Liberty Health Sciences Announces Expansion of its Cannabis Brand Portfolio – Yahoo Finance

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Liberty's portfolio of premium products include Clarity Brands, Papa's Herb, Mary's Medicinal, G Pen, PAX, Lemon and Grass, Liberty Health Sciences, Zentient and Pretty Pistil

TORONTO, April 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Liberty Health Sciences Inc. (CSE: LHS) (OTCQX: LHSIF) http://www.libertyhealthsciences.com("Liberty" or the "Company"), a provider of high quality cannabis,announced today the expansion to its award-winning brand portfolio of premium products that are available at all of its locations in Florida. Today Liberty launched its Liberty Health Sciences Shake brand to join its expanded and current portfolio that includes innovative cannabis products and formats, including premium flower, CBD, topicals, tinctures, extract and vape products.

Liberty Health Sciences Inc. (CNW Group/Liberty Health Sciences Inc.)

Liberty recently introduced Clarity Brands http://www.claritybrands.lifethat includes oil derived products on cartridges and G Pen pods and is available in all of its stores.

The Company has also recently introduced the all-new Papa's Herb classic 510 Cartridge pen to its Papa's Herb line up that has proven to be a popular new item in all of the dispensaries. In addition, Liberty has extended its popular offering of G Pen devices to include Roam, Elite, Connect, Gio, Pro, and Nova.

"We are always looking for ways to enhance our product offerings and find ways to better serve our patient's needs," said Victor Mancebo, Chief Executive Officer of Liberty. "Our passion and determination is to provide accessibility of best in class products at valued prices, especially during these challenging times. We are excited to grow our offering and provide the right cannabis derived medical options at a time when people need affordable ways to maintain their wellness and continue to practice social distancing."

Products under the Liberty umbrella include:

Clarity Brands: Clarity Brands promotes the clarification of body and soul through the use of cannabis products that are lab tested and organically and locally farm grown.

Zentient: Zentient represents a line of premium CBD and THC balanced products including topicals, vapes, and oral solutions made from a proprietary formula of ultra-high-quality cannabinoids.

Pretty Pistil: Pretty Pistil is a powerful (feminine house brand) that brings a beautifully balanced approach to high quality cannabis experiences for those with sophisticated tastes and a rebellious spirit.

Papa's Herb:Papa's Herb specializes in providing value products to the market. The brand highly prioritizes and is hyper-focused on their customers first. They offer quality Flower products at an always accessible price-point for all to enjoy.

Mary's Medicinal:Best known as the developer and exclusive distributor of the award-winning Transdermal Cannabis Patch, Mary's is transforming how people view and utilize cannabis; developing products that maximize the benefits of cannabinoids, terpenes, and other plant nutrients.

G Pen: Grenco Science, the maker of the G Pen Gio, Pro, Connect, Elite and Nova, is a leader in engineering advanced cannabis vaporizers, known for its aesthetics, portability, functionality, and user experience.

PAX: PAX is a leader in the design and development of premium cannabis vaporization technologies and devices.

Lemon and Grass: Lemon and Grass combines nature, science, and tech to formulate, and deliver, the highest standard of product. We strive for consistency to ensure that each and every time you use Lemon and Grass products, the results are reliable.

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Visit Liberty's social media channels for further details:

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/LibertyHealthSciences Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/libertyhealthsciences/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LibertyHSInc #LiveFree

Patients may place an order online at: http://www.libertyhealthsciences.comfor in-store pick-up or free delivery.

About Liberty Health Sciences Inc.Liberty is the cannabis provider committed to providing a trusted, high quality cannabis experience based on our genuine care for all cannabis users and a focus on operational excellence from seed to sale. Liberty's measured approach to expansion opportunities is focused on maximizing returns to shareholders, while keeping consumers' well-being at the forefront of what we do. For more information, please visit: http://www.libertyhealthsciences.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Any statements that are contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "may", "should", "anticipate", "expect", "believe", "plan", "intend" or the negative of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, expectations related to the Company's production capabilities, expectations concerning the receipt of all necessary approvals from the Florida Department of Health, expectations concerning the opening of new dispensaries and the expansion of its greenhouse space, and the Company's future expansion and growth strategies. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks, including, without limitation, risks associated with general economic conditions; adverse industry events; marketing costs; loss of markets; future legislative and regulatory developments involving medical marijuana; inability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources, and/or inability to access sufficient capital on favorable terms; the medical marijuana industry in the United States generally, income tax and regulatory matters; the ability of Liberty to implement its business strategies; competition; crop failure; currency and interest rate fluctuations and other risks. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

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Liberty Health Sciences Announces Expansion of its Cannabis Brand Portfolio - Yahoo Finance

Deja Gaston and Alex Murphy: Coronavirus protesters demand ‘liberty’ at the expense of the rest of us – Salt Lake Tribune

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It was troubling to see the Utah Business Revival protest that took place at Washington Square in Salt Lake City last weekend.

It was troubling because this protest seems to have emboldened reactionary, anti-science fringe movements even as health experts continue to show the need for social distancing measures.

It was also troubling because four months ago at the same location, 100 police officers in riot gear dismantled a demonstration featuring a diverse coalition of working-class activists and homeless people. Those demonstrators made demands for better conditions for the homeless. The protest was nonviolent and featured free first aid, daily meals and winter supplies for those in need. Yet the Salt Lake City Police Department suppressed it as if it were an armed occupation.

Saturdays event featured a speaker who actually once led an armed occupation Ammon Bundy. Also of note is that the event, which brought over 1,000 people into one of the most infected zip codes in the state, was organized by a former Salt Lake City Police Department officer who was placed on leave for anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Despite these details, as well as a sea of Dont Tread on Me flags wielded by a nearly all-white audience, the event was tread on by no one. The police had almost no presence at the event at all, much less a suppressive one.

Highlighting the disparity in police response is not to call for more aggressive policing. Instead, it points out that, as much as they say otherwise, the police do take sides. They are a plainly political organization that upholds racism and the dominance of property owners.

What was particularly troubling about Saturdays event were the demands made under the guise of individual liberty. Business owners demanded that the county allow them to force their employees back to work before it is safe. Landlords demanded that the state allow them to aggressively collect rent again. Middle-class suburbanites demanded that service workers be able to start serving them again. These are the demands of a plummeting middle class that is trying to keep up with an impossibly rich, exploitative class at the expense of everyones health.

Instead, working people must make demands that acknowledge the needs of those who are most at risk. Essential workers, who are largely low-income and nonwhite, dont need more businesses to open back up. What we need to fight the virus is sick pay, 100% unemployment insurance, a moratorium on rents and mortgages, a release of huge numbers of incarcerated people to prevent virus hot spots, secure housing for all and free COVID-19 testing and health care.

Rather than demand liberty for the individual, it is time to fight for liberation of the many including communities of color, unsheltered people, older Americans, incarcerated people, students and all poor and working-class people.

Deja Gaston and Alex Murphy are Utah community organizers and members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

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Deja Gaston and Alex Murphy: Coronavirus protesters demand 'liberty' at the expense of the rest of us - Salt Lake Tribune

$2.11 $2.37: is It Good Range to Buy Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (LTRPA)? – The News Heater

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Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:LTRPA) went up by 4.19% from its latest closing price when compared to the 1-year high value of $15.85 and move down -607.59%, while LTRPA stocks collected -6.67% of loss with the last five trading sessions. Barron's reported on 02/20/19 that 2 Deal Opportunities as John Malone Untangles His Empire

Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: LTRPA) The 36 Months beta value for LTRPA stocks is at 2.31, while of the analysts out of 0 who provided ratings for Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. stocks as a buy while as overweight, rated it as hold and as sell. The average price we get from analysts is $8.00 which is $5.76 above current price. LTRPA currently has a short float of 2.35% and public float of 72.14M with average trading volume of 2.08M shares.

LTRPA stocks went down by -6.67% for the week, with the monthly jump of 14.29% and a quarterly performance of -68.58%, while its annual performance rate touched -84.69%. The simple moving average for the period of the last 20 days is 11.06% for LTRPA stocks with the simple moving average of -69.34% for the last 200 days.

Many brokerage firms have already submitted their reports for LTRPA stocks, with Guggenheim repeating the rating for LTRPA shares by setting it to Neutral. The predicted price for LTRPA socks in the upcoming period according to Guggenheim is $160 based on the research report published on June 13, 2019.

Evercore ISI, on the other hand, stated in their research note that they expect to see LTRPA stock at the price of $12.50. The rating they have provided for LTRPA stocks is In-line according to the report published on October 16, 2018.

Guggenheim gave Sell rating to LTRPA stocks, setting the target price at $12.50 in the report published on May 25, 2018.

After a stumble in the market that brought LTRPA to its low price for the period of the last 52 weeks, Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. was unable to take a rebound, for now settling with -85.87% of loss for the given period.

The stock volatility was left at 20.77%, however, within the period of a single month, the volatility rate increased by 13.11%, while the shares sank at the distance of -0.44% for the moving average in the last 20 days. In oppose to the moving average for the last 50 days, trading by -66.32% lower at the present time.

In the course of the last 5 trading sessions, LTRPA went down by -6.67%, which changed the moving average for the period of 200 days to the total of -81.70% of losses for the stock in comparison to the 20-day moving average settled at $2.02. In addition, Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. saw -69.52% in overturn over the period of a single year with a tendency to cut further losses.

