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Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Amazon's (AMZN) two-day Prime Day event wraps up today, a summer shopping bonanza that celebrates nothing but shopping itself.

Conceived in 2015 to commemorate the company's 20th birthday, Prime Day has become a summer clearance event for electronics, household (almost) needs, appliances that seem useful at least at first and Amazon-branded hardware. Falling in the second or third quarter of Amazon's fiscal year, the event can help boost sales during a seasonally weaker part of the calendar.

But the Prime membership itself and the Prime Day "celebration" held for these members is not about Amazon's business, or at least not exclusively. Because while Prime Day will no doubt augment top-line growth in the current quarter, what Amazon really gets out of throwing a dart at the calendar and declaring it a consumer holiday is that it makes competitors bend to its will.

Target (TGT) is offering "deal days" while Best Buy (BBY) runs the "Bigger Deal Savings Event" through today. Walmart (WMT) has "Deals for Days" running through Wednesday. At J.Crew, where sale items are an extra 50% off, they just call it Tuesday.

The Jeff Bezos quote most business strategy types will break out to sound sophisticated is the old line that "Your margin is my opportunity." Pithy, sure. But also proven true enough across Amazon's different businesses.

Amazon now owns a production studio, grocery stores, and delivery vans dropping off small deliveries on porches across the country. Where Bezos and his team had been paying someone for a product food, entertainment, delivery services, cloud services, and so on the company sought to simply do it themselves, an opportunity against your profit source. Prime Day is no different.

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This year's Prime Day is notable, however, in that it marks the final iteration of this event under Jeff Bezos' leadership at Amazon. In a few weeks, Bezos will step down as CEO of the company he founded and then, later next month, will get launched into space.

What Amazon shareholders should hope doesn't leave with Bezos is the culture that drove Amazon to development units like AWS, products like the Prime membership, and the entire "flywheel" Bezos talks of so often in his annual shareholder letters.

Prime Day no doubt accomplishes many of the aforementioned goals, like inventory management and pressuring competitors. But Prime Day also makes the Amazon flywheel spin a little faster. More consumers spending more money in more places online, and on more days, means Amazon gets more chances to capture a slice of that activity.

"If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume," Bezos wrote in his most recent letter to Amazon shareholders. "Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesnt create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isnt long for this world. Its on the way out."

By Myles Udland, reporter and anchor for Yahoo Finance Live. Follow him at @MylesUdland

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In Minnesota, the HealthPartners system has seen a precipitous decline in COVID-19 hospitalizations, says Dr. Mark Sannes, an infectious disease physician and senior medical director for the system, which operates nine hospitals and more than 55 clinics. But now, nearly every admitted patient he does see is unvaccinated.

Less than 1% of our hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated," he said.

In Ohio, at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, only 2% of the COVID-19 patients admitted in the last month were vaccinated, said Dr. Robert Salata, the hospital's physician-in-chief.

And at Sanford Health, which runs 44 medical centers and more than 200 clinics across the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa, less than 5% of the 1,456 patients admitted with COVID-19 so far this year were fully vaccinated, said spokesperson Angela Dejene.

Falling rates of COVID-19 across the United States mask a harsh reality the overwhelming majority of those getting sick and being hospitalized today are unvaccinated, while vaccinated patients are becoming rare.

Hospitals in states with the lowest vaccination rates tend to have more COVID-19 patients in intensive care units, according to hospital data collected in the past week by the Department of Health and Human Services and vaccination rates published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas and Idaho currently have the highest percentage of COVID-19 patients on average in their ICUs; those states all have vaccinated less than 40% of their population.

Medical centers say there's also an obvious change in the age of their sickest patients, as older people are much more likely to be vaccinated than younger.

"We're all seeing the same thing when someone does get sick and comes to the hospital, they're much more likely to be young and unvaccinated," said Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Cathy Bennett, president and CEO of the New Jersey Hospital Association, said the picture is the same in her state.

