ZZZ Obamacare 04 Briefs

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A ban on some forms of the LGBTQ panic defense legal strategy passed out of an Iowa Senate subcommittee today.
The ban would restrict the legal strategy known as the ‘LGBTQ Panic Defense’ that asks a jury to consider a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity as justification of a violent reaction from the attacker.
Last week, the ban passed unanimously out of the Iowa House.
One Iowa Action Executive Director Courtney Reyes praised the legislation in a statement:
“We commend subcommittee members Senator Nunn, Senator Zaun, and Senator Kinney for advancing this much needed legislation out of subcommittee and are optimistic about its chances in the Senate Judiciary Committee moving forward. The LGBTQ panic defense is an unfair, immoral legal strategy that has no business in our state or anywhere else for that matter. The votes both today and last week send a strong message that murder is murder; you do not get to relinquish your responsibility for harming another personbecause they are a member of the LGBTQ community.”

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“Effectively immediately AMC will no longer play any Universal movies in any of our theatres in the United States, Europe or the Middle East,” AMC Chief Executive Adam Aron said in a statement addressed to Universal Pictures Chair Donna Langley. “This policy affects any and all Universal movies per se, goes into effect today and as our theatres reopen, and is not some hollow or ill-considered threat.”
AMC’s move follows comments by NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Shell about the release of “Trolls World Tour,” the sequel to 2016’s computer-animated musical “Trolls.” The new DreamWorks Animation movie, which was originally planned for a wide theatrical run before the coronavirus outbreak, generated nearly $100 million in online sales in three weeks.
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the “Trolls” online sales, NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Shell said the “Trolls World Tour” sales “demonstrated the viability” of premium video on demand, adding that “[a]s soon as theaters reopen, we expect to release movies on both formats.”

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On March 16, 2020, the White House asked AI experts to mine 29,000 scholarly papers for data that might provide useful information to help fight the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). The collective tome was assembled with the help of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
It’s unclear whether the AI powerhouses Microsoft and Deep Mind, another Alphabet company, tried cracking the problem themselves. Deep Mind was the developer of AlphaGo, the AI computer program that defeated the world champion in GO. Media lauded the success of AlphaGo as a potential solution to half the world’s problems.
A Deep Mind slogan is “What if solving one problem could unlock solutions to thousands more?” Think of the good will generated for Deep Mind if the company had successfully examined the 29,000 papers and found useful coronavirus information! The same for Microsoft. Having first access, both companies may have tried and failed. It could be that, after Microsoft and Deep Mind failed, the decision was made to pass the buck to give the rest of the world a chance.
That is conjecture on my part. But over a month has passed since public release and I see no report of any attempts, let alone success. Possibly, and most likely, there are no smoking guns in the papers for anyone to find.

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Sabine, the fierce storm that hit Europe in February, led to huge overproduction of wind energy in Germany, with domestic wind plants temporarily supplying a staggering 44 gigawatts (GW) of electricity to the national power grid — two-thirds of total national electricity consumption. This is a level not planned for another decade at the earliest as Berlin steps up its noncarbon energy plans. “A feed-in record!” as the Wind Energy Association hailed it. But not all are happy with this success….
Under Germany’s renewable energy law, which is designed to help support green power, wind turbine operators also receive compensation for every kilowatt-hour of electricity not produced if wind power surpasses peak grid capacity. Added to this, power grid operators must accept and distribute electricity from renewable sources even when there’s no demand for it.
The price of electricity can therefore turn negative, meaning that grid operators have to sell at a loss or pass the costs on to customers. It is estimated that so-called grid stabilizing measures due to excess wind power supply in 2020 could cost consumers a total of €4 billion ($4.5 billion) in extra bills for electricity that is sold at a negative price or even never produced.

