| It appears that the giant ship blocking the Suez Canal is going to be stuck for a lot longer. Even with an elite team trying to extricate it, experts said the earliest the boat may move is next Wednesday—much longer than initially feared. The longer the blockage lasts, the more it disrupts global supply chains and threatens to increase prices. Reverberations from the shutdown may be felt for months after the mess is cleaned up. Already, oil tankers are rerouting and major companies like Ikea and Caterpillar foresee potential delays. One shipping executive summed it up: "If it can't be resumed in a week, it will be horrible." —Margaret Sutherlin Bloomberg is tracking the progress of coronavirus vaccines while mapping the pandemic globally and across America. Here are today's top stories The fallout from Georgia's new, restrictive voting laws has been swift. The arrest of a Black lawmaker by White police triggered additional, national outrage. She was handcuffed by two men as she sought admission to a closed-door bill signing by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who was putting pen to paper before a group of White men. The juxtaposition focused sharper scrutiny on proposed voter access limits Democrats contend are a Republican effort to disenfranchise minorities. Just hours after the Georgia legislation was signed into law, a group of nonprofits sued the state's election chief, calling the laws an act of voter suppression. GOP leaders sought to justify the bills by citing false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. In Washington, Congress is taking its own, potentially landmark steps to expand voter rights.  Park Cannon is removed from outside Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's office in the State Capitol building, Atlanta on March 25. Source: Tamara Stevens/Storyful The U.S. will have received 240 million doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of this month, enough to fully inoculate 130 million people, a senior White House aide told Bloomberg. The news comes as the country rushes to vaccinate more adults. Infections are rising again thanks to more contagious variants and loosening restrictions. Globally, cases are also spiking and scientists have called for greater monitoring in Tanzania, where the most mutated form of Covid-19 has been discovered. Here's the latest on the pandemic. Afghanistan's Taliban said it would resume fighting against American or other foreign forces if the U.S. misses the May 1 troop withdrawal deadline agreed to in a peace deal inked last year. The Taliban's warning came after U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday it would be "hard" to meet the deadline, though he "can't picture" U.S. troops there by next year. The S&P 500 climbed the most in three weeks, swinging to a weekly gain on Friday with energy producers and health companies among the best performers. Fresh March data showed U.S. manufacturing is powering on despite investor inflation jitters, and a deeper dive into unemployment data shows South Dakota's jobless rate is only 2.9%. So why is the job market there thriving and not elsewhere? Here's your markets wrap. Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem—colorfully referred to as fatbergs—has gotten a whole lot more disgusting.  Undissolved wipes pulled from the water at a treatment plant in New York City. Photographer: David 'Dee' Delgado/Bloomberg In the last three months of 2020, as Walt Disney Co. laid off thousands of theme park workers, its shares leapt 46% and executives' fortunes surged. Now months since those cuts, former Disney employees are still struggling to make ends meet in the Covid economy. China President Xi Jinping and Russia President Vladimir Putin are among 40 world leaders Biden invited to a virtual White House climate summit next month, his administration's first major international meeting. What you'll need to know tomorrow What you'll want to read tonight in BusinessweekWhen the Covid-19 lockdown largely closed the border between the U.S. and Canada last March, it took the $10 million economy of Minnesota's Northwest Angle with them. So what did desperate locals do? They built a 22-mile road across a frozen lake so tourists could reach them.  The Northwest Angle Guest Ice Road stretches across a 22-mile plowed road on frozen Lake of the Woods. Photographer: Ackerman + Gruber for Bloomberg Businessweek Like getting the Evening Briefing? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and gain expert analysis from exclusive subscriber-only newsletters. Work Shifting: What Work Looks Like Next. Join us March 31 and hear from executives at IBM, Microsoft, Facebook and Prudential Financial on what the future of work looks like, what companies are doing to prepare and how organizations can become truly collaborative in a bid to stay competitive and profitable. Register here. Download the Bloomberg app: It's available for iOS and Android. Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more. | 
Post a Comment