By definition, social business is people business. As such, it can and should value every voice, which is why IBM set out to enable more inclusive social business.

Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg is a man with a mission. He wants to teach surgeons around the world the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) so that they can perform minimally invasive surgery and he wants to do it using sophisticated collaborative tools

An IBM Smarter Cities team led by the IBM Human Centric Solutions Center partnered with Bolzano city planners to answer the question "Can we use technology to guarantee a good quality of life for our aging population?" And the answer is a resounding "yes."

At the 28th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference California State University, Northridge (CSUN) conference, IBM brought together accessibility experts from government, major enterprise IT (information technology) providers, mobile OS (operating system) providers, mobile device providers, and industry standards efforts to bring focus and direction to addressing accessibility in one of the most liberating opportunities for people with disabilities in the last decade.

The AFB Leadership Conference was held in Chicago, IL on April 18-20, 2013. The conference had over 400 attendees and covered a wide range of topics over the 3 days. Chieko Asakawa, IBM Fellow, was a keynote speaker.

The desire to connect whenever we want, wherever we are has created a unique opportunity for the private sector to capture new markets as they work to fulfill our desire for ubiquitous connectivity. The growth in mobile ICT technology is profound and shows little signs of slowing down.

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The American economy plunged deeper into crisis last month, losing 20.5 million jobs as the unemployment rate jumped to 14.7%, the worst devastation since the Great Depression.The Labor Department's monthly report Friday provided the clearest picture yet of the breadth and depth of the economic damage -- and how swiftly it spread -- as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country.Job losses have encompassed the entire economy, affecting every major industry. Areas like leisure and hospitality had the biggest losses in April, but even health care shed more than 1 million jobs. Low-wage workers, including many women and members of racial and ethnic minorities, have been hit especially hard."It's literally off the charts," said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America. "What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time."From almost any vantage point, it was a bleak report. The share of the adult population with a job, at 51.3%, was the lowest on record. Nearly 11 million people reported working part time because they couldn't find full-time work, up from about 4 million before the pandemic.If anything, the numbers probably understate the economic distress.Millions more Americans have filed unemployment claims since the data was collected in mid-April. What's more, because of issues with the way workers are classified, the Labor Department said the actual unemployment rate last month might have been closer to 20%.It remains possible that the recovery, too, will be swift, and that as the pandemic retreats, businesses that were fundamentally healthy before the virus will reopen, rehire and return more or less to normal. The one bright spot in Friday's report was that nearly 80% of the unemployed said they had been temporarily laid off and expected to return to their jobs in the coming months.President Donald Trump endorsed this view in an interview Friday morning on Fox News. "Those jobs will all be back, and they'll be back very soon," Trump said, "and next year we're going to have a phenomenal year."But Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, said that such optimism was misplaced, and that many of the jobs could not be recovered."This is going to be a hard reality," Swonk said. "These furloughs are permanent, not temporary."Many businesses have indicated that employees can work from home throughout the summer, hurting sales at downtown restaurants. Meetings and conferences have been put off as well, reducing demand at hotels and other gathering places. And the longer the pandemic lasts, the more businesses will fail, deepening the downturn.The broad nature of the job cuts, too, means it will take longer for the labor market to recover than if the losses were confined to one or two areas."There is no safe place in the labor market right now," said Martha Gimbel, an economist and labor market expert at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative. "Once people are unemployed, once they've lost their jobs, once their spending has been sucked out of the economy, it takes so long to come back from that."Carrie Hines, a managing director at an advertising firm in Austin, Texas, had the kind of professional job -- adaptable to working from home -- that seemed insulated from the pandemic's effects. But her firm worked closely with companies in the airline, hotel and amusement park industries. When their business evaporated as a result of the outbreak, it was only a matter of time before Hines' firm felt the impact. She was laid off April 20."I was shocked," she said. "I've never had a gap in work since college."Hines and her husband are cutting back where they can, and they have canceled plans to send their three children to summer camp. "I never imagined this kind of job market where the entire advertising industry has been crushed," she said.The scale of the job losses last month alone far exceed the 8.7 million lost in the last recession, when unemployment peaked at 10% in October 2009."I thought the Great Recession was once in a lifetime, but this is much worse," said Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global.The only comparable period is when unemployment reached about 25% in 1933, before the government began publishing official statistics. Then, as now, workers from a variety of backgrounds found themselves with few prospects for quickly landing a new job.The government's official definition of unemployment typically requires people to be actively looking for work, making the measure ill-suited to a crisis in which the government is encouraging people to stay home. Some 6.4 million people left the labor force entirely in April, meaning they were neither working nor looking for work.Joblessness -- by any measure -- could be even higher in the report for May, which will reflect conditions next week. Some economists say the unemployment rate should fall over the summer as people begin to return to work. Several states have begun to reopen their economies, and others are expected to do so in coming weeks.But with the virus untamed, it's not clear how quickly customers will return to businesses. And epidemiologists and economists warn that if states move too quickly, they could risk a second wave of infections, imperiling public health and the economy."That would stop people from shopping and cause austerity," Bovino said.For businesses, the uncertainty about the path of the pandemic and about consumers' response to it is making planning difficult.When Austin Ramirez heard about the coronavirus earlier this year, his initial concern was for his supply chain. Ramirez runs Husco International, a manufacturer of hydraulic and electromechanical components for cars and other equipment. The company has a factory in China and receives parts from suppliers there and around the world.By April, virtually the entire U.S. auto industry was shut down, Husco included. (The company's nonautomotive production continued at a reduced rate.) Ramirez said he didn't know when business would bounce back. His goal is to weather the storm."There's no visibility or certainty on what the future demand is going to look like," he said. "We can't build a business model that relies on there being a big recovery six months from now."While most of Husco's roughly 750 North American workers have been furloughed during the crisis, the company has mostly avoided large-scale, permanent job cuts. Ramirez said he expected that most of his workers would come back when he needs them.But particularly in industries like retail and hospitality, layoffs that were initially temporary might not remain so as bankruptcies mount and business owners confront shifts in consumer behavior.Most forecasters expect the unemployment rate to remain elevated at least through 2021, and probably longer. That means that it will be years before workers enjoy the bargaining power that was beginning to bring them faster wage gains and better benefits before the crisis.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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Learn about this important American sports car.