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Universal calls the “Trolls World Tour” digital release a success and suggests it may be the beginning of a sea change in how movies are released. Theater owners strenuously disagree. AMC Theaters, the largest chain in the United States, is signaling an all-out war, saying it will no longer show Universal movies…..
On Tuesday, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell told The Wall Street Journal that the digital release for “Trolls World Tour” has gone well enough to demonstrate the viability of direct-to-home releases. He promised that even once theaters reopen, “We expect to release movies on both formats.”
The Journal reported that in three weeks of $20 on-demand rentals, “Trolls World Tour” has grossed about $95 million. The studio, which normally splits sales approximately in half with theaters, pocketed about $75 million of that. A spokesman for Universal did not dispute those figures.
By comparison, 2016’s “Trolls” grossed $116 million in U.S. and Canada and $346.9 million worldwide. The sequel cost a reported $90 million to produce, not including marketing costs that likely exceeded $50 million….
“Universal does not have reason to use unusual circumstances in an unprecedented environment as a springboard to bypass true theatrical releases,” said John Fithian, president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners. He touted the irreplaceable “beloved immersive, shared experience” of seeing a film in a theater, adding that many families would have flocked to “Trolls” if “the world had not been sequestered at home.”
AMC Theaters went further. CEO Adam Aron said his company would sever relations with Universal, effective Tuesday. He insisted the policy would continue once theaters reopened, would apply to its venues around the world and “is not some hollow or ill-considered threat.”
Aron said AMC would do the same to any distributor that “unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us.”

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet with an eye-watering current net worth of $143.2 billion (£114.6bn), and despite the fact that economies and businesses across the world are struggling due to the global pandemic Bezos’ wealth hasn’t been dented by coronavirus. Instead, it’s increased by more than $24 billion (£19.4bn). From running a fledgling business out of his garage in the 1990s to controlling the world’s largest online retailer today, click or scroll through to learn about Bezos’ incredible rise to success.

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The CEO of The Walt Disney Company shut down an LGBTQ critic who claimed that the company is losing money because its products “promote LGBT ideology.”
During a shareholding meeting Wednesday, Caroline Farrow, an anti-LGBTQ activist, asked Bob Chapek if it was “perhaps time to see what you can do to make Disney more family friendly” and “safe for people around the world, not just one minority” given that the company’s stock price has recently plummeted.
She also brought up concerns that the more than 400,000 people who signed a petition asking Disney to avoid hosting Pride events were not being heard.
Chapek, who replaced Bob Iger as CEO of Disney in February, dismissed Fallow’s objections in his response, stating that Disney believes in reflecting the diversity of its fanbase in its creative content. He added that producing inclusive projects will only become an increased priority for the company in the future.

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The Center for American Progress has identified three major areas for concern in execution of the first packages:
• First, the complexity of many of the programs is making them difficult to implement in a timely manner. Not only are individuals and businesses struggling to obtain the benefits they are entitled to, but government agencies are also unable to meet the surge in demand for their programs.
• Second, lack of oversight and accountability of the package opens the door to misuse and corruption.
• Third, many of the country’s most vulnerable populations and businesses were excluded by design from the first legislative packages and can be further left out by their implementation. Their needs must be addressed in subsequent legislation.
Both public health and economic recovery depend on the successful implementation of the legislation passed so far and the passage of additional legislation to fill remaining gaps.

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More than 3.4 million homeowners are temporarily skipping their mortgage payments because they’ve lost income during the pandemic. Under the CARES Act rescue package passed by Congress, affected homeowners can skip or delay payments for up to a year….
“In the vast majority of cases, what should happen at the end of the CARES Act forbearance period is that homeowners should be given the opportunity to have those missed payments put on the back end of their mortgage,” says Diane Thompson, a former attorney with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
So if you have a 30-year mortgage and skip six months of payments, then you’d get six months of payments tacked onto the back end of that 30-year term.
That means when you get back on your feet financially, you can just return to making your regular monthly mortgage payment — your payment doesn’t go up, and you don’t get socked with a giant bill that you can’t afford.
Thompson, who is now working with the National Consumer Law Center, says Congress should make this the default option that homeowners get automatically.
She says that this would fix the current situation, where the repayment method gets determined months down the road when the homeowner is ready to resume paying. Tacking the payments on the back of the loan is what should happen for most borrowers if the mortgage companies follow the rules, she says. But that leaves a lot of painful uncertainty hanging in the air for people, especially when borrowers in the meantime are being told about possible outcomes that are wildly inappropriate for their situation.

The World Health Organization warned that children across the world will die as the coronavirus pandemic forces some countries to temporarily halt vaccinations for other deadly diseases like polio.
At least 21 countries are reporting vaccine shortages as a result of travel restrictions meant to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference at the agency’s Geneva headquarters. “The tragic reality is children will die as a result.”
Just as immunization has been postponed in some countries, heath-care services for other diseases, like malaria, have been disrupted, Tedros said, noting that the number of malaria cases in sub-Saharan Africa could double. —Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is expected to lead a $100 million funding round in India’s digital payment behemoth- Paytm, according to a report from India’s The Economic Times.
Paytm provides digital payment services to individuals and merchants and has raised around $3.5 billion to date. Paytm is one of the largest digital payment platforms in India, with backing from investors including SAIF Partners, Softbank, and Alibaba Group.
Paytm became hugely popular after India’s demonetization efforts back in 2016. India was primarily a cash-based economy that had to temporarily transition into a digital-based economy overnight, resulting in a surge of online payment service providers.