"As COVID vaccinations rolled out across New Jersey, theres been a major shift in the ages of patients admitted to the hospital," said Bennett. "Unlike last spring, when those 65 and older accounted for the majority of hospitalizations, were now seeing more young people hospitalized with COVID."

In Ohio, Salata said the shift should be reassuring, showing the vaccines work.

"It sends a very strong message to the hesitancy people out there because the data speaks for itself," he said.

Doctors say there are multiple reasons people aren't yet vaccinated. There are the hesitant, who still have questions and sometimes fall prey to misinformation, and the opposed, who often harbor anti-government or anti-science sentiments.

"We've had a little success when we've spoken to them on a one-to-one basis. We can give them the information that they need to make their decision," said Dr. Gerald Maloney, chief medical officer for hospital services at Geisinger health network, which runs nine hospitals in Pennsylvania.

Some still can't easily access vaccine, either because it's not available nearby or because they can't get time off work.

And while the U.S. government paid for all vaccines and vaccinations so no one should be charged, others remain fearful they will be on the financial hook for a shot, Maloney said.

Eleanor Leisenring speaks with Cheryl McHale, RN, after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine at a Geisinger community vaccine center in Danville, Pa.

Last week, Health and Human Services secretary Secretary Xavier Becerra clarified in a letter that providers may not bill patients for COVID-19 vaccines.

There's still a lot of work to be done to create the trust necessary for these groups to embrace vaccination, Maloney said.

"The people who say, 'It's my body, my choice?' Well, it's not all about you," he said. "It's also about the people that you're around."

At this point, every vaccination is a win, one more person who can't pass the virus along. That's especially true in families where children can't be vaccinated and are still at risk.

At Akron Childrens Hospital in Ohio, we have not seen any kiddos who have been admitted to the hospital who have been vaccinated, said Dr. Michael Bigham, a pediatric intensivist in the critical care unit.

Among children 11 and younger, who cant yet get the vaccine, having vaccinated family members is keeping them out of the hospital, and protecting them against MIS-C, the multisystem inflammatory syndrome that can be a rare but dangerous aftereffect of a COVID-19 infection in children.

Most of the kids were seeing in the hospital with COVID or MIS-C had COVID in their household, maybe a parent or a grandparent, and most of those individuals had not been vaccinated, he said.

The message from health care workers is unanimous: They just aren't seeing many vaccinated people get sick.

In New Jersey, the percentage of COVID-19 hospitalizations among those ages 18 to 29 has increased 58% since the beginning of the year. By comparison, the percentage of COVID-19 hospitalizations among the 65 and older age group with a statewide vaccination rate of more than 80% declined by 31.2%.

The numbers are no coincidence, Bennett said.

"Vaccination," she said, "works in preventing severe COVID illness."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Majority of COVID-19 hospital patients in US now unvaccinated, younger

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People hospitalized with COVID-19 now have one overwhelming thing in common. They're not vaccinated. - Yahoo! Voices

People perform a funeral ceremony on May 9, 2021, for a girl killed in powerful explosions outside a high school in a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)

KABUL, Afghanistan The slaughter of students, mostly teenagers, at a tutoring center. The deaths of young athletes in a suicide bombing at a wrestling club. Mothers shot dead with newborns in their arms.

These relentless killings of Hazaras, a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, finally proved too much to bear for Zulfiqar Omid, a Hazara leader in the central part of the country.

In April, Omid began mobilizing armed men into militias to defend Hazara areas against the Taliban and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. He said he now commands 800 armed men at seven staging areas mustered into what he calls self-protection groups.

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Hazaras get killed in cities and on highways, but the government doesnt protect them, Omid said. Enough is enough. We have to protect ourselves.

As U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and talks falter between the Taliban and the American-backed government, ethnic groups across the country have formed militias or say they plan to arm themselves. The rush to raise fighters and weapons evokes the mujahedeen wars of the early 1990s, when rival militias killed thousands of civilians and left sections of Kabul in ruins.