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A Facebook post offers what appears to be a fictitious excerpt from a real Supreme Court ruling to claim that COVID-19 emergency measures are illegal.

An independent review last year found that Dr. Richard Strauss had abused at least 177 male students during his tenure at Ohio State University.

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Many collectors and enthusiasts continue to travel aboard gas-guzzling airplane to see art.

The FBI coordinated very closely with the Obama White House on the investigation of Michael Flynn, while the Obama Justice Department was asleep at the switch. That is among the most revealing takeaways from Thursday’s decision by Attorney General Bill Barr to pull the plug on the prosecution of Flynn, who fleetingly served as President Trump’s first National Security Advisor. Flynn had been seeking to withdraw his guilty plea to a false-statements charge brought in late 2017 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.While working on the Trump transition team in December 2016, Flynn spoke with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in conversations that were intercepted by our government (because Russian-government operatives, such as Kislyak, are routinely monitored by the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies). Among the topics Flynn and Kislyak discussed was the imposition of sanctions against Russia, which President Obama had just announced.That these conversations took place has been known for over three years -- ever since a still-unidentified government official leaked that classified information to the Washington Post. For almost as long, it has been known that the FBI became aware of the Flynn–Kislyak discussions very shortly after they happened. What was not known until this week was that then–acting attorney general Yates was out of the loop. She found out about the discussions nearly a week afterwards -- from President Obama, of all people.This was at a White House pow-wow on January 5, 2017. That was the day when the chiefs of key intelligence agencies briefed top Obama White House officials on their assessment of Russia’s meddling in the campaign. After the main briefing, the president asked Yates and FBI director James Comey to stick around to meet with him, along with Vice President Biden and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Yates was taken aback when Obama explained that he had “learned of the information about Flynn” and his conversation with Kislyak. She was startled because, she later told investigators, she “had no idea what the president was talking about.”Yates had to figure things out by listening to the exchanges between President Obama and FBI director Comey. The latter was not only fully up to speed, he was even prepared to suggest a potential crime -- a violation of the moribund Logan Act -- that might fit the facts.According to an FBI report, which was appended (as Exhibit 4) to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case, Yates later said she was “so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time.”I’ll bet.That Yates was in the dark was not the FBI’s fault. Two days earlier, the bureau’s then–deputy director, Andrew McCabe, had briefed Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, the head of DOJ’s National Security Division, about the Flynn–Kislyak discussions. Evidently not appreciating what the FBI regarded as the urgency of the matter, McCord did not pass the information along to the acting AG before her White House meeting.Ms. Yates’s astonishment at how well-informed the bureau was keeping the president calls for revisiting something to which I’ve called attention before. It now seems even more significant.When General Flynn was forced to resign as national-security adviser after just three weeks on the job, the New York Times did its customary deep dive, in which seven of its best reporters pressed their well-placed sources for details. It was a remarkable report, which recounted -- as if it were totally matter-of-fact -- that Flynn’s communications with Kislyak had been investigated by the FBI in real-time consultation with President Obama’s aides. For example (my italics):> Obama advisers heard separately from the F.B.I. about Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Mr. Kislyak, whose calls were routinely monitored by American intelligence agencies that track Russian