New York City’s mayor laid out his administration’s plan Friday to reopen the largest public-school system in the United States in September, as the onetime coronavirus hotspot has brought its infection rate under control.“Everything we do is going to be focused on health and safety – health and safety for our kids, our families, our educators, our school staff,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters.New York’s 1.1 million public school students were sent home in mid-March as the coronavirus took hold in the city. Officials and educators acted quickly to move classes online, getting hundreds of thousands of computers and tablets to low-income students and supplying them with Internet connections.For many children, school is also where they get their main meal of the day, so the city distributed meals to-go at more than 400 school sites.The effort was herculean in scale, faced numerous challenges, and was met with mixed reviews. But officials and parents agree that remote learning cannot replace the classroom experience. The city received 400,000 responses to a survey, and de Blasio said 75% of parents want their kids back in the physical classroom.FILE PHOTO: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio speaks to people as he gives away face masks for using in public spaces to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), May 16, 2020.“Overwhelmingly, the model here is the blended approach with two or three days in school each week, which is really going to benefit kids,” he said of how things will look in September.During the other days, remote learning would continue in order to limit the number of students in each school. He said full-time remote learning is available to any family that prefers it.In addition, social distancing guidelines will be in place in every part of the school buildings, and free face coverings, personal protective equipment and priority testing will be available for everyone in the school community. Students will stay in a single classroom as much as possible, with very few adults in contact with them.“The whole idea of this plan is to limit the amount of movement in the school, limit the amount of people coming in contact with each other, keep kids as much as possible in the same group all day long for everyone’s protection,” the mayor said.The mayor’s plan has not been warmly received by the city’s teachers unions, which say safety and logistical arrangements are inadequate.In addition to the precautions, reopening will be conditioned on the citywide infection rate, which must be below 3%. De Blasio said it has been under that threshold for the past six weeks.“That’s extraordinary,” he said.If the infection rate rises above 3%, students would shift completely to remote learning until it stabilizes.Many other states are using a 5% threshold, but the mayor said that due to New York’s density and its experience with the virus, officials want to be more vigilant in preventing a surge in infections, hence the lower threshold.In March and April, New York City was the U.S. epicenter of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. By the end of April, the city recorded more than 160,000 cases and more than 12,000 deaths. On Friday, the mayor said that in the past 24 hours there were 312 new confirmed cases and only 1% of residents tested for the virus had it.The city also has contingency plans covering the possibility of a student or teacher testing positive, including a 14-day quarantine.“If an illness does occur, we will respond quickly, communicate clearly during investigations and promptly to share decisions to quarantine classrooms, or if necessary, close schools,” said Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza.
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Young voters span two generations — older Gen Z voters and younger Millennial voters. 
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Why would anyone want to discourage voting? To keep an opponent’s supporters away from the polls. 
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У другому кварталі 2020 року в єврозоні спостерігалося зниження на 12,1% порівняно з попереднім кварталом, спричинене пов’язаними з коронавірусною інфекцією обмеженнями. Офіційна агенція Євростат заявила 31 липня, що падіння було найбільшим від початку збирання статистичної інформації в 1995 році.

Іспанія, яка однією з перших постраждала від пандемії, показала найгірше в єврозоні падіння. Економіка цієї країни скоротилася на 18,5% після падіння на 5,2% за перші три місяці року.

Економіка Франції також сильно постраждала, її валовий внутрішній продукт у другому кварталі впав на 13,8%.

Економісти не очікують повернення до докризового рівня раніше 2022 року.

Занепад у Європі співставний із квартальним падінням на 9,5% у Сполучених Штатах.

Згідно з підрахунками Бюро економічного аналізу, валовий внутрішній продукт США за другий квартал скоротився в річному вимірі на 32,9%, це найбільш глибоке скорочення в економіці США за понад 70 років ведення статистики.
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In a fiery eulogy for longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis on Thursday, former President Barack Obama took a series of thinly veiled shots at the actions of his successor that he said tore at the legacy of the Black civil rights icon being laid to rest.  
 
The funeral for Lewis, who played an instrumental role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came on the same day Republican President Donald Trump suggested the Nov. 3 election could be delayed. Trump has also waged a war against mail-in ballots, a tactic critics say is aimed at suppressing votes.
 
“We no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” Obama said in the eulogy, referring to one way Black people were once disqualified at the ballot box.
 
“But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
 
Obama also referred to reported moves to undermine “the postal service in the run-up to an election that could be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
 
Obama, joined at the funeral by two fellow former presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, spoke of Lewis’s rise from humble beginnings on a Troy, Alabama, farm to become a leader of the 1960s struggle for equal rights for Black Americans. Ultimately, the man known as the “conscience of Congress” never gave up his drive to make “good trouble” in the cause of justice, Obama said.
 
Obama and others spoke or sang in front of his casket draped in the American flag at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. King, who was assassinated in 1968, had been a mentor to Lewis.
 
Lewis, who was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  
 
Obama – a Democrat who was the nation’s first black president and who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 – argued that the man whose sharecropping parents “picked someone else’s cotton” now should be counted among the Founding Fathers.
 