A concerted and determined militia movement, even if nominally aligned with Afghan security forces, could fracture the unsteady government of President Ashraf Ghani and once again divide the country into fiefs ruled by warlords. Yet these makeshift armies may eventually serve as the last line of defense as security force bases and outposts steadily collapse in the face of a fierce onslaught of attacks by the Taliban.

Since the U.S. troop withdrawal was announced in April, regional strongmen have posted videos on social media showing armed men hoisting assault rifles and vowing to fight the Taliban. Some militia leaders fear the flagging peace talks in Doha, Qatar, will collapse after foreign troops depart and the Taliban will intensify an all-out assault to capture provincial capitals and lay siege to Kabul.

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For the first time in 20 years, power brokers are speaking publicly about mobilizing armed men, the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research group in Kabul, wrote in a June 4 report.

Hazaras have the most to fear from a return to power by the Taliban, which massacred thousands of the predominantly Shiite group when the Sunni Muslim militants governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban consider Hazaras heretics.

The most prominent Hazara militia commander is Abdul Ghani Alipur, whose militiamen in Wardak province, a mountainous area that borders Kabul, have clashed with government forces. Alipur had been implicated in the shooting down of a military helicopter in March. In an interview, he denied any involvement, although an aide said at the time that Alipurs militiamen had shot at the aircraft.

If we dont stand up and defend ourselves, history will repeat itself and we will be massacred like during the time of Abdul Rahman Khan, Alipur said, referring to the Pashtun Iron Emir who ruled in the late 19th century, massacring and enslaving Hazaras. Afghan folklore says he displayed towers built from severed Hazara heads.

They forced us to pick up guns, Alipur said of the government, which has failed to protect Hazaras. We must carry guns to protect ourselves.

Over the past two decades, Hazaras have built thriving communities in west Kabul and in Hazarajat, their mountainous homeland in central Afghanistan. But with no militias of their own, they have been vulnerable to attack.

Hazara demands for an army escalated after up to 69 schoolgirls were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 8. Less than a month later, three public transport minivans were bombed in Kabuls Hazara neighborhoods, killing 18 civilians, most of them Hazara. Among them was a journalist and her mother, the police said. Since 2016, at least 766 Hazara have been killed in the capital alone in 23 attacks, according to New York Times data.

Tajik have weapons, Pashtuns are armed, said Arif Rahmani, a Hazara member of parliament. We Hazaras must also have a system to protect ourselves.

Mahdi Raskih, another Hazara member of parliament, said he had counted 35 major attacks against Hazaras in recent years a campaign of genocide, he said. He said he had lost patience with government promises of protection for Hazara schools, mosques and social centers.

If they cant provide security, be honest and admit it, Raskih said. People believe the government feels no responsibility for them, so our people must pick up guns and fight.

Hazara soldiers, police and intelligence officers have quit or have been forced out of the security forces because of discrimination, Raskih said, providing militias with a valuable source of trained men. Many Hazara politicians, including Ghanis second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, have called on the government to stop what they call a genocide of Hazaras. Hundreds of Hazaras have taken to Twitter, at #StopHazarasGenocide, to demand government protection.

Even as some Hazaras mobilize, some Tajik and Uzbek groups never completely disbanded the militias that helped U.S. forces topple the Taliban in 2001. Other ethnic commanders have recently begun forming militias as the Taliban continue to overrun government bases and outposts.

Many of these power brokers are locked in an enduring struggle with the Ghani administration, vying for control, while trying to gain the upper hand in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan.

Nationally, one prominent leader to maintain a militia is Ahmad Massoud, 32, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a charismatic commander of the Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces rout the Taliban in late 2001.

