Learn how to create accessible documents with IBM Symphony.

The USBLN 2010 Annual Leadership Awards highlighted employer achievements in seven categories, including supplier diversity and market share. IBM was among those honored, receiving the "Employee Resource Group (ERG) of the Year" award for exemplary strategies to advance disability inclusiveness in the workplace, marketplace and supply chain.

The City of Nettuno worked with IBM Human-Centric Solutions (HCS) to develop an interactive service providing real-time accessibility information via a smartphone application. Called "Accessibility City Tag" (ACT!), the service allows residents or visitors with disabilities to view accessibility information about Nettuno points of interest, filtered by their particular disability type, on their smart phone.

Faced with a stagnant, 10-year budget forecast, restricted resources and the need to address healthcare and safety needs of a rapidly growing percentage of healthy citizens over the age of 70, city leaders got creative. Partnering with IBM, TIS Innovation Park, the technological park of Bolzano, and Dr. Hein GmbH, the city sponsored the Secure Living project to help seniors safely 'age in place' at home.

Social networking has literally transformed the way the world communicates. What began as entertaining online forums for reconnecting with old friends and former colleagues has also morphed into real-time virtual hotlines for job posters and seekers, political compatriots and natural disaster survivors.

Seth Bravin testifies before US Senate about higher education and employment for people who are deaf and hard of hearing

The ability to read small visual displays (SVDs) affects successful functioning at home and in the workplace. SVDs can be found in products as diverse as cell phones, personal digital assistants, photocopiers, fax machines, kitchen and laundry appliances, home entertainment devices, exercise equipment, and diabetes self-management technology. Individuals with vision loss face severe limitations in using such products safely and effectively because the visual displays lack accessibility features.

Many talented, creative clients and colleagues have physical limitations, such as blindness or visual impairment, deafness or limited mobility. When you schedule a meeting, do you take potential disabilities into consideration? These 10 steps should help you design your meeting and include everyone.

IBM advocacy partner, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH (NCAM) received the FCC Chairman's Award for Advancement in Accessibility for Mobile Applications for their development of the Media Access Mobile (MAM) solution. MAM is designed to serve visitors to entertainment venues and cultural institutions who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind or visually impaired, or who speak languages other than English.

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."

The decline in oil prices and the value of investment assets since the start of the coronavirus outbreak will have an adverse impact on the "financial solvency" of the state, Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah said on Saturday. "Kuwait is facing the big and unprecedented challenge of shielding our economy from the external shocks caused by this virus, specifically the decline in oil prices and the value of investments and assets, which will have a negative impact on the financial solvency of the state," the emir was cited by the state news agency KUNA as saying. It wasn't clear if the comment meant that Kuwait could delay the payment of government dues, or whether it was a general statement about the deterioration of the state's finance as a result of the economic impact of the health crisis.

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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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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.

Rates have risen just slightly, and buyers are coming back.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned on Saturday that if provinces move too quickly to reopen their economies, a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic could send Canada "back into confinement this summer." Trudeau, who represents a Montreal, Quebec parliamentary riding, told reporters in a daily briefing that he is concerned about the virus' spread in that province, the country's epicenter. Although health officials have pointed to a flattening rate of daily cases in many provinces, Trudeau said Canada was "not in the recovery phase yet."

Collectively, the five companies singled out by a House committee took $50 million in small business loans through the Paycheck Protection Program.

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

Why have so many leveraged and inverse ETFs reverse split their shares lately?

(California Court of Appeal) - Held that a father was not entitled to an adjustment in the child support arrears that accrued during his incarceration in federal prison. Vacated the decision below and remanded for further proceedings in this family court matter.

(United States Fifth Circuit) - Held that a deceased man's ex-wife was entitled to a specified portion of his 401(k) retirement account balance. Affirmed a summary judgment ruling, in a dispute between his ex-wife and his widow.

(United States Second Circuit) - Affirmed. Defendant is a divorced spouse who holds an interest in property that Plaintiff obtained a judgment lien against the other spouse’s interest. Plaintiff argued that Defendant’s interest was subordinate to Plaintiff’s interest. The trial court held that Defendant’s interest vested upon the entry of the judgment of divorce and that Plaintiff could execute only against the other spouse’s interest.

(California Court of Appeal) - Judgment quieting title of disputed property to plaintiff is affirmed, where: 1) defendant nonprofit religious organization's status as a "public benefit corporation" does not make it a "public entity" immune from adverse possession under Civil Code section 1007; 2) a nonprofit religious organization's "welfare exemption" from property taxes means that no such taxes were "levied and assessed" on the property during the years it qualified for the exemption; and thus, 3) under the plain and binding language of Code of Civil Procedure Code section 325, the adverse possessor is consequently excused from the usual requirement that he pay taxes on the disputed land for five years.

(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.

(California Court of Appeal) - In a dispute between two factions of a church over control of church property, the trial court's judgment is affirmed over meritless claims that it erred: 1) when it found in favor of respondents based on appellants' excommunication from the Holy Hill Community Church (Church) by the Western California Presbytery (WCP); 2) by admitting evidence of events occurring after the cross-complaint was filed; and 3) when it prevented appellants' counsel from cross-examining a representative of the WCP whose testimony was sought by respondents.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Upheld the constitutionality of California's requirement that charitable organizations must disclose the names and addresses of certain large contributors. Two nonprofit organizations contended that the disclosure requirement infringed their First Amendment right to free association. Disagreeing, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the disclosure requirement survived exacting constitutional scrutiny because it was substantially related to an important state interest in policing charitable fraud. The panel reversed and remanded for entry of judgment in the state's favor.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Reinstated a Catholic elementary school teacher's claim that her employment was terminated based on her disability, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Held that she did not qualify as a minister for purposes of the First Amendment's ministerial exception to generally applicable employment laws. Reversed a summary judgment ruling and remanded.

(California Court of Appeal) - Revived a lawsuit accusing a board member of a nonprofit organization of self-dealing and other misconduct. Held that the plaintiff, also a board member, had legal standing even though the board of directors subsequently removed her from the board. Reversed a dismissal.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - In a copyright action, arising from defendant's infringement of plaintiff's photos of the hip hop group Run-DMC for use on t-shirts and a calendar, the district court's grant of summary judgment to defendant Live Nation Merchandise is reversed where: 1) there is a triable issue of fact as to whether defendant's infringement was willful; and 2) plaintiff could prevail upon a showing that defendant knew that copyright management information had been removed from the photos.

(United States First Circuit) - In a suit alleging contract and intellectual property claims against a variety of companies affiliated with Sony Music Entertainment, concerning an original song and music video that plaintiff submitted to Sony as part of a songwriting contest sponsored by Sony, the District Court's dismissal of all claims and order compelling arbitration are affirmed where: 1) the claims were subject to mandatory arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act; and 2) plaintiff failed to allege facts sufficient to support his claims under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).

(United States Federal Circuit) - In an infringement action involving patents that relate to automating part of a preexisting 3-D animation method, the District Court's grant of judgment on the pleadings under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c) that the asserted claims of the patent are invalid, is reversed where the ordered combination of claimed steps, using unconventional rules that relate sub-sequences of phonemes, timings, and morph weight sets, is not directed to an abstract idea and is therefore patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. section 101.