“America was built by John Lewis. He as much as anyone in our history brought our country closer to its highest ideals,” the Democratic former president said.
 
In his speech, Bush remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “The story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work.”
 
The funeral capped a week of memorial services. Lewis’s coffin was escorted across the bridge on Sunday, decades after his beating there drew a national spotlight to the struggle for racial equality, including suppression of the Black vote in the South. And on Monday his casket was taken to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where it lay in state through Tuesday.
 
Eric Terrell, 65, of Atlanta, sat outside the church in his wheelchair, in the heat and thick air of an Atlanta summer morning, waiting to get a glimpse of former Presidents Clinton and Bush, but especially Obama. He was camped out before 6:30 a.m. so he could bow his head as Lewis’s funeral procession rolled by.
 
And he held his homemade sign until his arms got tired. It read, “Get your ass out and vote.” “He put his life on the line in Selma so we could vote,” said Terrell, who is Black. “So we better do it,” he said before joining the throng of onlookers outside the church watching the services on a Jumbotron.
 
In an essay written shortly before his death and published in the New York Times on Thursday, Lewis called on the younger generation to get into “good trouble,” using perhaps his most famous utterance about the importance of challenging inequality.
 
“In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way,” he wrote, before invoking a famous line from King: “Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
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Національний банк України встановив на 3 серпня курс 27 гривень 68 копійок за долар, це на одну копійку менше за офіційний курс на останній день липня.

На українському міжбанківському валютному ринку перша частина сесії відбулася на тлі посилення гривні (з початкового рівня 27 гривень 70–73 копійки до 27 гривень 61–63 копійок за долар), але в другій половині дня кілька годин трималися початкові котирування – 27 гривень 70–73 копійки, свідчать дані Finance.ua.

У широкому коридорі 26,5–27 гривень за долар національна валюта перебувала понад два місяці – від кінця квітня до початку липня. Зроблена 1 липня заява ексголови НБУ Якова Смолія про відставку через політичний тиск на нього спричинила зростання котирувань до 27 гривень 20 копійок за долар і навіть вище.

Після призначення головою НБУ Кирила Шевченка девальвація національної валюти прискорилася. Впродовж кількох останніх сесій регулятор показав учасникам ринку нові орієнтири – НБУ продав минулого тижня понад 300 мільйонів доларів за курсом дещо нижче від 28 гривень за долар. Нижній параметр нового коридору міжбанківський ринок знаходить переважно без активної участі Нацбанку.
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A recent survey in Mumbai’s slums finds that more than half of the residents have developed antibodies for COVID-19, indicating that some of India’s most densely packed settlements, which pose the greatest challenge in containing the spread of the infection, could be heading toward “herd immunity.”While urban slums may be inadvertently developing population immunity, though, officials are ruling it out as an option in tackling the rampaging infection, saying it could never be a choice but only an outcome.”Herd immunity” is achieved when a large part of the community develops antibodies against the virus, acting as a wall against its further spread.India is a global hotspot for COVID-19, with infections topping 1.6 million.A healthcare worker checks the temperature of residents of a slum area using an electronic thermometer, in Mumbai, India, July 6, 2020.Antibody developmentA government survey carried out earlier in July in parts of the capital New Delhi found that one in four residents had developed antibodies.As the two surveys turn the spotlight on possible “herd immunity,” the health ministry said that in a country like India with a huge population, this can only be an “outcome” and that, too, at a very high cost as it means lots of people would have to be infected.Rajesh Bhushan, officer on special duty in the health ministry underlined that the country must follow “COVID-10-appropriate behavior”—like wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and following hand hygiene util a vaccine is developed.After being ravaged by the coronavirus, both Delhi and Mumbai are showing a downward trend.Nonetheless, Mumbai, like several other parts of the country, continues to impose a stringent lockdown. Some commentators said the results of the serological studies test the logic of the shutdown and should encourage authorities to restart economic activity.Pointing to the recent surveys in the two cities, The Times of India newspaper said in an editorial that the “high prevalence of antibodies with asymptomatic spread makes a strong case for faster unlocking with safeguards.”
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У Росії курс рубля щодо основних світових валют падає понад 10 днів поспіль. 30 липня євро подолав позначку 86 рублів, а долар став коштувати вище 73 рублів. На торгах на Московській біржі 31 липня курс долара виріс на 86 копійок, показавши максимум із 14 травня. Курс євро вперше з березня перевищив позначку в 87,67 рубля, повідомляє російська служба Радіо Свобода.

Знецінення рубля відбувається на тлі завершення сезону дивідендів. Іноземні інвестори скуповують валюту, щоб конвертувати дивіденди по акціях російських компаній. За нормальних умов ці гроші можна було б залишити в рублях для реінвестування на російському ринку, але зараз інвестори до такого не готові.

Дії Центробанку Росії щодо зниження ключової ставки також знижують привабливість рубля. 24 липня регулятор знизив ставку на 0,25 процентного пункта, до 4,25%.
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