Reports are indicating that there were more than several insider trading activities at Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (LTRPA), starting from MAFFEI GREGORY B, who bought 15,408 shares at the price of $10.38 back on Sep 13. After this action, Rushing now owns 2,785,581 shares of Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc., valued at $160,004 with the latest closing price.

The current profitability levels are settled at +8.27 for the present operating margin and +64.29 for gross margin. The net margin for Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. stands at -1.41. Total capital return value is set at 3.21, while invested capital returns managed to touch -3.10. Equity return holds the value -6.80%, with -0.40% for asset returns.

Based on Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (LTRPA), the companys capital structure generated 162.50 points for debt to equity in total, while total debt to capital is set at the value of 61.90. Total debt to assets is settled at the value of 10.86 with long-term debt to equity ratio rests at 5.86 and long-term debt to capital is 154.69.

The value for Enterprise to Sales is 0.23 with debt to enterprise value settled at 0.14. The receivables turnover for Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. is 7.90 with the total asset turnover at the value of 0.31. The liquidity ratio also appears to be rather interesting for investors as it stands at 1.27.

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$2.11 $2.37: is It Good Range to Buy Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, Inc. (LTRPA)? - The News Heater

Lansdales Liberty Bell Trail Named Region Project Of The Year – Montgomeryville, PA Patch

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LANSDALE, PA A trail in Lansdale has received recognition for excellence by the American Society of Highway Engineers, which cited the project's complexity as well as its significance to the area economy and long term master plan.

The Liberty Bell Trail, the latest phase of which was completed in Oct. 2019, has been named the Delaware Valley 2019 Project of the Year in the under $10 million category, Pennoni, an engineering firm which assisted on the project, announced.

"This project met and exceeded the Borough's goals and objectives. From start to finish, this project was a true collaboration between all parties and I applaud the entire project team for their efforts in not only making this project a success but also for their continued commitment to the future of Lansdale," John Ernst, Lansdale's borough manager, said in a statement.

The 10-foot-wide multi-use trail which runs through the heart of downtown Lansdale was no easy task to perfect. Lansdale and Montgomery County worked closed with SEPTA, Pennoni, PennDOT, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, and the Pennsylvania Northeastern Railroad on various aspects of the project.

Some of the features noted by the award's organizers include the prefabricated bridge which crosses a large drainage channel next to the SEPTA tracks, as well as carefully planned at-grade rail crossings.

The trail not only increases walkability and recreation access while serving as a boon to the borough's economy, but it's also a "significant piece" of a larger puzzle in regional trails.

The project has been planned and been in varying stages of development for years. Regional developers foresee that the trail could ultimately run the length of the Liberty Bell Trolley Line between Norristown and Quakertown, which would link Lansdale to both the Schuylkill River Trail and Upper Bucks Rail Trail. Feasibility studies for further extensions have been completed or are underway.

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Lansdales Liberty Bell Trail Named Region Project Of The Year - Montgomeryville, PA Patch

The Debate Between Liberty-Minded and Common-Good Conservatives Is Nothing New – National Review

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National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.Its been raging since Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley duked it out on Firing Line five decades ago.

Between Sohrab Ahmaris denunciations of David Frenchism, Adrian Vermeules murkily authoritarian common-good constitutionalism, and Patrick Deneens book-long broadside against the liberal tradition, much ink has been spilled about the emergent ideological fissures within American conservatism. But such debates are hardly new. In fact, theyve been going on for at least five decades.

All the way back in 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. published a little book called Gratitude. Subtitled Reflections On What We Owe To Our Country, the book was Buckleys attempt to propose a Switzerland-style national-service program for Americas youth, born out of his concern that the younger generation lacked responsibility and patriotism. No doubt fully aware of the controversy that his proposal would ignite among many of his fellow travelers on the political right, Buckley wrote:

The conviction of some conservatives that the state cant have a genuine, non-predatory interest in the cultivation of virtue strikes me as an anarchical accretion in modern conservative thought, something that grew from too humorless a reading of such spirited individualists as Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken. . . . National service, if transformed merely into a state bureaucracy with huge powers of intimidation, is not only to be avoided, but to be fought. But we can open our minds to something other than a statist program, or one that lodges in the state the kind of power conservatives have been taught, at great historical expense, to husband for social uses.

So conscious was Buckley of the ire that his argument would provoke from the libertarian faction of the conservative coalition, he wrote an entire chapter entitled Anticipating the Libertarian Argument. Despite his support for free markets, he begrudgingly acknowledged the limitations of economic liberty. The deep wellsprings of patriotism are fed by other forces, and these do not leave fingerprints in the market, he wrote. They must be investigated by the use of entirely different instruments.

This is similar to a view that many of the more market-skeptical Burkean traditionalists have expressed in contemporary intra-conservative debates: the idea that the state has a vested interest in protecting and even proactively nurturing our civic institutions, placing some aspects of our cultural inheritance beyond the reach of the creative destruction that is inherent to any dynamic liberal society. Its a view that stems from a particular concern for what Buckley called connections between the individual and the community beyond those that relate either to the state or to the marketplace.

As Buckley expected, many prominent libertarians remained unconvinced by his ambitious case for a national-service program. Milton Friedman, the great padrino of classical liberalism and an old friend of Buckleys, was particularly upset by the proposal. In a now-famous Firing Line debate between the two, Friedman thundered: I am absolutely astounded that you, of all people, use the English language the way that you use it. Theres nothing voluntary about your program. . . . My God, whats happened to you?

Though it only lasted for about 25 minutes, the BuckleyFriedman debate crystallized the tug of war between common-good and liberty-minded conservatives that continues to this day. Friedman was the strident individualist, deeply suspicious of central planning and instinctually indignant at the prospect of expanding coercive state power. He denounced Buckleys organismic, collectivist philosophy, and, striking a characteristically Lockean tone, argued that our society is a collection of individuals who join together to achieve their common purposes, and the state is simply a mechanism through which they achieve their common purposes. Buckley, by contrast, argued that a decline in the collective virtue and patriotic duty of a people was a serious problem that could not be solved by private action alone. He shot back at Friedman that society is not a meaningless term, but rather a vehicle which will continue to protect your sons and mine, and that we have therefore an interest in the shape of.

This should all sound familiar to students of the contemporary rights internecine wars. Buckleys proposal of a national-service program that would act as a government-run promoter of good character was anathema to Friedman, who argued that the whole system of private enterprise itself functions as voluntary national service, using the terms correctly. A similar debate is occurring in our current moment: Some contemporary conservative thinkers have argued that, in our increasingly atomized and individualistic culture, the state must be more aggressive in promoting virtue, order, and the common good. Others, echoing Friedman, counter that liberty is the common good, at least insofar as the role of government is concerned.

For conservatives in both 1968 and today, the fundamental question remains the same: In a free society, how far should the state go in exercising its coercive powers to ensure positive outcomes for society? I object to it strenuously, Friedman said of such state action. I think its one of the typical cases of some people who think they know whats good for other people. Buckley, meanwhile, argued that some state action is justified by the necessity for virtuous citizenry.

It is worth noting, of course, that the two men agreed on the vast majority of political issues. Both understood themselves as advocating for freedom, republican democracy, a flourishing civil society, and a virtuous, self-governing people. The fiery nature of their debate was largely borne out of the fact that they understood themselves as being on the same side, and were thus upset at what they saw as the others betrayal of a shared vision.

Now more than ever, conservatives must take care to keep sight of what we share, however many contentious feuds may erupt over what we dont. Buckley and Friedman remain a great model of how to maintain a persistently deep friendship despite vehement disagreements. In the closing seconds of their storied 1968 debate, the two intellectual giants even flashed sheepish grins at each other. When the fight was over, there was a palpable exhalation throughout the television studio though they had been energetic rivals mere minutes before, the two men were companions once again. The lights began to dim, and the Firing Line music signaled the end of another episode.

Okay, Buckley smiled at Friedman. Ill see you in Alta, Milton.

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The Debate Between Liberty-Minded and Common-Good Conservatives Is Nothing New - National Review

Connecting Liberty Lake ready to help: Citys volunteers wait for calls from those in need – The Spokesman-Review

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When schools closed and the shut down order began, the city of Liberty Lake swung into action. It activated a new Facebook group called Connecting Liberty Lake and recruited volunteers to sign up to help their neighbors with things like grocery deliveries.

Our goal is to connect people who need help with people who need assistance, said city administrator Katy Allen. We have a lot of volunteers signing up on Facebook.

Its a tried-and-true method for the city. A similar group called the Snow Angels matches volunteers with residents who need help shoveling the snow off sidewalks and driveways. Another group rakes leaves in the fall and still another does spring yard work. Weve used that same platform, Allen said.

It seems like every season we have something, said Operations and Maintenance Director Jennifer Camp.

When the city was under a boil-water order earlier this week it was able to martial volunteers who had signed up to shovel snow and rake leaves to bring bottled water to those who couldnt pick it up. It was very successful during the boil-water advisory, she said.

The Connecting Liberty Lake group has been popular since it began a month ago. There are 100 people signed up, Camp said.

But for some reason, no one has contacted the city to ask for help. Camp said theyre not sure if its because people dont know about it or if people are getting help in other ways.

Im not sure what it is, she said. This is different than our other efforts.