diplomats. The Obama advisers grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming [Trump] team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.Interesting. The FBI tells Obama “advisers” about Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak. Between this and their surprise that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin did not retaliate when Obama imposed sanctions, the Obama “advisers” dream up a non-existent pact between Trump and the Kremlin -- collusion! And they’re already thinking about nailing Flynn on the Logan Act . . . an obsolete, unconstitutional vestige of the President John Adams administration that has never, ever been prosecuted in the history of the Justice Department (the last case appears to have been in 1852; DOJ was established 18 years later).Who came up with that? Well, Ms. McCord (whose interview is Exhibit 3 in DOJ’s Flynn dismissal motion) later told investigators that the Logan Act flyer originated in the office of Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper -- specifically proposed by ODNI’s general counsel, Bob Litt. Obviously, by January 5, Comey was already discussing it with Obama.Let’s look at some more of that Times report on Flynn’s downfall. For the legal analysis of Flynn’s exchanges with Kislyak, the president’s aides consulted the FBI, not DOJ:> The Obama officials asked the F.B.I. if a quid pro quo had been discussed on the call, and the answer came back no, according to one of the officials, who like others asked not to be named discussing delicate communications. The topic of sanctions came up, they were told, but there was no deal.So no misconduct. To the contrary, the incoming national-security adviser asked a Russian counterpart to discourage his government from escalating tensions, which is what we would want any American diplomat to do. “There was no deal.” Sanctions were merely mentioned, as one would expect since they’d just been imposed, but Flynn made no agreement to accommodate the Kremlin in any way.But see, those are the actual facts. Who cares what actually happened? What matters, it turns out, is what “Obama advisers” and their FBI co-creators could imagine it into: There must be Trump collusion with Russia because we’ve concluded Putin would otherwise have retaliated.This was nothing new for the FBI. Remember, at that point, they’re already in the FISA court (and at that time, were about to go back for a renewal warrant) telling the judges they suspect members of Donald Trump’s campaign are in a “conspiracy of cooperation” with the Putin regime. Their proof of that? The Steele dossier -- uncorroborated Democratic-party- and Clinton-campaign-sponsored propaganda that they already have immense reason to know is claptrap.Meanwhile, with Yates at the helm, the Justice Department had major reservations about the FISA warrants’ reliance on the Steele dossier, but swallowed hard and went along with it. The Justice Department had major reservations about the Logan Act as a predicate for investigating Flynn, but Yates was too startled to speak up at the White House meeting. The Justice Department wanted Comey to alert the Trump White House about the Flynn–Kislyak discussions, but the FBI refused . . . and Yates did nothing. By the time, after days of temporizing, she finally decided to put her foot down, Comey told her he had already dispatched agents to do an unauthorized ambush interview of Flynn. Yates was “dumbfounded,” McCord recalled.The Justice Department appears to have spent much of its time “flabbergasted,” to quote McCabe again. But in the end, it would always go with the collusion flow. Meanwhile, empowered and emboldened, the FBI ran rings around its nominal superiors.So what did President Obama make of all this theorizing from the FBI and his “advisers”? Well, intriguingly, as she was leaving her office for the last time, Obama’s top adviser, Susan Rice, decided that her last official act, moments after Trump was inaugurated, would be to craft -- 15 days after the fact -- an email memorializing Obama’s directive at the January 5 meeting:> President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.Hmm, you mean a reason like “Trump and his minions just might be colluding with the Kremlin”?You’d almost think the Obama White House and its intelligence apparatus was weaving a political narrative out of . . . nothing.

Check out our weekly earnings calendar and read the latest quarterly earnings previews.