Ahmad Massoud has assembled a coalition of militias in northern Afghanistan. Calling his armed uprising the Second Resistance, Massoud is purportedly backed by a few thousand fighters and about a dozen aging militia commanders who fought the Taliban and the Soviets.

Some Afghan leaders say Massoud is too inexperienced to effectively lead an armed movement. But some Western leaders view him as a valuable source of intelligence on al-Qaida and Islamic State groups inside Afghanistan.

Elsewhere, the roll call of regional leaders who appear to be mobilizing reads like a whos who of the countrys civil war in the 1990s. But their forces are nowhere near as commanding now.

Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a brutal Uzbek strongman, has long maintained a private army of thousands from his base in Jowzjan province. Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes and sodomizing an Uzbek rival with an assault rifle, would nonetheless be a central figure in any armed uprising against the Taliban.

Another power broker whose actions are being watched closely, Atta Muhammad Noor, is a former warlord and commanding figure in Balkh province, which includes Afghanistans commercial hub, Mazar-i-Sharif. He said Tuesday that he would mobilize his militia forces alongside government troops to try to retake territory that had fallen to the Taliban in recent days after the insurgents rapid offensive in the north.

In Herat province in the west, former Tajik warlord Mohammed Ismail Khan, another Northern Alliance commander who helped defeat the Taliban, recently broadcast a raucous gathering of armed men on his Facebook page.

Khan told supporters that a half-million people in Herat were poised to take up arms to defend you and keep your city safe a clear signal that he intended to mobilize his militia if peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban collapsed.

Also in Herat, Kamran Alizai, a Pashtun who leads the provincial council, said he commanded a large number of armed men ready to mobilize at a moments notice.

If government forces were unable to hold Herat, Alizai said, We will stand by them and fight the Taliban.

The Afghanistan Analysts Network reported that Abdul Basir Salangi, a former militia commander and an ex-police chief in Kabul, said in a speech in January that militias were forming in the Salang district in north-central Afghanistan in case talks collapsed. Such talk has become more blatant since the U.S. troop withdrawal announcement, the report said.

For Hazara militias, a wild card are thousands of Hazara former fighters of the Fatemiyoun Division, trained by Iran and deployed to Syria in 2014 through 2017, ostensibly to protect Shiite Muslim religious sites from the Sunni Muslim-dominated Islamic State. Others were sent to Yemen to fight alongside Houthi rebels against the Saudi-backed government.

Many Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to Afghanistan, raising fears they will be incorporated into Hazara militias, providing Iran a proxy force inside the country. But analysts and Hazara leaders say former Fatemiyoun have been turned away because of their Iranian ties and potential prosecution by the Afghan government.

In Kabul, many Hazaras say they are ready to take up guns. Mohammad, a shopkeeper who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he crossed a ditch flowing with blood when he ran from his shop to help after explosions rocked the neighboring Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school on May 8, killing the dozens of schoolgirls as they left for home.

Im 24, and there have been 24 attacks in my lifetime against Hazaras, he said.

Mohammad said several of his friends have recently joined militias led by Alipur and Omid.

If this situation continues, he said, Ill pick up a gun and kill whoever kills us.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

2021 The New York Times Company

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Attacked and Vulnerable, Some Afghans Are Forming Their Own Armies - Yahoo News

South Carolina and U.S. women's basketball coach Dawn Staley isn't outright saying she wants to jump to the NBA, but she isn't exactly denying it either. Staley was asked about rumors she's being pursued for NBA head coach openings, and she responded by saying she would "consider it all."

Staley was asked about the possibility while appearing on "Today."

Staley initially tries to indirectly answer the question, saying "you have to answer each call" whether or not she wants to take that leap. When pressed further, Staley said, "At this stage of the game, I think you have to consider it all."

She also spoke about the importance of a woman making that leap and coaching in the NBA, saying, "you have to consider it." Staley then tried to throw some cold water on that thought, adding, "you have to be ready for it."

