The chief investment officer of one of the country's biggest public pension funds said the government response to the coronavirus should be focused on supporting unemployed workers.

As companies deal with declining cash flow amid the coronavirus pandemic, they are likely to cut or even suspend dividends.

Silver reverses after a brief surge. With CNBC's Seema Mody and the Futures Now traders, Jim Iuorio and Scott Nations, both at the CME.

Fabrice Montagne, chief U.K. economist at Barclays, discusses the U.K. economy.

The stock market still reflects what is going on in the economy, even as it has rebounded from its lows amid dismal economic data.

Facebook's new homepage is live now. Here's how to switch to it.

Gold is breaking out to near 7-year highs, and options traders are betting the rally can run even further.

Chinese internet stocks are the targets of outsize bullish bets in the options market, and now is a good time to buy in, says Christian Fromhertz, founder and CEO of Tribeca Trade Group.

Exchange-traded bitcoin options launched Monday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they will likely provide a great tool for cryptocurrency speculators.

Options traders are betting the videoconferencing stock may be gearing up for a double-digit move higher.

Signs that Americans are driving more are helping lift oil prices, but analysts say a 60% jump in prices in just a week may be too much.

There are three defining features on the Nasdaq Composite chart. All of them suggest that talk of a tech crash is unjustified, writes Daryl Guppy.

Health savings accounts, or HSAs, will cover Covid-19-related testing and treatment, among other things.

How to understand what's going on when the jobless rate is surging and so are stock prices. Unemployment's up and so is the stock market. Why?

USB-C, faster processors and new design options continue to keep Microsoft’s Windows 10 laptop near the top of the pile

Microsoft’s top-quality laptop is now in its third generation, with new ports, new processors and a slight redesign, with the option to ditch the unique Alcantara for plain old aluminium.

The £999 and up Surface Laptop 3 is Microsoft’s vision of what a traditional laptop should be. For the most part that’s the same as everyone else, with traditional aluminium body, glass-covered screen and hinge that does not rotate all the way round to the back.

Screen: 13.5in LCD 2256 x 1504 (201 PPI)

Processor: quad-core Intel Core i5 or i7 (10th generation)

RAM: 8 or 16GB

Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB

Graphics: Intel Iris Plus

Operating system: Windows 10 Home

Camera: 720P front-facing, Windows Hello

Connectivity: wifi 6 (ax), Bluetooth 5, USB-A, USB-C, headphones, Surface Connect TPM

Dimensions: 308.1 x 223.3 x 14.5mm

Weight: 1,265 or 1,288g

Due to the angle of the side of the machine it can be difficult to plug the magnetic power cable in without lifting the side up for more leverage.

The black paint can be scratched revealing the silver aluminium underneath.

The screen supports 10-point touch and Microsoft’s Surface Pen stylus.

Pros: great keyboard, good trackpad, Alcantara or aluminium, sleek design, USB-A and USB-C port, great screen, good battery life, Windows Hello, powerful processor.

Cons: no SD card reader, limited configuration options, no Thunderbolt 3, only one USB-C port.

Surface Laptop 2 review: Microsoft’s sleeker answer to the MacBook Air

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 review: a fantastic tablet PC you shouldn’t buy

Microsoft Surface Go review: tablet that’s better for work than play

Microsoft Surface Studio 2 review: in a class of its own

16in MacBook Pro review: bigger battery, new keyboard, new Apple

Apple MacBook Air review: the new default Mac

Continue reading...

Adam Philipson, The Count Basie Center for the Arts president and CEO, joins 'Power Lunch' to discuss how the company is making it through the Covid-19 pandemic and how long the PPP loan will carry them.

The Department of Justice has decided to drop the criminal case against President Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn. CNBC's Kayla Tausche reports.

The winger, who was part of the Guardian’s first Next Generation in 2014, talks about rebuilding his career after being released by Southampton

Harley Willard made one of those sliding-doors decisions that can turn anyone’s life around last December. He had arrived at Heathrow airport, packed and ready for the 14-hour slog back to Phnom Penh, and at that point another season at the Cambodian club Svay Rieng felt like a trade-off he could just about stomach. The football there offered few real prospects but he had enjoyed the lifestyle and, after such an uncertain year and a half since leaving Southampton, surely his happiness was the most important thing.

Related: Next Generation: after five years, how has our first full class of picks fared?

Continue reading...

Dear Readers,

Just wanted to report that I'm back in Oslo, after 2+ spectacular weeks of sailing around the western and northwestern coast of Spitsbergen, Svalbard, in the tall ship Antigua, with a group of wonderful artists, guides, and crew. I have many, many pictures to post and stories to tell, but I'm not home yet, and it'll be a few days until I get organized. Here are a couple just to start things off :o). I can't wait to share more!

xo,
Kristin

Kim Mirus, one of my sailing companions and an extraordinary weaver, took this photo. That's Antigua in the background.

And I took this panorama with my iPhone... it makes the ship look very bendy :o). Click to embiggen.

There were over 245,000 people at this place on the day we were there. Kevin was more calm about this fact than I was.

You could probably take out your globe and figure it out from this picture. If you really wanted to :o).

Two dollars for all-you-can-drink milk. (Yuck!)

Fried pickles. (Fried everything else, too.)

This building is called Sheep. (Subtitle Dairy Goats.)

Standing is hard, guys!

In another building, displays of prize-winning flowers.

Kevin was extremely patient while I took pictures of basically every single flower. I LOVED the flowers!

Oooh!

Oooooo.