Camp said she has seen people seeking and receiving help on other community Facebook pages, including a mother who couldnt leave the house and needed diapers. Someone in the community volunteered to go to the store and get her some.

What Ive seen on the community pages is a lot of people helping each other out, she said. People are looking out for each other.

People can ask for whatever help they need, and the city will match them with a volunteer, Camp said. It could be anything from getting groceries to yard work.

Its really between the citizen asking for what they need and what a volunteer is willing to do, she said. The tasks could be endless, really. We just facilitate the coordination between the volunteer and the citizen in need.

Those who are in need of help can contact the city by calling (509) 755-6727 or sending an email to onlineinquiry@libertylakewa.gov. The city will then reach out to a volunteer who can help.

Meanwhile, the people who signed up to volunteer will go on the citys list of people willing to help in a time of need.

You can never have too many, Camp said. Once we create a database of volunteers, we can tap them for other things.

Thats something the city has already done. The snow angel and leaf-raking volunteers not only helped during the boil-water advisory, but the city also used the list to recruit volunteers to help set up the Winter Glow Christmas lighting event. They had so many people respond that they had to tell people to stop coming.

Allen said its clear people in Liberty Lake want to help each other.

If we had a natural disaster, I bet we could get 100 volunteers without trying, she said.

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Connecting Liberty Lake ready to help: Citys volunteers wait for calls from those in need - The Spokesman-Review

Rallying for the ‘freedom and liberty to work’ – Martha’s Vineyard Times

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A group of protestors gathered at Five Corners on a cold and windy afternoon Wednesday for the freedom and liberty to work rally holding American flags and signs saying I want to buy local and Thank you hospital.

The number of protestors hovered around 10 as people came and stood peacefully in support of the rally to reopen businesses.

Kenny MacDonald, who helped organize the rally with Jamie and Robbie Douglas before they pulled out of the event and decided not to attend, ended up joining the protest, holding a sign that said, All jobs are essential. The Douglas brothers are part of the family that owns the Black Dog restaurant, cafe, and retail shops, which faced a backlash from the event.

The rally comes on the heels of similar events across the country in Michigan, Ohio, and a smaller event at the Bourne Rotary Sunday, urging the government to end stay-at-home orders and business closures.

Chris DeMello, a landscaper, said it was important for people to be safe but equally as important for them to keep working.

We have to try and find that sweet spot of keeping people safe, DeMello said. The economy cant stay down forever.

Jason Cray, an Oak Bluffs carpenter who was wearing a Trump hat, held a large American flag and a sign saying liberty, freedom, work, socialism sucks!

Cray, who is also an Iraq war veteran, said he didnt want anyone to be sick, but the economy could be hurt.

Weve got to fight for peoples right to feed their families, he said. You shut down an economy its economic suicide.

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Rallying for the 'freedom and liberty to work' - Martha's Vineyard Times

Is One Liberty Properties, Inc.’s (NYSE:OLP) ROE Of 6.4% Impressive? – Yahoo Finance

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One of the best investments we can make is in our own knowledge and skill set. With that in mind, this article will work through how we can use Return On Equity (ROE) to better understand a business. By way of learning-by-doing, we'll look at ROE to gain a better understanding of One Liberty Properties, Inc. (NYSE:OLP).

Return on equity or ROE is an important factor to be considered by a shareholder because it tells them how effectively their capital is being reinvested. In other words, it is a profitability ratio which measures the rate of return on the capital provided by the company's shareholders.

View our latest analysis for One Liberty Properties

The formula for return on equity is:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for One Liberty Properties is:

6.4% = US$19m US$292m (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2019).

The 'return' refers to a company's earnings over the last year. That means that for every $1 worth of shareholders' equity, the company generated $0.06 in profit.

Arguably the easiest way to assess company's ROE is to compare it with the average in its industry. However, this method is only useful as a rough check, because companies do differ quite a bit within the same industry classification. The image below shows that One Liberty Properties has an ROE that is roughly in line with the REITs industry average (5.8%).

NYSE:OLP Past Revenue and Net Income April 23rd 2020

So while the ROE is not exceptional, at least its acceptable. Although the ROE is similar to the industry, we should still perform further checks to see if the company's ROE is being boosted by high debt levels. If true, then it is more an indication of risk than the potential. To know the 5 risks we have identified for One Liberty Properties visit our risks dashboard for free.

Most companies need money -- from somewhere -- to grow their profits. That cash can come from issuing shares, retained earnings, or debt. In the case of the first and second options, the ROE will reflect this use of cash, for growth. In the latter case, the debt used for growth will improve returns, but won't affect the total equity. Thus the use of debt can improve ROE, albeit along with extra risk in the case of stormy weather, metaphorically speaking.

One Liberty Properties clearly uses a high amount of debt to boost returns, as it has a debt to equity ratio of 1.54. Its ROE is quite low, even with the use of significant debt; that's not a good result, in our opinion. Debt increases risk and reduces options for the company in the future, so you generally want to see some good returns from using it.

Return on equity is a useful indicator of the ability of a business to generate profits and return them to shareholders. Companies that can achieve high returns on equity without too much debt are generally of good quality. All else being equal, a higher ROE is better.

But when a business is high quality, the market often bids it up to a price that reflects this. The rate at which profits are likely to grow, relative to the expectations of profit growth reflected in the current price, must be considered, too. So you might want to check this FREE visualization of analyst forecasts for the company.

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Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.

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Is One Liberty Properties, Inc.'s (NYSE:OLP) ROE Of 6.4% Impressive? - Yahoo Finance

Yes, government can restrict your liberty to protect public health – Los Angeles Times

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Can the government restrict individual liberties to stop the spread of COVID-19? Its a question being raised by protesters and in lawsuits filed to contest government-imposed restrictions.

There have been very few Supreme Court cases involving the governments power to deal with the spread of communicable diseases. The most relevant decision for today was issued in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts in 1905. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a state law requiring compulsory vaccinations against smallpox. The court declared, Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.

The court explicitly rejected the claim that liberty under the Constitution includes the right of individuals to make decisions about their own health in instances where those decisions could endanger others. But the court also made clear that restrictions imposed by the government to control communicable diseases must have a real or substantial relation to protecting public health.

Under this standard, there is no doubt that quarantine, shelter in place, and closure requirements are constitutional as a way of stopping the spread of COVID-19, even though they restrict freedom.

Throughout American history, quarantine orders have been upheld as valid exercises of the police power possessed by state and local governments. Not long after the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia imposed a quarantine to stop the spread of yellow fever. In 1799, Congress, by statute, recognized the power of states to impose quarantines. In 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that a state, in the exercise of its police power, may establish quarantines against human beings, or animals, or plants. Most recently, in 2016, a federal district court in New Jersey upheld a quarantine order for a nurse who had returned from Africa after treating Ebola patients.

The power to quarantine is not unlimited, however, and courts should invalidate orders that do not have a real and substantial relation to public health. In 1900, for example, a federal district court declared unconstitutional a quarantine order in San Francisco to stop the spread of bubonic plague because it was clear that it is made to operate against the Chinese population only and was based on racism, not public health needs.

At this stage, after a week when COVID-19 was second only to heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States, courts unquestionably should uphold orders for quarantine, shelter in place, and closure of nonessential businesses. All are designed to stop the transmission of a highly communicable disease that, if left unchecked, could overwhelm the healthcare system.

These orders are constitutional even when they preclude people from assembling for religious worship. A number of lawsuits have been filed by those who wish to gather for religious services, saying they have a 1st Amendment right to gather. But the Supreme Court has been clear that there is no exception to general laws for religion. Moreover, if people gather in large groups for this or any other purpose there is the serious risk of spreading COVID-19.

But this does not mean that the government can do whatever it wants in the name of stopping the spread of a communicable disease. There is always a danger that government might use its power as an excuse for unnecessary restrictions on freedom. This has occurred during our current crisis in countries including Hungary, which canceled elections, and Thailand and Jordan, which have restricted speech critical of the government.

In the United States, a number of states have adopted regulations preventing abortions, including medically induced abortions that involve no surgical procedure at all. It is hard to see how such restrictions have a real and substantial relationship to stopping the spread of COVID-19 as opposed to attempts to use the crisis as a pretext for imposing additional limits on abortion.

And courts would probably look skeptically on banning a religious service if it involved people staying in their cars in a parking lot a drive-in service, as some churches have instituted. Such gatherings present no valid public health threat, since they do not involve interpersonal contact.

Still, most closure orders are clearly constitutional. The right to swing your fist stops at another persons nose. With coronavirus, your freedom stops when it endangers others by facilitating transmission of a highly communicable disease.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a contributing writer to Opinion.

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Yes, government can restrict your liberty to protect public health - Los Angeles Times

Liberty end up with 4 of top 12 picks after draft-night deals – ESPN

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Apr 17, 2020

Mechelle VoepelESPN.com

The New York Liberty were involved in two trades on WNBA draft night, both bringing them forwards.

The Liberty received No. 10 pick Jocelyn Willoughby from Phoenix in exchange for the contract of guard Shatori Walker-Kimbrough. New York also got the contract of forward Stephanie Talbot from Minnesota in a swap for Rice guard Erica Ogwumike, who was the No. 26 pick by the Liberty.

