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The world’s largest Starbucks opens tomorrow in Chicago. Here’s what to expect if you go, from rare beans to coffee cocktails.

The Reserve Roastery Chicago opens Friday, transforming the former Crate & Barrel space into five floors of coffee wonderland.




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Grove Resort and Water Park completes 3rd tower in 878-room complex

The Grove Resort and Water Park fishes three-year journey to complete three-building complex's construction.




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Free six-bedroom house available in New Jersey - as long as you can move it

Looking for a house? Well, there’s a free one in New Jersey if you want it. You just need to come and get it. Literally.




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Plans for a Wu-Tang Clan theme park in Seoul

Jimmy S. Kang opens his laptop and shows the Wu-Tang theme park that he is negotiating in Seoul, which has special relevance to him as his family emigrated from South Korea when he was 4 years old.




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New York to probe claims of biased behavior by real estate agents

New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating allegations of racially discriminatory tactics by Long Island real estate agents as described in a sweeping Newsday report.




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From this luxury tower, you’ll see horses cross the finish line

The developer of a 23-story tower near Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach envisions a project with 320 condo style rentals and a 140-room hotel.




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As Chicago’s building boom continues, new nonprofit aims to train women and minorities for construction trades

Major players in commercial real estate, construction and organized labor are teaming up with the United Way to try to place thousands of and minorities into trade careers in Chicago, where there is both a shortage of skilled labor and a dearth of jobs in swaths of the city.




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Artwork as a selling tool: Condos seek sales boost from paintings and sculptures

Facing signs of a slowdown in South Florida real estate sales, developers are increasingly incorporating art into their sales pitches to sell multimillion-dollar single family homes and oceanfront condo towers. Here's a look at how it works.




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‘Windy City Rehab’ team facing multiple lawsuits, adding to HGTV show’s troubles

There’s more trouble for the team behind the popular HGTV series “Windy City Rehab.” Though Season 2 is expected to premiere later this year, the TV stars face multiple lawsuits, and they are starting to turn on each other.




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Penthouse once owned by critic Richard Roeper sells for $1.21 million

A three-bedroom duplex in River North that Roeper owned from 2005 until 2014 sold Jan. 7 for 13% less than what Roeper got for it.




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Small home living: not ‘downsizing’ but ‘right-sizing’

With the current trend toward de-cluttering and downsizing, there are plenty of books about how to winnow down possessions to the few that are truly necessary and loved. This book shows how you can live well once that's done.




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Smells impacting sales, rules against growing: How the real estate market is influenced by legal marijuana

A new National Association of Realtors report revealed the ways that legalizing marijuana has impacted real estate.




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‘They slap lipstick on a pig’: What Chicago real estate experts think of the HGTV effect and ‘Windy City Rehab’ woes

Chicago real estate experts bust myths portrayed by home improvement shows, from actors subbing in as buyers to unrealistically low renovation costs.




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Ousted WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann selling Manhattan penthouse for $37.5 million

Billionaire Adam Neumann, who was ousted from WeWork after the company’s botched attempt to go public last year, is selling a swanky penthouse in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood for $37.5 million. The 41-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, whose unorthodox management style made shocking headlines in recent months, reportedly combined a four-bedroom penthouse and a three-bedroom apartment that he bought in 2017 into a massive three-story unit.




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Hoodlums in the ’hood: Where mobsters lived in South Florida

Some of the most infamous mobsters lived in South Florida neighborhoods we call home today, from Miami to Hollywood to Boca Raton.




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Sober homes face challenge of finding welcoming neighborhood

As important as sober homes are to the effort to address a statewide crisis at the local level, many neighborhoods prefer not to be a part of that mission.




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US home sales plunge 8.5% in March, and it may grow worse

U.S. sales of existing homes cratered 8.5% in March with real estate activity stalled by the coronavirus outbreak.




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Virtual tours? A buyers’ market later? How coronavirus is affecting South Florida real estate.

A look at how real estate in South Florida has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, from virtual tours and technology playing larger in the home-buying process to how the market is expected to react.




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3D office tours grow in popularity as coronavirus brings in-person visits to a halt

Truss, a Chicago-based real estate technology firm, is seeing increased interest in its 3D virtual office tours during the coronavirus pandemic.




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‘Be prepared for the Wild West’: As real estate’s busy season winds up, here’s how to buy or sell a home during the coronavirus pandemic

Real estate data suggests the market took a downturn in March that might already be rebounding. Here's what experts predict.




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Galway Races 2020 will not be open to public

The organisers of the Galway Races have announced that this year's festival will not go ahead in its traditional form, in light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.