Have you guessed yet?

Where can one find prize-winning vegetables, and this veterinarian holding a piglet?

You guessed it. Kevin and I had lots of fun Sunday at the Minnesota State Fair.

Hi, my dear readers! I know I haven't been blogging lately, despite having a lot to share – including more Arctic pictures, from the trip that was almost a year ago at this point! These days, the amount I blog is inversely proportional to how intensely I'm working on the next book. This is good news for those of you waiting for my next book, but I am sorry about the lack of blogging :o). I've made a promise to myself to blog some pictures of Arctic critters soon. Stay tuned.

Well, hi there, everyone.

It's hard to know where to begin, isn't it? I'm just going to dive in, because I want to reach out, share some pictures, be distracting for a few minutes, and hopefully make some of you feel less alone.

I am thinking of all of you, every one of you, and hoping you are okay. Knowing that a lot of you aren't, and wishing that weren't the case. I am okay. Or rather, in the words of the immortal Anne (of Green Gables), "I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit." The people of my life are also okay. Tonight I am dashing off this blog post before disappearing into the kitchen to make some banana bread. Two weeks ago (it feels like months ago), Kevin and I were simultaneously hit with a dreadful and violent bout of food poisoning, and for a week afterwards, all I could eat was applesauce, rice, broth, and bananas. Then suddenly, my appetite returned, and since generally I am not a human who voluntarily eats a banana, a number of bananas have since been growing increasingly offensive in our kitchen. However, I do voluntarily eat banana bread! Unfortunately, the other morning when Kevin made some pancakes, he discovered that our baking powder expired in 2013 (How is this possible? Surely we have baked many times since 2013?). Though I found the pancakes to be perfect, he considered them to be less fluffy than he'd hoped. Knowing that I would be making banana bread sometime soon, I suggested he pick up some baking powder the next time he went to the store. Ha! So naive! Of course there was no baking powder to be had at the store. So I climbed onto a stool and shuffled determinedly through our cabinets. Success! I found some baking powder that expired in 2017. Banana bread is back on the menu. But I must begin it soon, because I no longer have the energy or the emotional fortitude to stay up until midnight.

There are a lot of ways in which Kevin and I are less impacted by this pandemic than other people. He's an indie game developer, self-employed, and was already working from home; my own writing deadlines aren't impacted by the pandemic, so I have work to keep me distracted. In fact, I've almost finished the final revision of my next book, soon to go into copyediting. I used to be excited for the day I got to tell you all about this book, but now I'm guessing it doesn't matter much. Though maybe, whenever I get the green light to talk about it, it will make some of you happy to know what I've been working on. I would like to be able to make someone happy right now.

I have an office outside the home where I can, in fact, self-isolate, but when the shelter-in-place order came down in Massachusetts, we moved me home. It involved lugging home a table; a chair; a computer; my fancy printer; every size, shape and color of pen, post-it note, and index card imaginable; many piles of crap; and many plants. Inconceivably, this was only two days ago! It feels like weeks ago.

And I try not to check the news every minute. And every morning, I plan my schedule for the day ahead with great strictness, because I have a lot of work to do, but it can be hard to focus. Incidentally, if you live somewhere other than the USA and you are looking at our country right now and thinking, "Wow, their government's handling of this crisis is a total shit show," you are correct. Then again, you are probably not surprised. Although one does occasionally think there should be limits to how badly a person can behave and how much he can screw everything up — shouldn't there? Alas. There are not.

Which reminds me that I also brought home my favorite decoration from the office:


This sublime Emily Dickinson line is from a letter Emily wrote to her friend Elizabeth Holland. The image is a greeting card painted by Pamela Zagarenski.

The smelly bananas are calling! My heart is with all of you, all over the world. Stay well, everyone, and don't forget: Being brave feels like being scared. Being strong feels like being too overwhelmed to cope. You are brave and strong.

[Revised entry by Michael Blake and Patrick Taylor Smith on May 4, 2020. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] International distributive justice has, in the past several decades, become a prominent topic within political philosophy. Philosophers have, of course, long been concerned with wealth and poverty, and with how economic inequalities between persons might be justified. They have, however, tended to focus only upon inequalities between inhabitants of the same state. In recent years, though, a sustained philosophical dialogue has emerged on how these ideas might be applied to the relationships and institutions holding at the global level....

[Revised entry by Bruce Russell on May 6, 2020. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A priori justification is a type of epistemic justification that is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples have led most philosophers to think that having a justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge (see Section 4.4, below, and the examples there), but many still believe that it is necessary. In this entry, it will be assumed, for the most part, that even though justification is not sufficient for knowledge it is necessary and that...

Its sting is excruciating to people, but it is a bigger threat to honeybees vital for agriculture

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

A journey to stop a bully has unintended emotional consequences.

My recent trip to the hospital led me to become convinced that reversing the five stages of death has magically beneficial properties.

The US Justice Department on Thursday abruptly withdrew its case against former White House national security advisor Michael Flynn following mounting pressure from President Donald Trump's political allies on the right, handing the US president a major political victory.

This week we bring you a show all about face masks as France starts to lift its lockdown. Faced with controversial shortages at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, French authorities initially rejected the notion of a generalised use before finally touting the device as essential, and in some situations compulsory.

HOLY SHIT WE DID IT!!! Superpoop is back and updates every Thursday. Drewtoothpaste is back and updates every Monday. Subscribe to the combined RSS feed for Superpoop and Drewtoothpaste and get updates in your RSS reader.