With the trades, the Liberty ended up with four of the top 12 selections from Friday's draft and six overall. They acquired Oregon's Sabrina Ionescu at No. 1, UConn's Megan Walker at No. 9, Willoughby at No. 10, Louisville's Jazmine Jones at No. 12, Louisville's Kylee Shook at No. 13 and Duke's Leaonna Odom at No. 15.

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Willoughby, a 6-foot wing from Virginia, averaged 19.2 points per game this season for the Cavaliers.

Walker-Kimbrough, a former Maryland standout, played for the defending WNBA champion Washington Mystics the past three seasons and had been traded to New York this week as part of the Tina Charles deal. Walker-Kimbrough now joins the Mercury; the 5-foot-9 guard averaged 6.7 points last year.

Ogwumike averaged 19.0 points this season for the Owls, and she joins older sisters Nneka (2012) and Chiney (2014) Ogwumike in being selected in the WNBA draft. Nneka and Chiney were No. 1 picks, and both now play for the Los Angeles Sparks.

Talbot is a 6-foot-2 forward from Australia who averaged 5.2 points last season for the Lynx.

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Liberty end up with 4 of top 12 picks after draft-night deals - ESPN

The Pandemic and the Global Economy – Dissent

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Developing countries face collapsing international trade, falling remittances, sharp reversals of capital flows, and currency depreciation. Only bold policiesdebt relief, international financing, planning, and morewill avert further catastrophe.

There are still many uncertainties about the COVID-19 pandemic: about the extent of its spread, its severity in different countries, the length of the outbreak, and whether an initial decline could be followed by a recurrence. But some things are already certain: we know that the economic impact of this pandemic is already immense, dwarfing anything that we have experienced in living memory. The current shock to the global economy is certainly much bigger than that of the 2008 global financial crisis, and is likely to be more severe than the Great Depression. Even the two world wars of the twentieth century, while they disrupted supply chains and devastated physical infrastructure and populations, did not involve the restrictions on mobility and economic activity that are in place in the majority of countries today. This is therefore an unprecedented global challenge and requires unprecedented responses.

This very severe economic impact largely stems not from the pandemic itself, but from measures that have been adopted across the world to contain it, which have ranged from relatively mild restrictions on mobility and public gatherings to complete lockdowns (and clampdowns) that have brought to a halt most economic activity. This has meant a simultaneous attack on demand and supply. During lockdowns, people (especially those without formal work contracts) are deprived of incomes and joblessness increases drastically, causing huge declines in consumption demand that will continue into the period after the lockdown is lifted. At the same time, production and distribution are halted for all but essential commodities and servicesand even for these sectors, supply is badly affected because of implementation issues and inadequate attention to the input-output linkages that enable production and distribution. Previous regional and global crises have not entailed this near-cessation of all economic activity. The deadly combination of collapses in both demand and supply is why this time is truly different and has to be dealt with differently.

World trade in both goods and services is already collapsing. The WTO expects trade to fall anywhere between 13 and 32 percent over 2020. But even these dismal projections could well be underestimates, because they implicitly rely on relatively rapid containment of the virus and the lifting of lockdown measures by late summer. Exports of goodsother than those deemed essentialhave effectively ceased; travel has declined to a tiny fraction of what it was, and tourism has also stopped for the time being; various other cross-border services that cannot be delivered electronically are contracting sharply. Trade prices have collapsed and will continue to decline. In the month leading up to March 20, 2020, primary commodity prices fell by 37 percent, with energy and industrial metals prices falling by 55 percent.

Within countries, economic activity is contracting at hitherto unimaginable rates, bringing about not only a dramatic immediate collapse but the seeds of future contraction as negative multiplier effects start playing out. In the United States alone, around 22 million people lost their jobs in four weeks, with GDP estimated to contract by 10 to 14 percent from April to June. Elsewhere the pattern is no different, probably worse, as most countries are facing multiple forces of economic decline. The IMF predicted on April 14 that global output will fall by 3 percent in 2020, and as much as 4.5 percent in per capita termsand this is based on the most optimistic projections.

These collapses in economic activity necessarily affect global finance, which is also in disarray. The classic point about financial markets being imperfect not only because of asymmetric but also incomplete information is being borne out in practice: these markets are all about time, and now we must painfully accept that no one can know the future, even a few months ahead. Financial bets and contracts made just a few months ago now appear completely implausible to sustain. Most debts are clearly unpayable; insurance claims will be so extreme as to wipe out most insurers; stock markets are collapsing as investors realize that none of the assumptions on which earlier investments were made are valid anymore. These negative forces together amount to humongous losses that could threaten the very viability of the global capitalist order (an order that was already struggling to show any dynamism over the past decade).

In an already very unequal world, this crisis already has and will continue to sharply increase global inequality. A large part of this is because of the very different policy responses in most developing countries (other than China, the origin of the pandemic, which has managed to contain its spread and revive economic activity relatively quickly) as compared to advanced economies. The sheer enormity of the crisis has apparently registered with policymakers in the developed world, who have (probably temporarily) abandoned all talk of fiscal austerity and suddenly appear to have no problem simply monetizing their government deficits. It is likely that the global financial system would have collapsed in the panic that arose in the third week of March without massive intervention by the major central banks of the developed worldnot just the U.S. Federal Reserve but the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and others.

The exorbitant privilege of the United States as the holder of the worlds reserve currency obviously gives it greater freedom to prop up its own economy. But other developed countries are also putting forward fairly large fiscal packages, from 5 percent of GDP in Germany to 20 percent in Japan, in addition to various other expansionary and stabilizing measures through their central banks.

By contrast, most developing countries have much less leeway to engage in such policies, and even those larger developing economies that could do so appear to be constrained by the fear of financial markets punishing them further. This is terrible: their economic challenges are already much greater than those in the developed world. Developing countriesmany of which have yet to experience the full force of the spread of the virushave been hit by a perfect storm of collapsing global trade, falling remittances, sharp reversals of capital flows, and currency depreciation. In just the month of March, capital flight from emerging market assets was an estimated $83 billion, and since January nearly $100 billion has flown outcompared to $26 billion after the 2008 financial crisis. Portfolio investment is down by at least 70 percent from January to March 2020, and spreads on emerging market bonds have risen sharply. Currencies of developing countries have mostly depreciated sharply, other than in China. The foreign exchange crunch is generating serious problems in servicing external debt, which is harder to do because of shrinking foreign exchange inflows and rising domestic costs for servicing them. By early April, eighty-five countries had approached the IMF for emergency assistance because of severe problems in meeting foreign currency payment obligations, and that number is likely to rise.

These external pressures, which are already together much greater than anything experienced during the Great Depression, have come to bear on economies that are already struggling with the terrible domestic economic consequences of their virus containment strategies. The burden of these processes has fallen massively upon informal workers and self-employed people, who are being deprived of their livelihoods and falling into poverty at very rapid rates. Seventy percent of workers in developing countries are informal and are unlikely to be paid at all during lockdowns in which they are forced to be inactive. Workers with formal contracts have also started losing their jobs. The International Labour Organization estimated in early April that more than four out of every five workers in the world are facing the adverse impacts of the pandemic and associated policy responses, and most of them reside in the developing world. Women workers are more likely to be disproportionately adversely affected: more likely to lose jobs and experience major pay cuts, more likely to be rationed out of labor markets when jobs do become available, more likely to suffer during lockdowns because of enhanced possibilities of domestic abuse, and more likely to suffer from inadequate nutrition in a time of household food shortages.

In many countries, livelihood losses are associated with dramatic increases in the extent of absolute poverty and growing hunger, even among those previously not classified as poor. Indeed, the re-emergence of hunger on a global scale is likely to be an unfortunate legacy of the pandemic and the containment measures that resulted. To add to all of this depressing news, most states in developing countries will not be able to indulge in the necessary levels of deficit financing (by borrowing from central banks) to enable the required increases in public expenditure, because of foreign exchange constraints and greater surveillance of financial markets over their deficits.

This, unfortunately, is just the beginning. What of the aftermath, when the pandemic is brought under control? It bears reiterating that after a seismic shock of this magnitude, economies across the world will not simply be able to carry on as before, picking up where they had left off before this crisis. Over the coming year, many things are likely to change, including global reorganization of trade and capital flows. International trade will remain subdued for a while. Most commodity prices will also remain low, because global demand will take some time to pick up. This will affect commodity exporters revenues, but it need not provide much advantage for commodity importers because of the overall deflationary pressures stemming from depressed demand.

On the other hand, the breaking of supply chains could well lead to specific shortages, including of some essential items, generating cost-push inflation especially in developing countries. Cross-border capital flows will be volatile and unstable, and most developing countries will struggle to attract sufficient secure capital on terms that would make it beneficial to add to domestic savings and meet trade financing costs. The steep currency depreciations that have already occurred are unlikely to get completely reversed and could even accelerate further, depending upon what strategies are pursued in both developed and developing countries. These falling currency values, higher margins on interest paid, and rising yields on bonds will all continue to make debt servicing a massive problem. Indeed, most developing country debt will be simply unpayable.

In addition to problems in domestic banks and non-bank lenders because of likely large-scale defaults, there will be massive problems in insurance markets, with the failure of some insurance companies and rising premiums that could be a disincentive for most medium and small enterprises to be insured at all. Travel and tourism revenues will also be significantly curtailed over the medium term, as the earlier confidence underlying such travel will have eroded. Similarly, many migrants will have lost employment. Demand for foreign labor is likely to decline in many host countries, so remittances will also decline. All of this will continue to put pressure on government finances especially (but not only) in the developing world.

