Month: November 2021

News of the gift was earlier reported by the online news group Puck.

It was neither Mr. Bezos’s biggest gift in recent months nor his first brush with Mr. Obama’s orbit. In September, Mr. Bezos, standing alongside John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s former Secretary of State, pledged $1 billion through his Bezos Earth Fund for conservation.

At first, her testimony raised concerns for her defense. Her lawyers’ strategy has been to paint her as inexperienced, led astray by others like her former boyfriend and business partner Sunny Balwani (who is being tried separately).

But on the stand, Ms. Holmes depicted herself as very much in control. She presented herself as an expert in the technology Theranos was developing and detailed how she used that knowledge to attract investors, whose money would eventually be wiped out.

She also rebutted a key argument by prosecutors. The prosecution sought to establish that Ms. Holmes withheld information, particularly financial reports, from investors.

On the stand, Holmes detailed the “very comprehensive diligence process” of Don Lucas, a venture capitalist who eventually invested in Theranos and became its chairman. The defense presented a 2006 email in which Ms. Holmes sent Mr. Lucas detailed financial information. (However, this may undermine another defense argument: that investors were careless and at least partially to blame.)

The trial is also a referendum on Silicon Valley’s start-up culture. If Ms. Holmes is found guilty, it would put truth-stretching start-up founders on notice. But if she is acquitted, it would bolster the tech industry’s “fake it til you make it” approach.

“A non-guilty verdict will vindicate a Silicon Valley culture of celebrating aggressive innovation at the expense of the complete and whole truth,” said Jeffrey Cohen of Boston College Law School.

Treasury bond prices declined, and yields — which move in the opposite direction — rose. Government bond yields, which essentially act as the foundation for interest rates charged on new car loans, mortgages, multibillion-dollar Wall Street bond offerings and more are heavily influenced by market expectations about what the Federal Reserve will do with monetary policy.

Yields on the two-year Treasury note, which had been hovering around 0.52 percent before the announcement, climbed to 0.56 percent. The yield on the five-year Treasury bill, which captures market expectations for how the Fed’s monetary policy will evolve over the next few years, a topic of considerable debate in the market, rose to 1.29 percent shortly after the announcement.

The rise in bond yields suggests that at least some investors were betting that Lael Brainard, a Fed governor whom Mr. Biden will promote to vice chair, could have been instead chosen to lead the central bank. Many progressive groups had championed her to replace Mr. Powell.

Steve Sosnick, the chief strategist at Interactive Brokers in Greenwich, Conn., said the rise in yields were an indication that some bond investors had thought Ms. Brainard, who is believed to be less aggressive about interest rate increases, had a chance to be Mr. Biden’s pick.

The Biden administration has ordered vaccinations for workers in large companies and members of the federal work force, but the effort has met resistance across the country. Florida is among states that have challenged federal mandates in court.

The new Florida law prohibits employers from enforcing strict vaccine mandates, allowing employees to choose exemptions that include health or religious concerns, pregnancy or anticipated pregnancy, and having had the virus and recovered from it. Unvaccinated workers could instead undergo periodic testing or wear protective equipment, at the employers’ cost. Fines for violation could cost $10,000 a day per employee violation for businesses with fewer than 99 employees or up to $50,000 per employee violation for larger businesses.

Government entities and school districts are also restricted by the Covid mandate ban.

Disney World previously struck a deal with employees to require theme park workers to be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus to keep their jobs, and the company defended that rule in a statement Saturday. “We believe that our approach to mandatory vaccines has been the right one as we’ve continued to focus on the safety and well-being of our cast members and guests,” the statement said.

More than 90 percent of active cast members in Florida have verified they are vaccinated, the company said, before it sent a memo to employees halting the mandate.

Walt Disney’s website tells visitors it has been “very intentional and gradual” in operating safely, recommending guests exercise caution: wearing face coverings, checking for symptoms and getting the shots. “We encourage people to get vaccinated,” it says.

Todd Gregory contributed to this report.

• Markets closed: The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, as will bond markets.

Friday

• Black Friday: The traditional start of the holiday shopping season kicks off. Many shoppers have started early, concerned over whether product shortages and supply chain disruptions will make it harder to find the gifts they want.

In the streets of Barcelona, a group called War Against Cerberus decided to fight back.

When lawyers of private equity firms come with police officers to force residents from their homes, members of the group — some of them longtime housing activists — surround the building to block their entry. As residents are pushed out of apartments, the group sends squatters to occupy properties owned by the firms elsewhere in the city — sometimes breaking in to gain entry.

The activists even took over the offices of a Cerberus real estate servicer in Barcelona for a time last year.

According to War Against Cerberus, dozens of families have occupied buildings owned by private equity firms in Barcelona, which has long been a target of outside investors. That can translate into years of courtroom hearings and millions of dollars in legal fees to remove the squatters.

“This property belongs to Cerberus,” said Ana María Banegas, a resident who, along with a dozen other families, has occupied a building in central Barcelona since April and now refuses to leave. “And from this home, we aim to pressure them.”

Miquel Hernández, a spokesman for War Against Cerberus who helped Ms. Banegas find the home where she is squatting, accused the private equity firms of profiting from the economic distress caused by the pandemic.

“They’re treating them like any other asset,” he said, referring to the homes owned by the firms.

The problem has caught the attention of Spain’s national government, led by a left-wing coalition. It has proposed the imposition of rent controls on investment funds and other large landlords.

The proposed legislation, supported by Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, would allow for rent caps for owners with more than 10 properties in areas where rent increases have outpaced inflation.

“We have to civilize a market that has gotten out of control,” said Ms. Colau, a former housing activist who rose to power with an organization that fought against foreclosures. “A problem that was bad before the pandemic has suddenly gotten worse.”

Spain imposed a partial moratorium on evictions for much of the pandemic, but only for those in “vulnerable situations,” such as single parents. In cases that went to the courts, the judiciary was seen as siding largely with the landlords.

In the first quarter of 2021, evictions of renters in Spain rose by 14 percent compared with the same period the previous year, according to the government. By the second quarter of this year, they surged to eight times as many as in the same period in 2020.

Samuel Aranda contributed reporting from Barcelona.

Video

transcript

Back

transcript

Austrians Protest Lockdown and Vaccine Mandate

Thousands in Vienna over the weekend demonstrated against the measures, which include a nationwide lockdown.

[drums] [chanting] [drums] [whistles] [drums]

The new Covid wave is being driven by widespread resistance to vaccines and to the growing prevalence of vaccine and mask mandates. Austrian officials have said they will enforce a nationwide vaccine mandate in February, the first European nation to do so.

Austria, where 66 percent of the population is vaccinated, reported more than 14,000 new cases of the virus within 24 hours on Sunday. Over the past week the Netherlands has been averaging more than 20,000, while Germany has seen roughly double that number.

The German health ministry said on Monday that the country was facing a dwindling supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which was partly developed in the country, as it races to provide booster shots.

And while the European Medicines Agency is poised to approve the vaccine for use on children 5 to 11 this week, first doses will not begin until Dec. 20, when shots for children are scheduled to be delivered to European Union countries, Mr. Spahn, the health minister, said.

The opposition to the lockdown and vaccine mandates in Austria is being fueled in part by the far-right Freedom Party, which has used its platform in the Austrian Parliament to spread doubt about the effectiveness of the vaccines and to promote ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms that has repeatedly failed against the coronavirus in clinical trials.

But the fury is not limited to far-right activists, as the throngs that filled Vienna’s streets on Saturday attested. The police estimated the crowd at 40,000, with many families and others far outnumbering the right-wing extremists.