The German cabinet on Monday agreed to an unprecedented aid package to prop up the country's economy as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold. Parliament is set to approve the package later this week.

With the wave of coronavirus infections washing over Europe, countries have turned inward to protect themselves. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has struggled to define the EU's role in the crisis as border checks have been reintroduced across the Continent.

While Spain continues to battle a dire coronavirus outbreak, the situation is vastly better in neighboring Portugal. But why?

In the fight against COVID-19, doctors and health workers are testing drugs and treatments whose efficacy has been proven against other illnesses. We take a look at the most prominent ones and the early findings.

Banks usually hold large amounts of domestic public debt which makes them vulnerable to their own sovereign’s default risk. At the same time, governments often resort to costly public bailouts when their domestic banking sector is in trouble. We investigate how the interbank network structure and the distribution of sovereign debt holdings jointly affect the optimal bailout policy in the presence of this "doom loop". Rescuing banks with high domestic sovereign exposure is optimal if these banks are sufficiently central in the network, even though that requires larger bailout expenditures than rescuing low-exposure banks. Our findings imply that highly central banks can use exposure to their own government as a strategic tool to increase the likelihood of being bailed out. Our model thus illustrates how the "doom loop" exacerbates the "too interconnected to fail" problem in banking.

We explore whether minimum wage increases result in substitution from lower-skilled to slightly higher-skilled labor. Using 2011-2016 American Community Survey data (ACS), we show that workers employed in low-wage occupations are older and more likely to have a high school diploma following recent statutory minimum wage increases. To better understand the role of firms, we examine the Burning Glass vacancy data. We find increases in a high school diploma requirement following minimum wage hikes, consistent with our ACS evidence on stocks of employed workers. We see substantial adjustments to requirements both within and across firms.

How should the design of incentives vary with agent time preferences? We develop two predictions. First, “bundling” the payment function over time – specifically by making the payment for future effort increase in current effort – is more effective if individuals are impatient over effort. Second, increasing the frequency of payment is more effective if individuals are impatient over payment. We test the efficacy of time-bundling and payment frequency, and their interactions with impatience, using a randomized evaluation of an incentive program for exercise among diabetics in India. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, bundling payments over time meaningfully increases effort among the impatient relative to the patient. In contrast, increasing payment frequency has limited efficacy, suggesting limited impatience over payments. On average, incentives increase daily steps by 1,266 (13 minutes of brisk walking) and improve health.

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education historically and still cater to large student populations worldwide. This paper examines how Indonesia’s long-standing Islamic school system responded to the construction of 61,000 public elementary schools in the mid-1970s. The policy was designed in part to foster nation building and to curb religious influence in society. We are the first to study the market response to these ideological objectives. Using novel data on Islamic school construction and curriculum, we identify both short-run effects on exposed cohorts as well as dynamic, long-run effects on education markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased on net as Islamic secondary schools absorbed the increased demand for continued education. The Islamic sector not only entered new markets to compete with the state but also increased religious curriculum at newly created schools. Our results suggest that the Islamic sector response increased religiosity at the expense of a secular national identity. Overall, this ideological competition in education undermined the nation-building impacts of mass schooling.

In an interview, Arne Schönbohm, 49, the head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, discusses the potential danger posed by Huawei, why he thinks it is "manageable" and the general state of IT threats in Germany.

Greed, envy, poor leadership and a poisonous internal culture: New York Times journalist David Enrich has written a book about Deutsche Bank that also sheds light on the financial institution's relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Just as Volkswagen was undergoing a radical restructuring to focus on e-mobility and driverless cars, the company has announced it is shutting down factories across Europe due to the coronavirus. There is hope in China, however.

Fox News pundit mocks 'experts,' encourages Americans to get out there and 'have some courage'

A California dad allegedly tossed his baby daughter off a “steep cliff” to her death after he stabbed the child’s mom and a bystander who tried to help, relatives and police said.

Gregory McMichael, 64, and his 34-year-old son Travis have been charged with murdering Arbery.

Conservative firebrand Dennis Prager has taken a break from pushing hydroxychloroquine and calling lockdowns “the greatest mistake” in history to rail against the loss of racist language.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

The Government is to provide a State guaranteed refund credit note for package holidays booked through Irish travel agents and tour operators in effort to help the industry during Covid-19 crisis.