This litany of horrors is well within the realm of the possible. The saving grace is that these outcomes are not inevitable: they depend crucially on policy responses. The terrible consequences described above are predicated on international institutions and national governments not taking the measures that could ameliorate the situation. There are both national and global policies that could help, but they must be implemented quickly, before the crisis generates even more humanitarian catastrophe. It is essential to ensure that the policy responses do not (as they currently do) increase national and global inequalities. This means that recovery strategies must be reoriented away from handouts to large corporations without adequate regulation of their activities, and toward enabling the survival, employment, and continued consumption demand of poor and middle income groups, and the survival and expansion of tiny, small, and medium enterprises.

There are some obvious steps that the international community needs to take immediately. These steps rely on the existing global financial architecturenot because this architecture is just, fair, or efficient (it is not), but because, given the need for a speedy and substantial response, there is simply no possibility of constructing meaningful alternative institutions and arrangements quickly enough. The existing institutionsespecially the International Monetary Fundhave to deliver, which requires that they shed their pro-capital bias and their promotion of fiscal austerity.

The IMF is the only multilateral institution that has the capacity to create global liquidity, and this is the moment when it must do so at scale. An immediate issue of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which are supplementary reserve assets (determined by a weighted basket of five major currencies), would create additional international liquidity at no extra cost. Since a fresh issue of SDRs must be distributed according to each countrys quota in the IMF, it cannot be discretionary and cannot be subject to other kinds of conditionality or political pressure. At least 1 to 2 trillion SDRs must be created and distributed. This will have a huge impact in ensuring that global international economic transactions simply do not seize up even after the lockdowns are lifted, and that developing countries are able to engage in international trade. Advanced economies with international reserve currencies are much less likely to need to use them, but they can be a lifeline for emerging markets and developing economies, providing additional resources to fight both the pandemic and the economic disaster. They are much better than depending on the IMF to provide loans, which often require conditionalities. (Insofar as additional emergency loans from the IMF are required, they must also be provided without conditionality, as purely compensatory financing for this unprecedented shock.) The issuance of more SDRs is also preferable to allowing the U.S. Federal Reserve to play the role of sole stabilizer of the system. The Feds swap lines are currently providing central banks of a few chosen countries with dollar liquidity as it becomes scarce in this crisis. But this is not a norm-based multilateral allocation; these swaps reflect the strategic national interests of the United States, and therefore reinforce global power imbalances.

One reason why there has been only limited issue of SDRs so far (the last increase was after the 2008 crisis, but to the tune of only around 276 billion SDRs) is the fear that such an increase in global liquidity would stoke inflation. But the world economy has just experienced more than a decade of the largest increases in liquidity ever due to quantitative easing by the U.S. Fed without inflation, because global demand remained low. The current situation is only different because it is more acute. If additional liquidity is used to invest in activities that would ease the supply shortages likely to come up because of lockdowns, then it could also ease any cost-push inflation that might emerge.

The second important international measure is dealing with external debt problems. There should immediately be a moratorium or standstill on all debt repayments (both principal and interest) for at least the next six months as countries cope with both the spread of the disease and the lockdown effects. This moratorium should also ensure that interest payments do not accrue over this period. It is obvious that very few developing countries will be in any position to service their loans when foreign exchange inflows have effectively stopped. But in any case, if everything else is on hold in the global economy today, why should debt payments be any different?

A moratorium is a temporary move to tide these countries over during the period when the pandemic and the closures are at their peaks. But eventually substantial debt restructuring is likely to be necessary, and very substantial debt relief must be provided especially to low-income and middle-income countries. International coordination would be much better for all concerned than the disorderly debt defaults that would otherwise be almost inevitable.

Within nation-states, the institution of capital controls would enable developing countries to deal at least partly with these global headwinds by stemming the volatility of cross-border financial flows. Such capital controls must be explicitly allowed and encouraged, in order to curtail the surge in outflows, to reduce illiquidity driven by sell-offs in emerging markets, and to arrest declines in currency and asset prices. Ideally, there should be some cooperation among countries to prevent any one country from being singled out by financial markets.

The aftermath of this crisis is also going to require a revival of planningsomething that had almost been forgotten in too many countries in the neoliberal era. The collapse of production and distribution channels during lockdowns means that defining and maintaining the supply of essential commodities is of critical importance. Such supply chains will have to be thought through in terms of the input-output relationships involved, which in turn requires coordination between different levels and departments in governments as well as across provincesand possibly at the regional level as well.

The pandemic is likely to bring about a change in attitudes to public health in almost all countries. Decades of neoliberal policy hegemony have led to drastic declines in per capita public health spending in rich and poor countries alike. It is now more than obvious that this was not just an unequal and unjust strategy but a stupid one: it has taken an infectious disease to drive home the point that the health of the elite ultimately depends on the health of the poorest members of society. Those who advocated reduced public health spending and privatization of health services did so at their own peril. This is true at a global scale as well. The current pathetically nationalist squabbles over access to protective equipment and drugs betray a complete lack of awareness of the nature of the beast. This disease will not be brought under control unless it is brought under control everywhere. International cooperation is not just desirable but essential.

While pushing for these major strategies for national governments and international organizations, we need to be conscious of some concerns. One is the fear that governments across the world will use the opportunity presented by the pandemic to push for the centralization of power, with significantly increased monitoring and surveillance of citizens, and increased censorship and control over information flows to reduce their own accountability. This has already started in many countries, and fear of infection is causing many people across the world to accept invasions of privacy and forms of state control over individual lives that months ago would have been seen as unacceptable. It will be harder to sustain or revive democracy in such conditions. Much greater public vigilance is required both at present and after the crisis has ended.

There is also a fear that the increased inequalities thrown up by this crisis will reinforce existing forms of social discrimination. In principle, a virus does not respect class or other socio-economic distinctions. But there are well-known negative feedback loops between the squalor associated with income poverty and infectious diseases. In our unequal societies, poor and socially disadvantaged groups are more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 and more likely to die from it, because peoples ability to take preventive measures, their susceptibility to disease, and their access to treatment all vary greatly according to income, assets, occupation, and location. Perhaps even worse, COVID-19 containment policies within countries show extreme class bias. Social distancing (better described as physical distancing) implicitly assumes that both residences and workplaces are not so crowded and congested that the prescribed norms can be easily maintained, and that other essentials like access to soap and water are not limited. The fear of infection during the pandemic has brought out some more unpleasant forms of social discrimination and prejudice in many countries, from antipathy to migrants to differentiation on the basis of race, caste, religion, and class. At a time when the universality of the human condition is highlighted by a virus, responses in too many countries have been focused on particularistic divisions, which bode ill for future progress.

Despite these depressing possibilities, it is also true that the pandemic, and even the massive economic crisis it has brought in its wake, could also bring about some changes in attitudes that point to a more hopeful future. Three aspects of this deserve comment.

The first is the recognition of the essential nature and social significance of care work and the greater respect and dignity accorded to paid and unpaid care workers. This could result in societies increasing the number of paid care workers, providing required training for them because of greater appreciation of the skills involved in such labor, and offering these workers better remuneration, more legal and social protection, and greater dignity.

Second, the wider realization among the public of the real possibility that unthinkable events can occur and unimaginably dreadful processes can be unleashed by our ways of life may also bring home the reality of climate change and the disasters it will bring in its wake. This could make more people conscious of the need to change how we live, produce, and consume, before it is too late. Some of the less rational aspects of global supply chains, especially in the multinational food industry (which has encouraged produce from one part of the world to be shipped to another part of the world for processing, before coming back to places near its origin to be consumed), will be questioned and could decline in significance. Other changes in lifestyle and consumption and distribution patterns could follow.

Finally, on a more philosophical level, existential threats like pandemics encourage more recognition of the things that really matter in human existence: good health, the ability to communicate and interact with other people, and participation in creative processes that bring joy and satisfaction. These realizations could encourage the first steps toward civilizational shifts that lead to the reorganization of our societies. There is an opportunity to move away from dominant assumptions about individualistic utility maximization and the profit motive to more caring and cooperative social frameworks.

Jayati Ghosh is a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.

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The Pandemic and the Global Economy - Dissent

Lebanon: Financial Collapse, Revolution, and Pandemic: Where are the Unions? – prruk.org

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If the last six months in Lebanon have taught us anything about extraordinary timeswhether financial collapse, revolutionary moments, or pandemic wavesit is the centrality of having grassroots organizations that can play an important role in protecting collective interests, providing social safety nets, and envisioning alternatives that hold social justice at their core. At a time when the economic situation is in a free fall, and people are requested to stay home in order to contain the pandemic, the elephant in the room remains the social and economic consequences of such a measure. After all, a pandemic does not only require medical and public health interventions, but also social, political, and economic plans that can uphold society in such difficult times, especially as this hits in an already collapsing economy.

