefore, Best Speed Repair urges clients to talk to their staff as quickly as possible to ask about their wide range of products. The business installs composite decking from Trex and Fiberon’s Douglas Fir and Redwood, both of which are famous for their durability (Class 3) and adaptability to extreme conditions. The company’s technicians also add support to the decks through pouring concrete footings, installing fresh posts and setting beams to reinforce the deck frame.

Additionally, Best Rate Repair advises homeowners to wash their wood decks each year or two in order to protect their homes from damage caused by harsh sunshine, termites and moisture. Upon review, the ideal Rate Repair team will provide professional advice and offer necessary services, such as power washing, staining, resealing and cleaning. These treatments can also be applied to other timber structures, like balconies, verandas, patios and handrails.

Aside, from mending decks, Best Rate Fix conceals cracks and peels in stuccos or wall plaster and stains interior drywall. Their staff also clean rain gutters and storm drains in addition to removing graffiti and trash from apparently inaccessible locations. Additionally they renovate rooms such as kitchens and bathrooms and fix damaged windows, doors, fences, gates and privacy obstacles. Additionally, they notify their customers of legal issues related to property reparations like escrow billing and comprehension Wood Destroying Organism (WDO) segments in contracts. The company mostly educates them when to substitute decks, where the team receives the equipment and supplies from and how they’re superior to other repair companies in the region. In addition, the company emphasizes that all of their employees are well-trained and guaranteed.

Best Rate Repair has repaired more than a thousand homes in Southern California over a 20 year period. Its 40 staff members to ensure that they are client-focused and adhere to values such as commitment to promises, responsibility in jobs, project management instruction, regard for property, job consistency and result-orientedness.

On account of their successful jobs and powerful principles, Best Rate Repair has received high ratings from their customers, like an A+ rating on BBB and 4.5 stars on Yelp. They also have attracted more than 600 clients with positive feedback. As exhibited in a glowing review shared on the organization’s official website, Sandra Bacal says,”James Johnson and Ed Avalos did an excellent job of inspecting the premises, and James Johnson did the very thorough treatment.” She added that the staff of Best Rate Repair are meticulous in fixing the damages in her property. Meanwhile, another client, Ingrid Reinig, states that the provider is relied upon by homeowners due to the instant repairs and quotes they provide in addition to their respectful, professional mindset.

Homeowners looking for’deck repair near me‘ and in need of prompt repairs because of their decks and possessions may consult Best Speed Repair via their official site. They may also join with Best Speed Repair via social media to stay current with their information and announcements.

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Archives for March 2021

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