Category: Breaking News

https://youtu.be/zoWlxbGhdiw

The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it would extend the foreclosure moratorium and mortgage forbearance through the end of June. The actions would block home foreclosures and offer delayed mortgage payments until July, as well as offer six months of additional mortgage forbearance for those who enroll on or before June 30. The actions are an extension of an order that was originally enacted under the Trump administration in March of last year. President Joe Biden — as one of 17 orders he signed on his first day in office — initially extended the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums through the end of March. The eviction moratorium remains in effect through March but was not included in the actions announced Tuesday. The departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture will work together to enact the actions, according to the announcement from the White House. Resources for homeowners will be consolidated on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s website. The White House announcement also pushed for quick passage of

Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, arguing the bill would provide states with $10 billion to assist homeowners with mortgage and utility costs.

The Biden administration said Tuesday that 2.7 million homeowners are enrolled in the Covid-19 mortgage forbearance program, which remains available to an additional 11 million government-backed mortgages.

https://youtu.be/wEQqbNNrFc4

THe Bros are showing the hunkies how to get stimulus checks…… Its welfare by another name and at the trailer park they are experts at staying high and sucking off the system. We are reducing Americans to a nation of beggars. And as far as the racial bit I hate every ethnic group especially old fat white babby boomers of which I am one. .I can not be called racially prejudiced since i hate all races especially my own. I have no problem with a police state as long as i own the police.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil prices rose about 1% on Monday as optimism around U.S. stimulus plans and some supply concerns boosted futures, but demand worries prompted by coronavirus lockdowns limited gains. Brent crude futures rose 47 cents, 0.9%, to settle at $55.88 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude ended 50 cents, or 1%, higher at $52.77 a barrel. Officials in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration on a Sunday call with Republican and Democratic lawmakers tried to head off Republican concerns that his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief proposal was too expensive. “Newly inaugurated President Biden seems to be pushing for a quick approval of his proposed $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, a development interpreted by the market as a clear indication that the new U.S. administration aims to kick-start an economic recovery, which will naturally benefit fuel consumption,” said Bjornar Tonhaugen, Rystad Energy’s head of oil markets. European nations have imposed tough restrictions to halt the spread of the virus, while China reported a rise in new COVID-19 cases, casting a pall over demand prospects in the world’s largest energy consumer.

A World Health Organization (WHO) official investigating the cause of the pandemic has said he “can’t rule out” the possibility that COVID originated from a Wuhan laboratory. Dr David Nabarro, who is conducting the probe into how the virus developed, said the WHO is currently working with Chinese authorities. He told He told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge On Sunday that “everything will be looked at” by the investigators. Asked if he could rule out the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, he said: “The thing about theories is you have to have them as a way to set up the reason why things might be occurring in a particular way. “I can’t rule anything out and I know the team on the spot, as well as those they’re talking to in China, they’re not ruling anything out either. “All options are on the table and everything will be looked at.” As part of the investigation, the WHO is scheduled to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Chinese researchers at the institute say they have handled coronaviruses but have previously strongly rejected claims that COVID-19 came from their lab. Former US president Donald Trump said in April last year that he had seen evidence it had come from a laboratory in China. But health experts and intelligence communities have previously said it is more likely that COVID-19 was naturally occuring rather than man-made. Dr Nabarro added the investigation was getting “exemplary co-operation” from Chinese authorities. He continued: “All the sites that WHO people wanted to visit are being visited, there is an openness for all kinds of communication to take place. “But it’s early days, this is detective work. We’re anticipating this will take quite a lot longer.” Elsewhere in the interview, Dr Nabarro added that “the world should be accessing vaccines in an equal way” as he praised the UK for its rollout. “We have some excellent vaccines that can stop people from dying,” he said. “The only way to deal with a global pandemic is to get fair shares across the world now, that’s the right thing to do. “I’m really hopeful that world leaders in the coming weeks will realise that to have a few countries vaccinating a lot of people and poorer countries have very limited vaccines is not really the way to go ahead economically, socially, environmentally and indeed morally.” Nabarro said the UK having 400 million doses of vaccine on order was “totally understandable” but that once all over-50s in the UK have been inoculated it should consider sharing vaccines with poorer countries through the WHO’s Covax scheme. “At the moment politicians believe that their primary duty is to make sure they get vaccines to perhaps everybody in their countries,” he said. “We think citizens can perhaps talk to their politicians and say ‘wait a minute, we’re actually part of the world, we think the first priority is to make sure everybody in the world gets what they need’.” He said 100 countries have signed up to the WHO’s vaccine-sharing Covax scheme, adding they are “ready to receive vaccines” and there is money available to buy doses. He added: “Do we want to be remembered as a world where those who had the cash could afford to vaccinate their whole populations and countries that didn’t have the cash had to cope with a possibly quite dramatically increasing death rate among their health workers? I don’t think so.”

The United Nations has predicted that the economic fallout from the worldwide coronavirus outbreak may end up killing more people than the actual disease itself. The virus’ outbreak has decimated the world economy and threatens the lives of millions around the globe who had been emerging from poverty. Economists forecast a global recession that will result in up to 420 million people plunging into extreme poverty, or making less than $2 a day. The U.S. has seen its unemployment levels reach levels not seen since the Great Depression while vulnerable poorer countries consider the virus’ impact on those already impoverished. “I feel like we’re watching a slow-motion train wreck as it moves through the world’s most fragile countries,” Nancy Lindborg, the president of the nonprofit U.S. Institute of Peace, said, according to the paper. The head of the International Labour Organization (ILO) said with lost working hours higher than originally forecast, and equivalent to 495 million full-time jobs globally in the second quarter of the year. The bleak news from ILO Director-General Guy Ryder coincided with an updated mid-year forecast from the UN body. Lower and middle-income countries have suffered most, with an estimated 23.3 per cent drop in working hours – equivalent to 240 million jobs – in the second quarter. Previously, the ILO had suggested a 14 per cent average drop in global working time, equivalent to the loss of 400 million jobs, relative to the fourth quarter of 2019. Workers in developing nations had also seen their income drop more than 15 per cent, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder told journalists in Geneva. “On top of this, these are the places where there are the weakest social protection systems, so there are very few resources or protections for working people to fall back upon”, he said. “If you look at it regionally, the Americas were worst-affected, with losses of 12.1 per cent.” Mr. Ryder highlighted that while the Governments of richer countries had shored up their economies with hundreds of billions of dollars, poorer nations had been unable to do the same. Without such fiscal stimulus, working hours losses would have been 28 per cent between April and June, instead of 17.3 per cent, he insisted. State financial support has led to the emergence of an extremely worrying “fiscal stimulus gap” between wealthy economies and the developing world, amounting to $982 billion, Mr. Ryder warned. “It runs a risk of leading us to post-COVID world with greater inequalities between regions, countries, sectors and social groups,” he said. “It’s a polar opposite to the better world that we want to build back, and it reminds us all, that unless we are all able to overcome and get out of this pandemic, none of us will.” Although the $982 billion global stimulus package was a staggering sum, the ILO Director-General noted that low-income countries needed a fraction of this figure – $45 billion – to support workers in the same way as wealthier nations had done, while lower-middle-income countries required the remaining $937 billion. To protect workers and economies everywhere, Mr. Ryder warned against any premature loosening of support for health measures aimed at combating the pandemic, in view of increasing infection rates in many countries.

By Brenda Goh

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, one of the team’s investigators said, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began. The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team. Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed. “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where hed is currently undergoing quarantine. He said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood centre in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.