The entire segment read as Staley essentially saying, "Yes, I will take calls from NBA teams and I am interested in being the first woman head coach in the NBA, but I don't want to upset South Carolina by openly pining for a different position."

Dawn Staley will take calls from NBA teams. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

Staley reportedly isn't the only woman being considered for an NBA head coaching job. San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon is also expected to be interviewed for open positions. Hammon has NBA experience, coaching a 2020 game after Gregg Popovich was ejected.

Staley hasn't coached in the NBA, but has an impressive rsum. She's spent over a decade coaching women's college basketball, first at Temple and currently at South Carolina. In addition to that, the NBA Hall of Famer is also the head coach of the U.S. women's basketball team.

Monday's appearance on "Today" is not the first time Staley has expressed a desire to coach in the NBA. In June, she told the New York Times she "can stand in front of men and lead them."

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Dawn Staley on whether she would take an NBA coaching job: 'I think you have to consider it all' - Yahoo Sports

Apples (AAPL) annual WWDC, or Worldwide Developers Conference, kicks off on Monday, and while it wont be the usual in-person extravaganza, the company is still expected to announce a slew of major updates to everything from the software powering your iPhone and iPad to, possibly, a new MacBook or two.

Heres everything Apple could debut at the all-virtual show.

The biggest news from WWDC always includes changes to Apples most important operating system: iOS. And this year that means we should get a look at iOS 15. Apple soothsayer, Bloombergs Mark Gurman, reports that the latest version of iOS will bring improvements to the iPhones notifications settings, privacy features, and updates to iMessage to make it more of a competitor to Facebooks (FB) WhatsApp.

The new notifications settings will come in the form of system-wide changes that allow you to go beyond the usual Do Not Disturb mode. According to Gurman, youll be able to set your phone to react in different ways in various situations like when youre in a meeting, sleeping, or driving. Depending on the situation your notifications will provide set prompts, such as not playing sounds during meetings, which can be pretty embarrassing.

The iPhone 12 Pro lineup. (Image: Apple)

Youll also be able to set new auto-replies for notifications. Currently, you can send auto-replies when youre driving, but this will extend well beyond that to more situations. Though, I dont know if I ever want to send my boss a notification telling them Im sleeping.

Apple has made privacy a main feature of its product lines, and you can expect further enhancements to iOSs already stout privacy set in its next iteration, as well. Reports point to Apple informing you when apps are sucking up data, which could be a big problem for advertising-based apps like Facebook.

Speaking of which, updates to iMessage are expected to make the messaging software more like Facebooks WhatsApp. Though little is known how far those changes will go. Thats sure to anger Facebook, which already has a serious distaste for Apple due to its recent privacy policy changes.

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PhoneArena, meanwhile, says that iOS 15 will allow users to change even more default apps, which could help with some of the regulatory scrutiny Apple has faced about its control over iOS.

Finally, you might be able to log your meals in the iOS Health app to better track your caloric intake. Ive always found that exercise to be notoriously tedious, so heres hoping Apple is able to make it somewhat easier than whats already out there.

On the iPad side of things, Gurman says Apple will release its largest ever update for the iPads home screen, giving users the ability to get rid of all of their individual app icons to turn the entire screen into interactive widgets.

The 11-inch iPad Pro features the company's M1 chip. (Image: Apple)

Apples latest iPad Pros are powered by the companys custom M1 chips, which offer far more power than most apps require, so it will be interesting to see if the new OS provides any big benefits for the little powerhouse.

Theres slim pickings as far as rumors concerning watchOS 8, the likely name of the next version of the operating system that powers the Apple Watch, but Apple usually makes a number of yearly changes to the OS including new watch faces and workout options. You can already do everything from logging your badminton game to surfing, so its hard to imagine what else the company can add. Might I suggest competitive couch sitting?