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Australian jockey banned for head-butting fellow rider

Australian jockey Luke Tarrant has been given a six-month ban after head-butting fellow rider Larry Cassidy during an altercation at Doomben.




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New dates announced for French Classics

France Galop has announced rescheduled dates for the French Classics, with the Guineas meeting set to be staged on June 1 at ParisLongchamp and the French Derby and Oaks to follow on 5 July at Chantilly.




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Japanese Guineas whet appetite for European Classics

The Flat racing calendar in the northern hemisphere remains mired in uncertainty, but in one jurisdiction the first Classics of the season have been staged as the coronavirus pandemic rages.




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Ruby Walsh believes racing can work behind closed doors

Ruby Walsh believes enforcing social distancing should not prove too much of an issue when racing eventually resumes.




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Wicklow jockey Jackson cheered on to biggest career win

Irish jockey Shane Jackson achieved the biggest win of his eight-year Australian stint with victory in the Grand Annual Steeplechase at Warrnambool on Tuesday.




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French racing to return with magnificent Monday card

Victor Ludorum heads eight declarations for Monday's Prix de Fontainebleau at Longchamp.




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Blades boss Wilder will allow players to opt out

Chris Wilder says he will respect the decision of any Sheffield United player opting not to play when football is given the go-ahead to resume.




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Bundesliga nails down final details for big return

The German Bundesliga is set to start again on 16 May.




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Dutch won't allow fans in stadiums until vaccine found

Sporting events in the Netherlands will have to take place without fans in attendance until there is a vaccine for coronavirus, Health Minister Hugo de Jonge said.




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Rangers hit back as row with SPFL continues to rumble

Rangers have accused the Scottish Professional Football League executive of withholding vital information before clubs voted to end the lower-league season and potentially the Premiership campaign.




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Two Serie A clubs confirm positive Covid-19 tests

Four Sampdoria players, including one who had previously recovered, and three from Fiorentina have tested positive for coronavirus, the two Serie A clubs announced on Thursday.




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City star Walker believes he is being 'harassed'

Kyle Walker claims he is being "harassed" after admitting that he breached lockdown rules to visit his sister and parents.




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Rangers' Robertson an isolated figure in SPFL row

Rangers managing director Stewart Robertson has been accused of making "baseless, damaging and self-serving attacks" by his fellow Scottish Professional Football League board members.




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A Multi-Risk SIR Model with Optimally Targeted Lockdown -- by Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Iván Werning, Michael D. Whinston

We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.




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Inequality of Fear and Self-Quarantine: Is There a Trade-off between GDP and Public Health? -- by Sangmin Aum, Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee, Yongseok Shin

We construct a quantitative model of an economy hit by an epidemic. People differ by age and skill, and choose occupations and whether to commute to work or work from home, to maximize their income and minimize their fear of infection. Occupations differ by wage, infection risk, and the productivity loss when working from home. By setting the model parameters to replicate the progression of COVID-19 in South Korea and the United Kingdom, we obtain three key results. First, government-imposed lock-downs may not present a clear trade-off between GDP and public health, as commonly believed, even though its immediate effect is to reduce GDP and infections by forcing people to work from home. A premature lifting of the lock-down raises GDP temporarily, but infections rise over the next months to a level at which many people choose to work from home, where they are less productive, driven by the fear of infection. A longer lock-down eventually mitigates the GDP loss as well as flattens the infection curve. Second, if the UK had adopted South Korean policies, its GDP loss and infections would have been substantially smaller both in the short and the long run. This is not because Korea implemented policies sooner, but because aggressive testing and tracking more effectively reduce infections and disrupt the economy less than a blanket lock-down. Finally, low-skill workers and self-employed lose the most from the epidemic and also from the government policies. However, the policy of issuing “visas” to those who have antibodies will disproportionately benefit the low-skilled, by relieving them of the fear of infection and also by allowing them to get back to work.




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Which Workers Bear the Burden of Social Distancing Policies? -- by Simon Mongey, Laura Pilossoph, Alex Weinberg

What are the characteristics of workers in jobs likely to be initially affected by broad social distancing and later by narrower policy tailored to jobs with low risk of disease transmission? We use O NET to construct a measure of the likelihood that jobs can be conducted from home (a variant of Dingel and Neiman, 2020) and a measure of low physical proximity to others at work. We validate the measures by showing how they relate to similar measures constructed using time use data from ATUS. Our main finding is that workers in low-work-from-home or high-physical- proximity jobs are more economically vulnerable across various measures constructed from the CPS and PSID: they are less educated, of lower income, have fewer liquid assets relative to income, and are more likely renters. We further substantiate the measures with behavior during the epidemic. First, we show that MSAs with less pre-virus employment in work-from-home jobs experienced smaller declines in the incidence of `staying-at-home', as measured using SafeGraph cell phone data. Second, we show that both occupations and types of workers predicted to be employed in low work-from-home jobs experienced greater declines in employment according to the March 2020 CPS. For example, non-college educated workers experienced a 4ppt larger decline in employment relative to those with a college degree.