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Saudi Arabia has ended the death penalty for crimes committed by minors after effectively abolishing floggings, as the kingdom seeks to blunt criticism over its human rights record.
The death penalty was eliminated for those convicted of crimes committed while they were minors, Human Rights Commission president Awwad Alawwad said in a statement, citing a royal decree.
“Instead, the individual will receive a prison sentence of no longer than 10 years in a juvenile detention facility,” the statement said.

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The World Health Organization on Saturday said there was not enough evidence that a person who has recovered from covid-19 is immune from a second infection. This comes as the known coronavirus death toll worldwide surpassed 200,000, though the true figure is unknown.

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….it will not be seamless for the companies that have been ordered to remove Huawei gear. Steven Barry, who heads the Competitive Carriers Association, said at a congressional hearing last month that rural carriers were “essentially attempting to rebuild the aeroplane in mid-flight” by having to remove and replace network equipment.
The FCC originally requested telcos to submit relevant data by April 22, but that deadline has been pushed back by a month due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Kail.
“We’re not thrilled about replacing the Huawei equipment because it has been very reliable, and it will be a major diversion,” said Kail.
“While we haven’t determined a time frame for the swap, we believe it may take up to one year, and, of course, it will depend on how much time we’re given to complete the rip and replace process.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted Friday that Congress’ next economic package provide billions for financially reeling state and local governments, foreshadowing a sharp partisan fight ahead in lawmakers’ continuing response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“There will not be a bill without state and local” aid, Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters in the Capitol. Suggesting that Democrats have leverage to address a problem that shows no signs of vanishing soon, she also said, “There will be a bill, and it will be expensive.”

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U.S. states promoting apps that could prove essential to ending the coronavirus lockdown may be headed for a showdown with the two Silicon Valley companies that control key software on 99% of smartphones over the collection of sensitive GPS location data….
Google and Apple have sought to build public trust by emphasizing that the changes they are making to Bluetooth to allow the tracing apps to work will not tap phones’ GPS sensors, which privacy activists see as too intrusive.
But the states pioneering the apps – North and South Dakota, and Utah – say allowing public health authorities to use GPS in tandem with Bluetooth is key to making the system viable….
Apple and Google said on Friday that they still have not decided how to proceed.

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Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO, the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s $2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a lot of money.”

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A Massachusetts factory that normally makes some of the nation’s most beloved board games, including Monopoly, Risk and Candyland, has pivoted to making personal protective equipment for heath care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Charlie Baker said Saturday.
The Cartamundi-owned Hasbro factory is making 50,000 face shields per week for hospitals in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Republican said after a tour of the East Longmeadow facility.
Making games and making personal protective equipment have the same goal, President and COO John Frascotti said.
“It is our job to make the world a better place for children and their families,” he said.

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UnitedHealth Group Inc., CEO
Total compensation: $52,098,104 for the year ended Dec. 31, 2019
Salary: $1,384,615
Nonequity incentive pay: $4,500,000
Other compensation: $201,993
Exercised stock options: $27,201,316
Value realized on vesting shares: $18,810,180….
Note: Wichmann and former executive chairman, Stephen Hemsley, each realized more than $50 million in compensation for 2019.
Both executives benefited from long-term equity awards that were granted in previous years. Wichmann was named CEO in 2017, after joining UnitedHealth in 1998 and holding senior executive roles since 2004. Combined, Wichmann and Hemsley exercised $57 million worth of stock options and realized $39 million from restricted stock that vested.

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No one has ever contested the legitimacy of Turkish Cypriot claims to an equitable share. It is the legality of Turkey’s actions that is challenged as unlawful, and the fusion of those actions with the legitimate claims of the Turkish Cypriots is unhelpful as is talk of being co-owners, which implies owning half the share of Cyprus’ hydrocarbon wealth.
The issue is not whether RoC acted wisely in the past or whether its claims are maximalist – most Greek Cypriots would reject the notion that their claims are maximalist. Their starting point is that Turkey is occupying northern Cyprus so there can be nothing maximalist about playing hardball on hydrocarbon wealth if you have the sovereign right to it.
The Turkish case based on the 1960 treaty of guarantee does not really fly. The fact is that the international community recognises the RoC government as in charge of the ship of state in Cyprus and it is no good being in denial about this state of affairs.
The RoC signed the1982 UN treaty on the law of the sea and negotiated Cyprus’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) with Israel and Egypt. As I said in last week’s article, EEZs have received such wide acceptance they now form part of customary international law and bind all states even though they have not signed the convention.
The fact that Turkey does not recognise Cyprus means that there cannot be an EEZ or delineation of continental shelf between them, whereas both Israel and Egypt recognise the RoC government and have agreed EEZs that are valid against the whole world.