Several weeks into the lockdown in Lebanon, the government has only taken very slow and limited measures to protect what they qualify as being the poorest. Of course, this gave roomintentionally, I would argueto sectarian leaders to resurface with their clientelism in the form of donation boxes. But in times like these, social protection cannot be equated to a charity program targeting the poor. Given the magnitude of the crisis, it is society at large that needs protection, and with it, a broader vision is required in order to get out of the multiple crises the country is going through simultaneously. Who will protect the daily wage workers who have lost their jobs due to the lockdown? The unemployed who have no social protection? The workers and employees who have been laid off? The employees who have lost more than half of their salaries because of the financial crisis? Who will protect domestic workers or migrant workers? What about the medical staff that are risking their lives to save ours? The cleaners, garbage collectors, and delivery workers who have been our essential workers, keeping us clean and safe in our houses, while being exploited and underpaid? Who will protect people who are unable to pay their rent? Or those who are unable to put food on their tables anymore? Who will protect the owners of small businesses who are unable to make ends meet anymore? After all, werent the youth encouraged for decades to be entrepreneurs and create their own businesses? Who protects them now that their small investments have only resulted in debts and losses? These social categories do not all qualify as the poorest, but they all require immediate social protection in the form of social justice, not charity.

One of the main predicaments of the Lebanese uprising and the current COVID-19 pandemic lockdown is the absence of strong and active unions and labor organizations. It is in times like these that unions and syndicates play a crucial role in protecting the interests of most people in society, and take a leading role in pushing for social and economic plans that guarantee social protection.

Why Labor Organizations?

While some consider it to be old school to insist on the importance of labor organizations, an informed reading of socio-economic and political dynamics in Lebanon points to the centrality of such types of organizations in challenging the existing neoliberal-sectarian regime. It is not a coincidence that the post-civil war era in Lebanon was marked by a systematic and violent crackdown on unions that led, by the end of the 1990s, to a full cooptation of the General Confederation of Workers (GCWL), the countrys national trade union center. Similarly, professional orders were also dominated by sectarian party politics, and played an important role in upholding the interests of the ruling elites.

The post-war neoliberal rolling back of the state and the flourishing of non-state welfare in the form of clientelism created a system of inequality whereas only party partisans can potentially benefit. It is a system where bankers, businessmen, and sectarian leaders are able to accumulate wealth and exploit workers and employees with little to no resistance from below. The weakening of the unions meant that the power of collective bargaining and the struggle for social justice were made impossible. In such context, two types of activism flourished in post-war Lebanon: Sect-based mobilization (mainly in the form of political parties) and issue-based campaigns (mainly taking the shape of civil society activism). Despite their seemingly opposite paths, both streams have contributeddirectly or indirectlyto the reproduction of the neoliberal-sectarian regime through the fragmentation of causes, the elevation of identity politics, and the professionalization of issue-based activism without ever questioning the very structure of the political or economic system.

Therefore, it is only when society starts to organize along class interests and to demand social justice by questioning the accumulation of wealth or by pushing for social protection as a right for all, rather than clientelism, that the regime is really threatened in its core. This is not an overstatement of the power of the people, but rather a reminder of the understated power of organization that is interest-based. The mobilization of the Union Coordination Committee in 2012, which aimed to improve working conditions of civil servants and teachers, is one such example of the power of alternative unions to pressure and to achieve benefits that contribute to social protectiondespite the unfortunate crackdown that brought the movement to a halt in 2014.

Revival of Labor and Professional Organizations since October 2019

Since the start of the uprising in October 2019, new groups of workers, employees, and professionals started to emerge. While these movements were mainly spontaneous and largely unorganized, the severity of the financial crisis and its catastrophic implication on the labor market pushed employees to come together on many occasions, either informally or through pre-existing unions, to protect their rights and to collectively negotiate salaries and benefits.

As expected, the official GCWL did not mobilize in the uprising, and professional orders also remained widely silent and at the margin of the historic events. It was only after the election of an independent candidate as president of the Beirut Bar Association that the role of professional orders in the uprising surfaced. Simultaneously, new bodies of shadow unions or professional associations started to take shape and to organize as alternatives to the coopted and dysfunctional syndicates and orders. Clearly inspired by the Sudanese Professionals Association, a new Association of Professionals ( ) was declared on 28 October, calling on professionals, employees, and workers to organize in their workplaces, and to couple the political struggle with a socio-economic struggle that brings back the question of labor and social justice to the core.

While such initiatives can play a crucial role in the unfolding of the uprising, their success in revamping the role of syndicates and creating a nationwide labor movement will largely depend on their ability to organize in a democratic and coherent way. These nascent organizations are now faced with the sudden shift to work from home for many employees, and the emergency of essential workers to report to work without interruption. In such difficult and unusual times, the challenge becomes to come up with a new repertoire of contention that can devise tactics of organizing and mobilizing that pressure for bargaining and protecting labor rights and social safety nets.

Moreover, such initiatives should also make room for types of organization that are not merely traditional labor unions or professional associations. For example, given the prevalence of the informal sector in Lebanon and the high rates of unemployment, it would make sense for these groups in society to organize based on informality or unemployment. Such organizations are crucial for social protection since they would raise very important demands such as the right to unemployment benefits, which would limit clientelism and youth migration, or the right to free universal healthcare. Had we organized and activated such unions and associations long before, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the social and economic level would have been much different today.

Finally, building a strong and independent labor movement is crucial to channel the popular demands of the October uprising for social justice into a political project that can have serious leverage in the balance of power between the regime and the people. Looking at the experiences of the Arab uprisings over the past decade, it becomes clear that the only two countries that were able to build on their popular upheavals to launch a somehow democratic transitional political process were Tunisia and Sudan. In both cases, labor unions and professional associations played a key role.

Imagining a political transition in Lebanon toward a more just and fair system will surely require unions and syndicates to play a central role. This is even more crucial today, at a time when the whole world will be going into a recession and when opportunities for exporting our youth to work abroadas has been the Lebanese formula for decadeswill be shrinking considerably. Protecting society means organizing based on our interests as workers, employees, unemployed, or underemployed. After all, a job and a decent income are a right, not a privilege; and the core of the problem is in the distribution of wealth, not in its existence.

Rima Majed is Assistant Professor of Sociology at American University of Beirut and LCPS research fellow.

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Lebanon: Financial Collapse, Revolution, and Pandemic: Where are the Unions? - prruk.org

United Nations Statement to the Development Committee – UNDP

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We will not and cannot return to the world as it was before the pandemic struck. We must rebuild societies that are better, more resilient and we must do so together.Secretary General Antonio Guterres

The unprecedented crisis triggered by the spread of the COVID-19 virus, has focused the full attention of the United Nations System (UN) on a strategy of rapid response and recovery. In the words of the UN Secretary-General, this pandemic is the worst global crisis since World War II. The IMFs World Economic Outlook frames the depth of the current global economic recession as the deepest since the Great Depression.

I. Introduction: The COVID Response

The UNs efforts to help save lives and protect people from the COVID-19 pandemic focus on three critical components, all led by each countrys Resident Coordinator: the health response, coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO); the humanitarian response, coordinated by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); and the socio-economic response, coordinated by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in close collaboration with all UN agencies in 162 countries and territories.

In a recent report entitled Shared responsibility, global solidarity: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19, the UN Secretary-General calls for a large-scale, coordinated, comprehensive multilateral response that amounts to at least 10 per cent of GDP. The size of this commitment requires an open discussion about debt relief in all developing countries in fragile/crisis contexts, in low and middle-income countries as well as in Small Island Developing States.

While its impact will vary from country to country, Covid-19 will likely increase poverty and inequalities at a global scale. According to the UN International Labour Organization, working hours are projected to decline by 6.7% in Q2 (2020), equivalent to 195 million full-time workers, with the world losing between $860 billion to $3.4 trillion in labor income. The UN Conference on Trade and Development projects 30 to 40 per cent downward pressure on global foreign direct investment flows. The World Tourism Organization sees a 2030 per cent decline in international arrivals. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization forecasts that 1.5 billion students will be out of school. Inequality of access to broadband connectivity and inaccessibility of ICTs hinders effective remote participation and access to remote schooling arrangements, health information and telemedicine by all. According to the International Telecommunication Union, an estimated 3.6 billion people remain offline, with most of the unconnected living in the least developed countries.

To operationalise the UN Secretary-Generals report, the UN development system has developed a socio-economic response framework and has switched into emergency mode. A significant portion of the UNs existing portfolio of sustainable development programmes of a total of $17.8 billion across all the SDGs is being adjusted and expanded towards COVID-19 related needs, in close collaboration with programme countries, donors and partners.

II. The Socio-Economic Response

The UNs response to the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis considers a variety of interlinked dimensions that need to be addressed in an integrated manner to protect the needs and rights of people living under the duress of the pandemic, with particular focus on the most vulnerable countries, groups, and people who risk being left behind.

1. HEALTH FIRST: PROTECT AND STRENGTHEN THE HEALTH SYSTEM: Health systems are being overwhelmed by demand for services generated by the COVID-19 outbreak. When health systems collapse, both direct mortality from the outbreak and avertable mortality from vaccine and other care interventions, preventable and treatable conditions increase dramatically. At least half of the worlds population still do not have full coverage of essential health services and about 100 million people are still being pushed into extreme poverty (defined as living on 1.90 USD or less a day) because they have to pay for health care. Over 930 million people (around 12% of the worlds population) spend at least 10% of their household budgets to pay for health care.

Countries with the weakest health systems stand before huge challenges in all these aspects. There must be immediate, targeted actions to allow countries to maintain essential lifesaving health services even as they surge to meet the spike in demand for acute care. And there must be a complementary effort on health systems recovery, preparedness and strengthening with a focus on primary health care and Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Massive investment in health will be needed for both, maintaining services and to strengthen preparedness of health systems to respond to future waves of COVID-19 and future global outbreaks.