The Apple Watch Series 6 should get some software updates along with the Apple Watch SE. (Image: Apple)

MacOS, meanwhile, is said to be getting a minor update this year. That would make sense seeing as how the OS saw major changes during last years WWDC as part of macOS Big Sur, which brought more iOS-like changes to Apples Mac and MacBook lines.

WWDC is a developers conference, and Apples track record of announcing new hardware is always spotty during the show. YouTuber and leaker Jon Prosser says Apple will roll out updated versions of the MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch complete with changes like MagSafe chargers, and a return of the SD Card slot that photographers and videographers have been missing.

The new MacBooks could also get the latest version of Apples flagship processors, so-far dubbed the M2, which is supposed to be a more powerful version of the M1. The M1 is already a powerhouse, and if the M2 is going into new MacBook Pros, it should offer even more firepower.

Apple will be streaming WWDC from its website beginning at 1 p.m. ET on June 7.

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Heres what to expect from Apples WWDC 2021 - Yahoo Finance

U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is giving a thumbs up to the May jobs report, but acknowledges it will take some time for the labor market to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There is no question there is still a ways to go in still dealing with the pandemic from all of the job loss at the beginning of the pandemic," Walsh said on Yahoo Finance Live.

The Labor Department reported Friday that non-farm payrolls increased by 559,000, falling shy of Wall Street's estimates for a rise of 675,000. The result came up short compared to higher economist estimates on the Street that ranged from an increase of 800,000 up to 1 million.

May's increase followed a gain of 278,000 jobs in April, which was upwardly revised slightly from the 266,000 previously reported. The unemployment rate ticked down to 5.8% from 6.1% in April, missing the Bloomberg consensus of 5.9%.

Meanwhile, average hourly earnings accelerated to a 0.5% month-on-month clip and 2% year-over-year increase.

But to Walsh's point, the U.S. labor market recovery remains a work in progress.

The economy shed a startling 22.4 million jobs last year in March and April but has only since added back 14.8 million, points out Bleakley Advisory Group Chief Investment Officer Peter Boockvar.

Strategists say the jobs market is poised to kick into high gear this summer as pandemic-era unemployment insurance benefits start expiring in June. That will go a long way in companies addressing the labor shortage they continue to deal with amid a sharp rebound in demand.

"It is becoming crystal clear that the main problem with the labor market right now is the supply side and were seeing higher wages in response to encourage people back. Well see later this month what impact on hiring well see in those states that are nixing the enhanced benefits and well see what happens when school ends," Boockvar contends.

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"Today is an encouraging report a good, solid report as we just need to continue to build off this momentum," Walsh said.

Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick contributed to this story.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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May jobs report is 'encouraging' but there's 'still a ways to go': US Labor Secretary Marty Walsh - Yahoo Finance

Slack has been under pressure for not growing as fast as other work-from-home stocks. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Slack (WORK), the online chat tool that has become the main way many people have communicated with their coworkers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, reported its fiscal Q1 2022 earnings after the bell on Thursday, beating expectations on the top and bottom line.

Here are the most important numbers from the report compared with what analysts were expecting as compiled by Bloomberg.

Revenue: $273 million versus $265 million expected

Earnings per share: $0.08 versus -$0.01 expected

Total paid accounts: 169,000 versus 155,852 expected

The company's stock was trading down slightly following the earnings announcement.

"In Q1 we saw a near-record number of Paid Customer additions, a record number of Paid Customers adopting Slack Connect, and approached 1 million active developers on our platform, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield said in a statement.

Slacks Q1 could be its last quarterly report as an independent company, as business software giant Salesforce (CRM) is expected to close its $27.7 billion acquisition of the messaging platform in the coming months.

That deal, which was announced in December 2020, sent shares of Slack soaring after they hovered around the $20 to $30 range throughout the pandemic. Slack has been criticized for not capitalizing on the need for work-from-home software as millions of workers around the world fled their offices last year.