By the time in 2015 when prosecutors indicted Chris Christie flunkies Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni for shutting down Fort Lee’s George Washington Bridge lanes for four days in 2013 to punish the mayor for failing to endorse the big man in Trenton’s reelection, the two sick sycophants had long lost their stupid sinecures in the State House and Port Authority. And Christie had already rightly lost the trust of Jerseyans for building the hothouse in which the lichens could grow.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

Emergency department visits are costly to providers and to patients. We use the Flint water crisis to test if an increase in office visits reduced avoidable emergency room visits. In September 2015, the city of Flint issued a lead advisory to its residents, alerting them of increased lead levels in their drinking water, resulting from the switch in water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Using Medicaid claims for 2013-2016, we find that this information shock increased the share of enrollees who had lead tests performed by 1.7 percentage points. Additionally, it increased office visits immediately following the information shock and led to a reduction of 4.9 preventable, non-emergent, and primary-care-treatable emergency room visits per 1000 eligible children (8.2%). This decrease is present in shifts from emergency room visits to office visits across several common conditions. Our analysis suggest that children were more likely to receive care from the same clinic following lead tests and that establishing care reduced the likelihood parents would take their children to emergency rooms for conditions treatable in an office setting. Our results are potentially applicable to any situation in which individuals are induced to seek more care in an office visit setting.

Lysacek, originally from Naperville, took a loss on the two-bedroom condo.

After Hurricane Dorian savaged the northern islands of the Bahamas, damaged properties loom as a target for real estate speculators.

A Los Angeles real estate agent was shoved backwards off a stairway and pinned to the ground by an unknown open house visitor who flashed a chilling smile at a security camera seconds earlier.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Former Manchester United and England defender Rio Ferdinand believes there is no viable resolution to the resumption of the 2019-20 season that will satisfy all 20 Premier League clubs.

European soccer leagues got a glimpse of what the future might hold after football finally returned with the start of the South Korean K-League on Friday.

The lack of reliable electricity in the developing world is widely viewed by policymakers as a major constraint on firm productivity. Yet most empirical studies find modest short-run effects of power outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-run general equilibrium effects of power outages on productivity. The model captures the key features of how firms acquire electricity in the developing world, in particular the rationing of grid electricity and the possibility of self-generated electricity at higher cost. Power outages lower productivity in the model by creating idle resources, by depressing the scale of incumbent firms and by reducing entry of new firms. Consistent with the empirical literature, the model predicts that the short-run partial-equilibrium effects of eliminating outages are small. However, the long-run general-equilibrium effects are many times larger, supporting the view that eliminating outages is an important development objective.

Aaron Weinreb, a 48-year-old OB-GYN, has been in home detention on $1.5 million bail since his arrest in October on charges he used the gay dating app Grindr to connect with an underage boy for sex.Because they’ve found a second victim, prosecutors wantED Weinreb jailed while he awaits trial.

Judge Jack Weinstein on Monday moved to inactive status, closing out a 53-year career. A highlight of his law career was working with Thurgood Marshall on the legal arguments that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was illegal. He was named a federal judge in 1967, and on his retirement was the last appointee of President Lyndon Johnson still on the bench.

Marvina Robinson was inspired to create Stuyvesant Champagne, named after Bedford-Stuyvesant where she grew up, while drawing up plans for a champagne bar set to launch in the neighborhood later this year.

Ruthie Ann Miles, a Tony winner who is now a regular on the CBS series “All Rise,” shared the happy news on Instagram.

The beloved 49-year-old priest, born in Mexico City, passed away Friday evening at the Wyckoff Medical Center in Brooklyn, the diocese said. Father Jorge, as he was known to worshippers, served as the diocesan coordinator of the ministry for Mexican-Americans among his other duties.

Two Brooklyn nail salon workers who pummeled a customer with brooms in a viral video had assault charges against them dismissed at trial – and a defense attorney says they were victims of a mob mentality fueled by elected officials.

Outraged community leaders joined staffers Tuesday outside the Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, where demonstrators complained as many as 10 bodies were stored in an unrefrigerated fourth floor dementia unit where the dead reside among the living — and ailing residents are reportedly free to wander.

Staff at New York City’s two federal jails, defense attorneys and inmates interviewed by the Daily News say the official numbers of COVID-19 cases obscure the magnitude of the crisis behind bars.

Federal prosecutors filed the motion in Brooklyn Federal Court in the case against the “Welcome to the Party” rapper, Bashar Jackson, 20, who was shot dead in Los Angeles in a Hollywood Hills home invasion in February.