Archives for May 2021

Stocks end higher on Wall Street, breaking a 3-day slump

Technology companies led broad gains for stocks on Wall Street Thursday, ending a three-day losing streak for major U.S. indexes.

Investors were encouraged by the latest jobs data that showed fewer Americans filing for unemployment benefits, another sign that the economic recovery is underway.

The S&P 500 gained 1.1%. The benchmark index is still on track for its second straight weekly loss.

Technology and communications stocks accounted for much of the market rally. Apple rose 2.1% and Google’s parent, Alphabet, rose 1.6%. Nearly every sector in the S&P 500 made gains, though a drop in oil prices dragged energy sector stocks lower. The sector remains the biggest gainer so far this year with a 36% gain.

Investors continue to be focused on the potential for inflation down the road. Prices for everything from gasoline to lumber have been rising sharply this year as the economy reheats after the pandemic, and investors have been worried that high inflation may cause the Federal Reserve to pull back on its stimulus efforts.

“There’s a bit of churning going on in the markets,” said Tom Martin, senior portfolio manager with Globalt Investments. “Here we are near all-time highs on the S&P 500, and there’s so much uncertainty about what is actually happening with inflation, how long it’s going to last and how the Fed will react.”

The S&P 500 rose 43.44 points to 4,159.12. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 188.11 points, or 0.6%, to 34,084.15. The technology heavy Nasdaq fared better than the rest of the market, climbing 236 points, or 1.8%, to 13,535.74.

Small company stocks also notched gains. The Russell 2000 index picked up 14.12 points, or 0.6%, to 2,207.76.

Several retailers were among the biggest decliners in the S&P 500. Gap dropped 1.4%, while L Brands skidded 2.6%. Ross Stores lost 2.7%.

The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid fell last week to 444,000, a new pandemic low and a sign that the job market keeps strengthening as consumers spend freely again, viral infections drop and business restrictions ease.

Part of that decline may be fueled by Republican governors who have opted not to allow their residents to claim the $300-a-week supplemental benefit that came with the latest economic relief package. The move could be pushing more people back into the labor market.

Treasury yields mostly fell, despite the positive economic data. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 1.63% from 1.67% late Wednesday.

Oatly, the largest maker of oat milk in the world, jumped 18.8% on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. The company raised $1.5 billion as part of its initial public offering.

Digital currencies fell sharply Wednesday after China’s banking association issued a warning over the risks associated with digital currencies. On Thursday the price of Bitcoin regained some ground, adding 4.4% to roughly $40,213, according to the online brokerage Coinbase.

Biden signs bill to counter spike in anti-Asian hate crime

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday signed legislation to curtail a dramatic rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and expressed pride that lawmakers who seem to agree on little else came together against hate and racism.

Biden lavished praise on Democrats and Republicans for approving the bill by lopsided margins and sending it to the White House for his signature. Several dozen lawmakers attended the bill signing ceremony, one of the largest groups to visit the Biden White House during the pandemic.

The House approved the bill 364-62 this week, following the Senate’s 94-1 vote in April.

Biden, who stressed his wish to help unite the country as he campaigned for office, said during the East Room event that fighting hate and racism should bring people together.

“I’m proud today of the United States,” he said.

The new law will expedite Justice Department reviews of hate crimes by putting an official in charge of the effort. Federal grants will be available to help local law enforcement agencies improve their investigation, identification and reporting of bias-driven incidents, which often go underreported.

Some activists opposed the legislation’s reliance on law enforcement.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Black and Indian, discussed reports of stabbings, shootings and other attacks against Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals and their businesses since the start of the pandemic a little over a year ago.

Harris said such incidents had increased six-fold during that time.

She said that while the new law brings the U.S. closer to stopping hate, “the work to address injustice, wherever it exists, remains the work ahead.”

The AAPI Victory Alliance, a policy and advocacy organization for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, complimented Biden for quickly signing the bill. But executive director Varun Nikore said the law is “only one piece in the long fight” for equity and opportunity for communities of color.

Nikore said Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will use the “electoral prowess” they demonstrated last year to elect leaders who will advocate for their community.

“Ending Asian hate should never be a partisan issue,” he said.

The bill-signing scene at the White House was reminiscent of pre-pandemic times, and the bill itself marked a fleeting moment of bipartisanship in a Congress that has struggled all year to overcome partisan gridlock over issues ranging from COVID-19 aid to the definition of “infrastructure.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and more than 60 guests from Congress, the Justice Department, and advocacy groups, along with White House aides, mingled freely and barefaced due to new public health guidance that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can stop wearing face masks while indoors with other fully vaccinated people.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins was the only Republican lawmaker seen in the audience.

At the end of the program, Harris and lawmakers who led the effort to get the bill passed surrounded Biden as he sat at a desk and signed it into law.

NARA calls in DoD to help resolve its backlog of veteran records requests

The National Archives and Records Administration is making an urgent plea to the Defense Department, calling on the Pentagon to help it address a backlog of 500,000 pending records requests and another 400,000 refiling requests.