Investors and analysts have been calling on Slack to push its user growth higher to better match with the kind of expansion seen by other so-called work-from-home stocks like Zoom, which exploded during the pandemic.

While Zoom saw its stock price increase 54% in the last 12 months, Slack saw growth of just 13.5%, lower than the S&P 500s 36% price increase. Whats more, much of Slacks stock price growth came as rumors of its acquisition began circulating.

Of course, Slack could face the same issues that have struck Zoom, which saw its stock price tumble following its Q1 2022 earnings during which it revealed its growth is slowing as the pandemic wanes.

Story continues

By Daniel Howley, tech editor. Follow him at @DanielHowley

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Slack sees 39% user growth as it beats Q1 expectations - Yahoo Finance

By Michael Martina

WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) - The Biden administration will issue a new executive order on Thursday that bans U.S. entities from buying or selling publicly traded securities for 59 Chinese companies with alleged ties to defense or surveillance technology sectors, senior administration officials said.

The Treasury Department will enforce and update on a "rolling basis" the new ban list, which replaces one from the Department of Defense, the officials, noting the policy would take effect on Aug. 2.

The new order, which is an effort to make a similar Trump-era prohibition more legally sound, signals the administration's intent to "ensure that U.S. persons are not financing the military industrial complex of the People's Republic of China", one of the senior officials told reporters.

The inclusion of Chinese surveillance technology firms expanded the scope of the previous order, the officials said.

"We fully expect that in the months ahead ... we'll be adding additional companies to the new executive order's restrictions," an official said.

President Joe Biden has been reviewing a number of aspects of U.S. policy towards China, and his administration had delayed the implementation of the previous order while it formulated its new policy framework.

The move is part of a broader series of steps to counter China, including reinforcing U.S. alliances and pursuing large domestic investments to bolster U.S. economic competitiveness, amid increasingly sour relations between the world's two most powerful countries.

Biden's Indo-Pacific policy coordinator Kurt Campbell said last month that a period of engagement with China had come to an end and that the dominant paradigm in bilateral ties going forward would be one of competition.

The Treasury Department is expected to issue the full list later on Thursday, and give guidance on what the scope of surveillance technology means, including whether companies are facilitating "repression or serious human rights abuses" in or outside of China, one of the officials said.

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"We really want to make sure that any future prohibitions are on legally solid ground. So, our first listings really reflect that," a second senior administration official said.

Investors would have time to "unwind" investments, a third official said.

In May, a judge signed an order removing the designation on Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi, which was among the more high-profile Chinese technology companies that the Trump administration targeted for alleged ties to China's military.

The judge later also suspended an ban imposed on Luokung Technology Corp, a Chinese mapping technology company.

The Department of Defense had also placed similar restrictions on China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation 0981.HK, a firm key to China's national drive to boost its domestic chip sector. (Reporting by Michael Martina Editing by Alistair Bell)

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Biden order to ban investment in 59 Chinese defense and tech firms - Yahoo Finance

No one wants to name their baby girl Karen any more.

The name has tanked in popularity over the past year, according to figures released by the Social Security Administration.

Throughout 2020 the name Karen fell a whopping 171 spots on the popularity list, from a low of 660 to number 831, Huffington Post reported Tuesday.

The names popularity had already been ebbing, falling to its lowest ranking since 1929 by the end of last year, Huffington Post reported in September 2020. While it fell 23 spots to 660 on the list of popular baby names for 2019, it has plummeted even more since then.

The parents of just 325 baby girls named their daughter Karen last year, down from 439 in 2019, Huffington Post said, citing the SSA.

In 1965, at the names peak popularity, nearly 33,000 newborns were named Karen, HuffPo noted.

While theres no scientific link between the name Karen and the pejorative connotations with the entitled white woman who wants to speak to the manager, theres no denying that The Name That Launched a Thousand Memes is morphing into something less than desirable.