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IBM today announced plans to integrate Project Debater into Watson Group products like Watson NLP, Watson Knowledge Studio, and Watson Discovery later this year. This is the first commercialization of Project Debater since IBM Research introduced the AI capable of maintaining debate with human champions in June 2018….
Work started on Debater six years ago, but the system only gained the ability to spar with humans about four years ago, Noam Slonim, IBM Research principal investigator and creator of Project Debater, told VentureBeat. Project Debater is trained on millions of news articles and other content.
The second debate — on whether governments should subsidize preschool — took place about a year ago, when Debater took on 2016 World Debating Championship grand finalist Harish Natarajan for an episode of popular debate podcast Intelligence Squared.
In IBM Watson products, Debater will power Watson sentiment analysis, summarization, and clustering topics found in language.

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….after years of waiting for insurers to cover more telehealth, the pandemic has not been an ideal starting point. When Minahan called one insurance company recently about an issue with a claim, she was faced with a four-hour wait time.
“I’m like, are you kidding me?” she says. “So for us to actually get through to any of the insurance companies to ask questions or to solve our problems or anything right now – like, they are overworked and overwhelmed and it’s crazy.”
Tyler Brannen, the director of health economics for the state insurance department, says they did get some complaints in the first weeks of the executive order about insurance companies lagging on compliance.
“But I think those issues have been resolved now,” he says. “And indeed, every major insurance company operating in New Hampshire does have a very detailed set of billing instructions to get reimbursement and coverage for services virtually.”

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Increasingly, doctors also are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases that don’t seem to follow any of the textbooks they’ve trained on. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels — so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death — talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.
With no clear patterns in terms of age or chronic conditions, some scientists hypothesize that at least some of these abnormalities may be explained by severe changes in patients’ blood.
The concern is so acute some doctor groups have raised the controversial possibility of giving preventive blood thinners to everyone with covid-19 — even those well enough to endure their illness at home.
Blood clots, in which the red liquid turns gel-like, appear to be the opposite of what occurs in Ebola, Dengue, Lassa and other hemorrhagic fevers that lead to uncontrolled bleeding. But they actually are part of the same phenomenon — and can have similarly devastating consequences.
Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. On Saturday, Broadway actor Nick Cordero, 41, had his right leg amputated after being infected with the novel coronavirus and suffering from clots that blocked blood from getting to his toes.

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After years of working almost exclusively on long-term projects and pushing day-to-day management to his deputies, Bezos, 56, has turned back to the here-and-now problems facing Amazon, the company said, as the giant retailer grapples with a surge of demand, labor unrest and supply chain challenges brought on by the coronavirus.

He is joining daily calls to help make decisions about inventory and testing, as well as how and when — down to the minute — Amazon responds to public criticism. He has talked to government officials. And in April, for the first time in years, he made a publicized visit to one of Amazon’s warehouses.

“For now, my own time and thinking continues to be focused on COVID-19 and how Amazon can help while we’re in the middle of it,” Bezos wrote to shareholders last week.

Bezos’ daily oversight hasn’t led to perfectly smooth sailing. Amazon has struggled to respond quickly to the growing number of coronavirus cases in its workforce, and it has been slammed with orders from consumers.

But Amazon is one of the few companies that have benefited financially from the crisis. Because of all the customer demand, shares of the company have hit record highs. That has made Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world, $25 billion richer since early March.

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Brown-Richardson is one of more than a dozen nurses in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, who detailed their experiences on the front lines in affidavits corroborating three lawsuits filed Monday against the state health department and two area hospitals. The complaints, which were lodged by New York’s largest nurses union, allege that inadequate protective equipment, among other failures, contributed to “compromising the health and safety of the nurses,” according to a news release from the union.
“These lawsuits were filed to protect our nurses, our patients and our communities from grossly inadequate and negligent protections,” Pat Kane, executive director of the New York State Nurses Association, said in the release. “We cannot allow these dangerous practices to continue.”