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Immigration, Innovation, and Growth -- by Konrad B. Burchardi, Thomas Chaney, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Lisa Tarquinio, Stephen J. Terry

We show a causal impact of immigration on innovation and dynamism in US counties. To identify the causal impact of immigration, we use 130 years of detailed data on migrations from foreign countries to US counties to isolate quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties that results purely from the interaction of two historical forces: (i) changes over time in the relative attractiveness of different destinations within the US to the average migrant arriving at the time and (ii) the staggered timing of the arrival of migrants from different origin countries. We then use this plausibly exogenous variation in ancestry composition to predict the total number of migrants flowing into each US county in recent decades. We show four main results. First, immigration has a positive impact on innovation, measured by the patenting of local firms. Second, immigration has a positive impact on measures of local economic dynamism. Third, the positive impact of immigration on innovation percolates over space, but spatial spillovers quickly die out with distance. Fourth, the impact of immigration on innovation is stronger for more educated migrants.




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Woman struck and killed by hit-and-run driver in Brooklyn

The victim, believed to be in her 40s, was hit at the intersection of Atlantic Ave. and Pennsylvania Ave. in East New York about 4:30 a.m., cops said.




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Off-duty FDNY firefighter busted for DWI after found sleeping in parked car

Police discovered firefighter Lenzell Ross, 28, snoozing in his parked Tesla on the side of the Belt Parkway near Shore Parkway in Lindenwood about 2:30 a.m., authorities said.




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Brooklyn father who stabbed 2-year-old son in temple with comb charged with attempted murder

Jahvier Perez, 26, faces attempted murder, assault and child endangerment charges in the grisly Saturday morning attack, which may have left the two-year-old brain-damaged, police sources said.




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NYPD tow truck driver’s death in Brooklyn crash blamed on medical problem

The on-duty driver was heading south on Flatbush Ave. near Avenue R in Marine Park around 6 p.m. when he lost control of his truck, said police.




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Defense lawyer, in closing arguments for 2016 slaying of beloved Brooklyn pizzeria owner, insists prosecutors failed to prove their case

Attorney Javier Solano, in his final jury address Friday, insisted there was a “piece that didn’t fit” in the prosecution’s presentation against murder suspect Andres Fernandez in the June 30, 2016, shooting of Louis Barbati.




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Off-duty NYPD cop charged in fatal two-car Brooklyn crash; second driver flees scene

A driver abandoned his wrecked vehicle and left one of his passengers to die after a drunken off-duty cop in a muscle car t-boned his vehicle in Brooklyn early Sunday, police said. NYPD Officer Rohan Shaw was driving a white 2019 Nissan GT-R, zooming east on Foster Ave. just before 5 a.m., when a black 2016 Mazda 6 rolled through a stop sign on E. 55th St. and right into the cop’s path, police said.




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‘She was a pleasure to be around... you never expect this:' distraught dad grieves for daughter, killed by off-duty NYPD cop in car wreck

Instead of waking up to wish his daughter the best on her 23rd birthday, Collin Dixon got the phone call every parent dreads.




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South Brooklynites are fed up with spotty R and D train service: report

The survey of more than 700 people in Sen. Andrew Gounardes’ district — which stretches from Bay Ridge to Manhattan Beach — found that half of those who take the subway to work need to transfer at least once during their commutes.




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SEE IT: Home invader with knife walks through sleeping man’s home in Brooklyn

Creepy video of an intruder with a knife roaming through a sleeping man’s kitchen in Brooklyn was released by police Sunday night.




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Suspect with knife captured on video in sleeping man’s home may have also slipped into Brooklyn building: police

Cops are looking into the possibility a man who stalked through a Brooklyn home with a knife may have trespassed through another nearby location the night before.




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Brooklyn teen accused of swiping more than $1 million from dozens of victims in cryptocurrency scam

Yousef Selassie, 19, pleaded not guilty to first-degree grand larceny, identity theft and other charges at his Manhattan Supreme Court appearance for the lucrative scheme that operated from January through May this past year.




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Angry customer broke glass door at Junior’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, then fled in BMW: police

An angry man broke a glass door at Junior’s restaurant in Brooklyn before fleeing in a BMW, police said Wednesday.