The backlog has been building since last March, when NARA sent most employees home to work remotely and implemented COVID-19 safety protocols at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which houses and processes military and medical documents that veterans need to apply for federal benefits.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been fielding complaints from their constituents for months, many of whom have struggled to access services at the Department of Veterans Affairs during the pandemic.

William Bonsanko, NARA’s chief operating officer, issued a formal request for assistance to the Pentagon last week, and a bipartisan group of House members, including the chairmen and ranking members of the House Oversight and Reform and Veterans Affairs Committees, are calling on the Pentagon to respond.

“We respectfully ask DOD to prioritize and fulfill NARA’s request,” the members said Thursday in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “Veterans and their families depend on timely access to personnel records in order to receive life-saving medical care, emergency housing assistance, proper military burials and other vital benefits earned through service to our country. We urge DoD to support the NPRC’s work and to ensure that we uphold our solemn pledge to care for our nation’s veterans.”

Veterans need their military records in order to get access to VA health, housing, burial and other benefits. But most records at the NRPC exist only in a paper format, and employees can’t access them remotely.

During most years, the NRPC receives 20,000 records requests each week, or 1.2 million annually. The agency responded to most within 10 days, NARA said, before the pandemic hit.

“We have not been able to maintain our normal, high level of responsiveness during the pandemic,” Bonsanko said his in request to DoD. “We have taken a number of actions to protect our workforce from exposure to COVID-19, including reducing the number of employees permitted in our facilities at one time and implementing strict social distancing procedures for on-site work.”

NARA, for example, brought employees into work on Saturdays and added a second shift for the workforce, meaning the agency could double the number of personnel on hand without breaking COVID-19 safety protocols.

During a nine-month period last year, NARA responded to nearly 80,000 emergency requests for veterans, David Ferriero, the chief archivist, told Congress last December.

“Unfortunately, these efforts have not been enough to keep pace with the new requests received over the same period, and our backlog of unanswered requests has continued to grow,” he said at the time.

VA has tried in several ways to help. Thomas Murphy, VA’s acting assistant secretary for benefits, told Congress last week that his team worked with NARA to process some emergency records requests more quickly, and the department has chipped in some of its own COVID-19 relief funding to pay for NPRC employee overtime.

The department detailed employees to the NPRC, and VA Secretary Denis McDonough offered vaccines to NARA employees through VA’s allotment of doses.

Today, the two agencies are working together to digitize some records.

Still, those efforts clearly haven’t been enough. NARA told Congress it could take two years to resolve the backlog of pending records requests without additional help.

NARA’s request to DoD illustrates the complexity of the work that lies ahead.

Specifically, the agency said it needs DoD’s help in transporting up to 400,000 official military personnel folders to a location off site from the NPRC in St. Louis. DoD personnel would sort and group folders in sequential order so the NPRC can refile them later.

DoD would transport the newly batched files back to the NPRC and help the agency with refiling and digitization efforts. It would also help NARA search, find and respond to records requests and photocopy and mail separation documents to those who have requested them.

“We are prepared to begin immediately,” the NARA request reads. “To support social distancing, we request the on-site work be performed in the afternoon, between the hours of 1 and 7 p.m. daily, when there are fewer staff and contractors in the facility. We expect the duration to be less than six months.”

While NARA processes and houses these records for a fee, military services own the documents themselves. NARA will not reimburse DoD for the use of its personnel, but it will repay the department for any other costs associated with the project, Bonsanko said.

Powerful US nuclear test reactor getting rare major overhaul

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Scientists in Idaho this summer plan to remove the 62,000-pound (28,100-kilogram) stainless steel lid on one of the world’s most powerful nuclear test reactors for a rare internal overhaul.

The Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory is being refurbished and improved with new components and experimental capacity, the scientists said in interviews this week.

The nine-month and $170 million effort, called a core internals changeout, started last month and is scheduled to be finished around the end of the year.

An additional $100 million has been spent over the last three years on replacing external equipment to keep the test reactor going.

Experiments at the reactor help the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered war fleet stay at sea longer, bolster NASA’s space exploration, and advance life-saving medical treatments. The reactor also plays a key role in the effort to keep commercial nuclear power plants running longer and creating new and safer reactors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“ATR is an absolutely beautiful reactor,” said Sean O’Kelly, associate lab director in charge of the test reactor. “There has never been one like it on the planet.”

The reactor is configured so it can run multiple tests simultaneously. Some of the best testing slots face a decade-long wait for room to run experiments, and other slots are booked years in advance.

The ATR is unique because unlike commercial nuclear reactors that produce heat that’s turned into energy, the ATR produces neutrons so that new materials and fuels can be tested to see how they react in high-radiation environments. The test reactor’s unique cloverleaf design includes a core that’s surrounded by beryllium metal to reflect the neutrons.

But all those neutrons puts wear on the internal parts of the test reactor, meaning it would lose the ability to conduct experiments if it is not refurbished.

The reactor’s designers foresaw that problem and created a reactor with internal components that can be periodically replaced. The current changeout is the sixth since the reactor started operating in 1967 and the first in 17 years.