2. PROTECT PEOPLE: SOCIAL PROTECTION AND BASIC SERVICES: The COVID-19 crisis impacts the worlds poorest and most vulnerable. The crisis will devastate incomes and access to basic services with intergenerational implications for families on multidimensional poverty and inequality. Many governments are responding to the crisis by expanding existing programmes, but 4 billion people accounting for 71% of the world population, including 2 out of 3 children have no or inadequate social protection to start with. Therefore, the scope of the challenges ahead requires an extraordinary scale up of the response. Those with informal or unstable employment, entrepreneurs and those working in the service industry (majority women) are most affected, with only 1 in 5 unemployed persons able to avail of unemployment benefits. Social protection responses must consider differentiated impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable groups and women and men.

Access to social services is being curtailed either through reduction in services or in access. Key areas include: (a) Food and Nutrition: The disruption of markets impacts on the quality of diets and nutrition practices, which translate into an increase of mortality, morbidity and malnutrition among the population groups with the highest nutrition needs; (b) Education: About 90% of the total number of school children in the world have been directly affected by school closures, with an estimated 370 million school children also missing out on school meals. Adolescent girls already lack access to secondary education and are at heightened risk; (c) Water and sanitation: WASH services will be affected with public utilities potentially facing less than optimal staffing and available workforce, disrupted supply chains, and challenges in payments to support functionality putting these services at grave risk of collapsing. Women-headed households are more likely to have inadequate housing, including on water and sanitation, which can increase health risks, especially in cases of overcrowding of shelters; (d) Gender-Based Violence (GBV): Quarantine and isolation policies, coupled with financial stress on families, individuals and communities, will exacerbate the conditions for women already vulnerable to domestic violence, estimated to be at least one third of all women. Care and support to GBV survivors may be disrupted when health service providers are overburdened; (e) Protection, mental health and psychosocial support: Fear, worry and acute stressors can lead to long-term consequences, coupled with diminished availability to services from social workers and case workers, leaving women and the most vulnerable exposed to violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect.

3.PROTECT JOBS AND ECONOMIC RECOVERIES: COVID-19 has plunged the world economy into a recession with deep consequences and historical levels of unemployment and deprivation. It is estimated that we could lose 25 million jobs and see losses in labour income in the range of USD 860 billion to USD 3.4 trillion. Small and medium enterprises, the self-employed, daily wage earners and migrant workers are hit the hardest. Supporting income and employment for workers needs to be a core element of stimulus packages. Most vulnerable workers are in the informal economy, with no or limited access to social protection, nor do they have the economic security to take sick leave, get treated if required, or cope with lockdown. Women represent approximately 70 per cent of frontline workers dealing with the pandemic in the health and social sector, many of whom are migrant workers. Women are also overrepresented in some of the services sectors most impacted by the crisis, mostly lacking social protection, and will also bear a disproportionate burden in the care economy.

Economic recovery is about protecting critical productive assets, productive units and productive networks during the crisis. Ensuring the continued or improved functioning of SMEs across sectors, including food and other essential goods and services supply chains, is of particular urgency. First, policy actions across multiple sectors and mitigation of adverse policy effects on essential services are needed to avoid disruption and permanent job losses. Second, employment crises are the harbingers of political crises. Disruptions in massive employment sectors presents immediate existential threats to essential services that result in riots, violence and erosion of trust in institutions and governments. Third, a global economic recession will impact global population movements and hence affect countries with high levels of migration and large portions of remittances in their GDP. The return of migrants and the reduction of remittances will likely surpass the capacity of the formal and informal sectors in those countries to absorb large numbers of returnees or additional local job seekers in the local labour market.

4.THE MACROECONOMIC RESPONSE AND MULTILATERAL COORDINATION: A major global economic recession is underway, along with the possibility of a financial crisis, with major implications for vulnerable population groups and households. A large-scale fiscal and financial effort for counter-cyclical spending is urgently needed everywhere.

A three-step strategy is essential for the socio-economic response to the COVID-19 crisis. First, a rapid assessment of the potential impact of the crisis is needed in order to quantify the spending necessary to contain it. Second, an assessment of the fiscal space available to finance increased spending, as it will restrict the governments capacity for action. Third, an analysis of policy priorities and available policy measures considering both financing and implementation constraints faced by governments. The possible implications of the proposed policy measures will need to be accounted for as well.

As the UN Secretary-General has noted, a large scale, coordinated and comprehensive multilateral response is needed now more than ever. COVID-19 is a global problem and confronting the effects of the pandemic will require global and coordinated efforts supported by regional initiatives and regional institutions. While the level and intensity of the impact of COVID-19 varies across the world, countries under sanctions may be particularly affected. Three areas of regional coordination are particularly relevant: trade policy, monetary coordination and enhanced connectivity.

5.SOCIAL COHESION AND COMMUNITY RESILENCE: The impact of COVID-19 on the life of rural and urban communities is set to be massive, particularly in poor and densely populated urban areas and slums. 1 billion people live in slums, where living conditions affect the health of the urban poor dramatically, where people are unable to self-isolate and where their livelihood depends on income from day to day work in the informal sector.

The scale of the socio-economic impact of COVID19 on the urban and rural poor will largely depend on tailored solutions for these communities. This will require a close interaction between national, subnational and local Governments and communities, based on a good understanding of the specific situations of communities through local assessments, strengthen community-led advocacy and service delivery. It will also require that communities are empowered to participate in local planning and in the oversight of services.

The COVID-19 crisis also threatens social cohesion as the crisis can erode trust within society and with respect to governments. Whole-of-society approaches are essential to confront the socio-economic impacts of the crisis. Social cohesion, embedded in actors, communities and institutions, holds the society together and is critical to the achievement of the SDGs, advancing the values, norms and fundamental human rights. Close attention should be paid to the impact of COVID-19 on fragile political transitions and in countries already facing a rapid deterioration of security conditions, on top of weak health systems and climate change.

III. A focus on debt

The size of fiscal and financial stimulus needed in each country - short run measures to address the pandemic, and fiscal policy to spur demand in the medium run - is in the order of several percentage points of GDP. Yet, many developing countries, including low- and middle-income countries, fragile/crisis context countries and Small Island Development States, will be unable to raise the resources needed.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, global debt had reached record highs. As the UN 2020 Financing for Sustainable Development Report points out, the long period of unusually low international interest rates and unprecedented levels of global liquidity associated with quantitative easing gave developing countries, including least developed countries, increased access to commercial financing. While providing much needed resources in the short term, this has also resulted in higher debt servicing costs, and heightened interest rate, exchange rate and rollover risks. Forty-four per cent of least developed countries and other low-income developing countries were already at high risk of external debt distress or already in debt distress prior to the outbreak of the pandemic.

A UN proposal: Debt relief should not be based on level of income but on vulnerability

The global COVID-19-induced contraction in economic activity is having dire consequences, including on debt sustainability. This is not limited to low-income countries. Middle-income countries, home to 75% of the worlds population and 62% of the worlds poor, are highly vulnerable to a debt crisis, lost market access and capital outflows. Small Island Developing States face structural constraints on growth, energy and food imports, and fiscal space that need to be addressed in comprehensive fashion.

Principles for Global Solidarity

To effectively halt a debt crisis, we need to move quickly. We propose a framework that aims to ensure debt relief, while accounting for heterogeneous debt situations across countries and the need for tailored policy responses.

This approach builds on principles for debt sustainability discussed and agreed at the United Nations and laid out most recently in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. They also reflect best practices underlying debt resolution at the IMF and the World Bank.

These include:

i) Debtors and creditors must share responsibility for preventing and resolving unsustainable debt situations

ii) Debt restructurings should be timely, orderly, effective, fair and negotiated in good faith

iii) Debt workouts should aim to restore public debt sustainability, while enhancing the ability of countries to achieve sustainable development, growth with greater equality and the sustainable development goals.

A Three Phase Approach

A comprehensive approach across three phases, involving all relevant creditors and all countries facing liquidity and solvency issues due to the crisis is required.

Phase 1

An across-the-board debt standstill for two years for all developing countries who cannot service their debt and request relief should be instituted. To start, official bilateral creditors should immediately institute an emergency debt payment moratorium on sovereign debt.

The standstill should also:

Include other creditors (private creditors as well as multilaterals). Coordination is of the essence.

Extend beyond IDA countries to include other low-income and those heavily indebted middle-income countries that request relief.

Include principal and interest payments, as well as associated fees and charges

Set a cut-off date, after which new financing is excluded from future debt restructurings, in order to facilitate access to financing after this date.

Allow for repayment schedules that ensure ability of countries to implement the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Phase 2

A second phase should consider a more comprehensive assessment and options towards debt sustainability. Debt swaps can release resources for the COVID-19 response in developing countries, although they may not adequately solve unsustainable debt situations.

A debt mechanism for the SDGs, with a focus on creating fiscal space for recovery in a resilient manner and SDG achievement could be considered.

Phase 3

Addressing long outstanding issues in the international debt architecture should be cast as a third phase given the urgency and immediacy of the need to act in the face of COVID.