The Drum Corps International World Championship Prelims will be shown live in more than 500 theatres on Thursday, August 8 when Big, Loud and Live 16 begins at 6:30 PM Eastern.

(California Court of Appeal) - In a trespass suit brought by a grocery store against a church soliciting donations in front of the store, summary judgment in favor of the store is affirmed, where: 1) the church's solicitation was not protected by In re Lane (1969) 71 Cal.2d 872, because there was no relation between the church's expressive activities and the store's location; and 2) the church did not contend or present evidence to establish that the store or the sidewalk in front was a public forum within the meaning of Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center (1979) 23 Cal.3d 899.

(United States Fourth Circuit) - In an action by a Virginia non-profit corporation organized under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code to provide "accurate and truthful information about the public policy positions of Senator Barack Obama," contending that it was "chilled" from posting information about then-Senator Obama because of the vagueness of a Commission regulation, 11 C.F.R. section 100.22(b), and a Commission policy, published at 72 Fed. Reg. 5595 (Feb. 7, 2007), relating to whether plaintiff has to make disclosures or is a "political committee" (PAC), the District Court's judgment is affirmed where: 1) neither the regulation nor policy are unconstitutionally broad and vague in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments; and 2) it correctly applied the "exacting scrutiny" standard applicable to disclosure provisions.

(United States First Circuit) - In a dispute between two monasteries for copyright infringement of a religious text, district court's judgment in favor of the plaintiff is affirmed, as the plaintiff has established both elements of an infringement claim of actual copying and actionable copying, and all of the defenses set forth by the defendant are without merit.

(Court of Appeals of New York) - In this case, petitioner, a not-for-profit theater corporation, filed applications for real property tax exemptions with respondent assessor and was denied. Petitioner then commenced this RPTL article 7 proceeding for review of its tax assessments. Order of the Appellate Division granting the petition is affirmed, where: 1) the statute does not elevate one exempt purpose over another, and under the circumstances, the use of property to provide staff housing is reasonable incidental to petitioner's primary purpose of encouraging appreciation of the arts through theater; and 2) petitioner has demonstrated that it is entitled to an RPTL 420-a tax exemption.

(Court of Appeals of New York) - In this case, petitioner, a not-for-profit religious corporation that owns real property, commenced proceedings pursuant to CPLR article 78 and RPTL article 7 after respondent Board of Assessment and Review for the Town of Catskill refused petitioner's applications for tax-exempt status pursuant to RPTL 420-a. The Appellate Division's grant of the petitions is affirmed, where petitioner adequately established its entitled to the RPTL 420-a exemption, as the proof at trial established that petitioner "exclusively" utilized the property in furtherance of its religious and charitable purposes.

(United States Second Circuit) - Reversed summary judgment for an apparel company in its trademark infringement action. A company that sold leather jackets branded ROGUE contended that a commercial brewery that sold ROGUE-branded beer had infringed its trademark by using the name on t‐shirts and hats. The Second Circuit held that the apparel company was not entitled to summary judgment, because the brewery was the senior user and the evidence did not show that it was precluded by laches.

(United States Supreme Court) - Held that a death row inmate's execution by lethal injection would not subject him to constitutionally impermissible suffering, even if his unusual health issues meant that he would experience particularly excruciating pain. The inmate contended that his medical condition meant Missouri's legal injection protocol was unconstitutional as applied to him. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that he failed to satisfy the Baze-Glossip test. Justice Gorsuch delivered the majority opinion.

(United States Second Circuit) - Upheld a Board of Immigration Appeals decision that a lawful permanent resident was ineligible for cancellation of removal. He had been found removable based on his New York convictions for endangering the welfare of a child. Denied the Irish citizen's petition for review.

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Aside from a few wild guesses, Izuku had no idea how this had happened. But here he was, about to bear All Might's child, and all he could think to blame it on was a jar of rice.

RT @VanityFair: Trumpworld's campaign to blame China for creating the coronavirus is ramping up—even as the U.S. intelligence community and WHO insist otherwise

r/Coronavirus: In December 2019, a novel coronavirus strain (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in the city of Wuhan, China. This subreddit seeks to monitor the …

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Almost all of the world's cruise ships have formed ghost fleets with their crews trapped aboard

This note examines the published data protection impact assessment (DPIA) released by NHSX in relation to their contact tracing/proximity tracing app. It highlights a range of significant issues which leave the app falling short of data protection legislation. It does this in order so that these issues can be remedied before the next DPIA is published.