How could it not, with connotations like the Central Park Karen who falsely called police to say a Black bird-watcher who had asked her to comply with the rules and leash her dog had actually threatened to harm her? Or the so-called SoHo Karen, who wrongfully accused a Black boy of stealing her cellphone? Or a woman actually named Karen, who refused to mask up in an Ohio grocery store?

Baby names are always a mirror of the times, noted the website Baby Center last October, noting that 2020s changes reflected a year of loss and political divisiveness, with Kobe leaping 175% after the helicopter-crash death of basketball great Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, whose name popularity soared even further, by 216%.

Also gaining in popularity were Kamala, up 104%, and Liberty, which rose 12%, while Karen dropped by 13%, the parenting website said in its own list of popular baby names for 2020, based on its own database of 550,000 babies born in 2020 to parents registered on BabyCenter.

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Similar stats apply around the world, with a poll that asked 6,000 British parents and parents-to-be to list the top three names they would never dream of calling their child, The New Zealand Herald reported in December. There, too, Karen falls far from the list of most desirable names.

Boris is the most disliked name for a baby boy, the Herald said, and in a blow to the U.K. [Prime Minister] Boris Johnson, is even more unpopular than the name Donald.

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Karen baby name going the way of the dodo - Yahoo News

The capitalist system is in the biggest need of reform in America, said Ford Foundation President Darren Walker.

A former banker, Walker said he is a believer that there is no better mechanism to organize an economy than capitalism. But I also, as an advocate for capitalism, have to acknowledge its shortcomings and the reality that in the United States, we have actually never given real capitalism a chance. What we need is a new form of stakeholder capitalism that recognizes the importance of all stakeholders, including employees, the communities, and suppliers."

Walker said "the actual boardroom of corporations needs to change. If you look, a year ago, we had a third of the S&P that did not even have a single African-American director. I can assure you that if you do not have representation at the board, you are not likely to see material, sustainable change at the C-suite and within the company more broadly.

"We've got to change the rules of the game so that people have an opportunity to compete on a level playing field, he said.

Walker believes that last year was one of racial reckoning of the kind we have never seen in this country, and certainly in our lifetimes, as major companies acknowledged that corporate America has failed Black America.

So there has been huge disappointment. And that disappointment was manifest in 2020. But the encouraging thing that came out of 2020 was the strong statements Black Lives Matter and other statements by CEOs with concrete, measurable objectives attached that give us time now, one year later, to assess just how much progress has been made.

But despite the progress, Walker said, We are far from turning the corner. But I do think we have begun to see some progress and some reasons for hope.

In order for the American Dream to continue, the question wealthy and privileged people must ask is how much money and power they are willing to give up, Walker said.

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I am lucky enough to live in a country where a poor kid like myself could be born in the bottom 1% and find myself in the top 1%. And that can only happen in America, he explained. But if we want that to continue to happen, we have to not hoard all the privileges and all of the assets.

In order for the opportunity ladder to continue to work, Walker explained, we've got to have a system that does not compound the advantage of the already-advantaged, and compound the disadvantage of the already disadvantaged and particularly the historically disadvantaged.

So we have to look at what are the systems that produce and reproduce inequality," Walker said. "Those systems are our education system, our access to capital systems, financial systems, and say, what do we need to do to change those systems?

Theres something fundamentally wrong, he said, with a system where during a pandemic, privileged Americans are better off than most Americans that suffered financially. We need to ask some questions to ensure that we still leave hope on the table. At the end of the day, the American dream of hope and aspiration is what fuels our society. Hope is the oxygen of democracy.

And if we allow it, hopelessness will be the end of our society, Walker said. And I believe in this country. I know there is no other nation like the United States of America, and my loyalty and faith in it is unwavering. But I also am sobered by the reality of what I see in this country, which is far too much inequality.

Kristin Myers is a reporter and anchor for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.

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Ford Foundation president: We need a new form of capitalism to level the playing field - Yahoo Finance