O’Kelly and Hans Vogel, director of the ATR Strategic Irradiation Capabilities Division, said that the most difficult challenge will come this summer when workers take off the stainless steel lid, exposing the inside of test reactor.

“Removing the reactor top head itself, that’s a 30-ton lift that we do, and that is a very infrequent evolution,” Vogel said, adding that will be followed by roughly three months of changing internal hardware.

O’Kelly and Vogel said the U.S. has looked at building a new test reactor that would cost billions of dollars, but so far opted to stick with the ATR.

It’s the most powerful test reactor of its kind in the world, producing 250 megawatts at full power. China has a test reactor that can produce 125 megawatts, followed by a test reactor in Belgium that can produce 100 megawatts. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has one that can produce 85 megawatts.

The advantage with more power, O’Kelly said, is that fuels and materials can be tested to their limits.

“You don’t want fuel that is designed for 100 megawatts, and the first time you go to 103 megawatts, it fails,” he said. “You build a safety margin in, and we have to test to that safety margin.”

Additionally, the ATR has what O’Kelly describes as the ability to maintain “a constant gradient of neutron flux throughout the core. ATR has this constant curvature of flux, so the experimenters have a fixed power and they know exactly what the power is in that region.”

He said other test reactors can be more challenging for experiments because the environment is changing during the experiment.

The Advanced Test Reactor has been used to develop reactors and fuel that can last the 30-year lifespans of nuclear-powered U.S. warships. Because they don’t need refueling, the ships can spend more time on their missions, meaning the Navy needs to build fewer ships.

The USS Idaho, a Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, benefits from work done at the ATR. The submarine is scheduled to launch in 2023 and spend three decades in service.

Late this year or early next year, scientists expect the ATR will be put back together and have completed required safety testing.

“ATR will be able to run for at least another 15 to 20 years,” said O’Kelly, adding this internal changeout might not be the last. “We are planning to do at least one more (core internals changeout) in the lifetime of ATR in the 2030s.”

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This story has been corrected to show that it’s the sixth core overhaul, not fifth.

U.S. rapper Flo Rida helps San Marino reach Eurovision final

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Tiny San Marino got a big dose of star power Thursday as U.S. rapper Flo Rida helped the city state qualify for the grand final of the 65th Eurovision Song Contest along with nine other national acts.

The rapper known for hits including 2008′s “Low” joined singer Senhit on stage for her song “Adrenalina” as the first of 17 performers in the second semifinal at the Ahoy arena. He then sat in San Marino’s booth to watch the rest of the show along with 3,500 fans who had tested negative to the coronavirus.

Flo Rida said he was enjoying the Eurovision vibe as San Marino reach the final for just the third time.

“I love the energy, you know, to be up there,” the rapper said. “I mean, it’s just amazing, man. The whole set up, it’s like over the top. So, you know, I’m embracing it very well.”

Iceland also was among the 10 national acts voted into Saturday’s final despite not even performing because one of the band members tested positive for COVID-19. The crowd instead watched a recorded rehearsal from last week of the kitsch act Dadi og Gagnamagnid.

Band members were shown on giant screens in the arena cheering from quarantine in a Rotterdam hotel room as presenters announced they had progressed.

“It just feels weird. I don’t know, really. It’s still kind of processing,” singer Dadi Freyr said. “Maybe I’ll know later how we’re feeling about it. And we’re not going to be on stage on Saturday, which is annoying because we put out a lot of work into this and we’ve been ready for a long time”

Also voted through to the final by viewers and national panels of experts were acts from Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece and Finland.

Greece’s singer 18-year-old Stefania was a local favorite in host nation the Netherlands. She was born to Greek parents in the Dutch city of Utrecht and said she was proud to sing for Greece.

“The one thing that’s also really important for me is to make all the Greek people happy because I represent Greece, the country, and I just really want to make them happy and make them proud,” the 18-year-old said.

While most performers Thursday stuck to the tried and tested Eurovision formula of bombastic beats or ballads and plenty of glitter, Finland’s act was rock band Blind Channel whose members were dressed all in black, with not a sequin in sight.

Finnish rock has won Eurovision hearts before. The hard rock band Lordi won the contest in 2006.

Saturday night’s final will be the first since 2019 after last year’s musical spectacle was canceled because of the global pandemic. The final features 20 nations from the two semifinals along with the so-called big five nations of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, plus host nation the Netherlands.

Up to 3,500 fans, who have to show a negative COVID-19 test, are allowed to attend each dress rehearsal, semifinal and final, making the contest one of the biggest live events in Europe since the pandemic upended public life.

The fans are allowed in as part of a Dutch government-sanctioned test event to evaluate how large-scale events can be safely staged as the country gradually emerges from lockdown.

The 2019 winner, Duncan Laurence, had been slated to play live on Saturday but he has tested positive for COVID-19 and and will not perform, organizers announced.

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Associated Press writer reported this story in Rotterdam and AP writer Mike Corder reported from The Hague.

Archives for May 2021

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