This new international debt architecture should build upon the Principles established in the Financing for Sustainable Development Agenda of timely, orderly, effective, fair resolutions. It should aim at preventing defaults from turning into prolonged financial and economic crises, restoring public debt sustainability, and enhancing the ability of countries to achieve the sustainable development goals.

IV. Next Steps

The pandemic has reminded us, in the starkest way possible, of the price we pay for weaknesses in health systems, social protections and public services. It has underscored and exacerbated inequalities, above all gender inequality, laying bare the way in which the formal economy has been sustained on the back of invisible and unpaid care labour. It has highlighted ongoing human rights challenges, including stigma and violence against women.

Building a better, post-pandemic future will require social and economic interventions today that build greater resilience tomorrow. To be resilient, COVID-19 recovery efforts must be part of the solution to climate change the other global crisis facing this generation. They must accelerate rather than undermine decarbonization, the protection of natural capital, social equality and inclusion, the realization of human rights for everyone, and strong, capable governments and institutions all critical, systemic elements to avoiding such an outbreak again.

Rather than being put aside as aspirational in a time of crisis, the SDGs offer a framework for a fair and sustainable transition, as they recognize the interconnected nature of all life on this planet. Beyond the socio-economic frame of the current response, the role the environment and natural capital will play in the path to recovery is a policy choice that warrants further elaboration, as do good governance, gender equality and empowerment, and the protection and promotion of human rights for all.

As the UN Secretary-General report avers, we need to build back better. A large-scale, coordinated and comprehensive multilateral response is needed now more than ever. The COVID-19 crisis is a global problem and confronting the effects of the pandemic will require global and coordinated efforts supported by regional and sub-regional collaboration.

The UN is fully mobilized. It will make full use of its programmatic assets, contribute through actions that enable and empower, and through words that connect and protect with the SDGs as compass. It is also establishing a new Multi-Partner Trust Fund for COVID19 Response and Recovery. The collective know-how of the UNs Country Teams is operational and mobilized to implement this strategy over the next 12 to 18 months, led by Resident Coordinators in 162 countries and territories, and supported by a global and regional network of expertise and experience.

There will be no return to the old normal. The massive fiscal and financial repurposing made by governments in these weeks and months, including the redirection of fossil fuel subsidies to aid the response, are a glimpse of the future. They suggest that the status quo and business-as-usual are policy choices, not inevitable constraints on sustainable development.

Recovering from this pandemic must not come at the expense of tackling others. We need to do everything possible to ensure that our efforts to support countries ravaged by Covid-19 do not divert resources from existing crises addressing the needs of refugees and other vulnerable groups; tackling the global climate emergency; ending violence against women and girls; and putting an end to discrimination in all its forms. How stimulus plans are implemented matters to what this recovery will look like. The global recovery needs to be fair; it needs to be green, and above all, it must be inclusive.

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United Nations Statement to the Development Committee - UNDP

The Analytical Angle: How smart containment, along with active learning, can help mitigate the Covid-19 crisis – DAWN.com

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Policymakers must be empowered down to the district levels to respond differentially based on local data.

Governments across the world face a near impossible choice in tackling the Covid-19 virus lockdown and prevent spread, but risk economic collapse and potentially many dying of non-Covid-19 reasons, or remain (mostly) open to minimise the socio-economic fallout, but risk many dying of Covid-19.

To make matters worse, there is little data to base a policy response on. Our knowledge of this new virus (transmission mechanisms, environmental triggers, immunity, etc) is still nascent and fast evolving. We also dont know enough about the potential adverse socio-economic and health impacts of the proposed public health policies. While many countries in the developed world have gone down the route of blanket lockdowns, for others, the choice is harder to make.

Physical distancing and locking down will be particularly damaging for the developing world. In Pakistan, much of the economy is informal. According to the Labour Force Survey 2017-18, the informal sector accounts for 72 per cent of non-agricultural employment. This makes it harder to target and provide financial assistance to those who may need it most.

Loss of livelihood and severe financial hardships may be accompanied by food shortages. In South Asia, food supply chains are dominated by labour-intensive SMEs. This means that extended lockdowns and quarantines may result in food supply disruptions especially in midstream and downstream segments retail, food service, distribution.

Health issues which require regular care are widely prevalent in Pakistan. The World Health Organisation characterises Pakistan as a TB high-burden country with the fourth highest prevalence of multi-drug resistant TB globally. In young children, diarrhoea is still a major killer, and malnutrition and stunting are persistent problems. Maternal deaths due to preventable causes prevail and half of women of reproductive age are anaemic.

The impact of Covid-19 policies on an already weak and over-stressed healthcare system must be well thought out. Managing health conditions in a lockdown may be difficult. Conversely, easing distancing measures may be too risky as the high prevalence of these health conditions in some populations makes them highly vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus.

Fiscal space is severely limited for adequate relief measures and countercyclical policies which will be required as the economy comes to a grinding halt. Weak state capacity may also make it nearly impossible to implement and enforce a country-wide lockdown, while ensuring all citizens are taken care of.

Understandably, these are very tough decisions to make. While the fear of uncontrolled spread and mortality eventually pushed the government out of paralysis, at times it also led to panic and poorly thought out decisions. The decision to expand the Ehsaas programme, for example, was a good one but the execution was poorly thought out with massive crowding outside distribution points.

The decision to ease the lockdown and open up some industries is also a controversial one especially with little transparency on the criteria being used to strengthen or ease the lockdowns.

In Pakistan this crisis has also become politicised resulting in misalignment of strategies across government tiers. The enormity of this challenge requires cooperation rather than tribalism. Our leaders need to work together to save lives and build resilient systems for the long-term.

Up till now the choice has largely been presented as a binary: Lockdown and prevent spread but risk economic collapse, loss of livelihoods, and deaths from other preventable reasons; or remain open to minimise this socioeconomic disaster, but risk health systems buckling and thousands dying from the virus.

Read: A better response to the Covid-19 challenge lies in smart lockdown strategies

Given the dearth of data, however, we are driving blind: we just dont know enough about the health and economic impact to figure out the trade-offs between these choices. How can we make better decisions in the face of such great uncertainty?

The crux of our approach is the importance of learning. Governments must draw on a well-developed and well-tested machinery for how to make decisions under uncertainty. Policy actions should inform our learning so that policies are tested and refined in real-time. This is what we call smart containment with active learning.

While some decisions must be made immediately (such as, increasing testing capacity and personal protective equipment for health workers), others may be better made after collecting some information (such as, socio-economic data to better target the relief response). Many decisions may also be refined over time as more information comes in (such as, which specific aspects of distancing and lockdown strategies are most effective).

The smart containment approach allows for a locally heterogeneous policy response each area may have different prevalence, and different needs based on demographic, economic and other characteristics. For example, areas with high population densities or areas with high-risk health characteristics such as high incidence of TB, may need to be treated differently.

Policymakers must be empowered down to the district and local levels to respond differentially based on local data and ground realities. These ground realities then translate into differential and graded decisions on smart testing strategies, physical distancing and lockdown measures, relief measures, public messaging, health sector capacity, and so on.

The active learning aspect calls for re-evaluating policy measures regularly based on data and evidence. This will help us better understand the benefits and costs of each policy and refine accordingly. This process of continuous re-evaluation can provide a roadmap for the next 18 months that is fully guided by the evidence.

The roadmap should inform the design of physical distancing measures and enable better targeting of support measures to rebuild the economy and society.

Consider the two contrasting policy choices (a) a weaker lockdown where there is isolation, contact tracing and care for those who are sick but there is also a degree of freedom of movement to allow essential workers, such as food producers and distributors, to continue their work, or (b) strict quarantines and physical isolation which will require massive investments in maintaining food chains, ensuring necessities for every family and providing critical care for those who need it.

Up till now, decisions have been made in the face of substantial uncertainty without any clear guidelines for how those decisions should be made to resolve the uncertainty as rapidly as possible. The approach we recommend incorporates prior information and multidisciplinary expertise in a structured fashion and enables real-time data responsiveness.

The Analytical Angle is a monthly column where top researchers bring rigorous evidence to policy debates in Pakistan. The series is a collaboration between the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan and Dawn.com. The views expressed are the authors alone.

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The Analytical Angle: How smart containment, along with active learning, can help mitigate the Covid-19 crisis - DAWN.com

NASA’s incredible new moon map will serve as blueprint for human missions – CNET

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The most comprehensive geologic map of the moon ever.

NASA is preparing for new missions to the moon, setting an ambitious goal for putting walkin', talkin' humans (including the first woman) back on the lunar surface by 2024. There's plenty of gigantic hurdles to overcome before that future is realized, but this stunning, detailed new map of the moon's surface features, produced by scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute, is likely to play an invaluable role in fulfilling the agency's goal.

Known as the "Unified Geologic Map of the Moon", the cartograph looks like a rainbow Gobstopper and charts decades of geological surveys of the lunar surface, dating as far back as the Apollo era -- when humans first stepped foot on our celestial neighbor. Using regional maps from six Apollo missions combined with new data acquired by NASA's lunar orbiter and observations by Kaguya, a probe launched by the Japanese space agency which imaged the moon between 2007 and 2009.

Stay in the know. Get the latest tech stories from CNET News every weekday.

The colourful 1:5,000,000-scale geologic map, which was set to be unveiled during the 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, is designed to serve as a resource for research and analysis efforts and to help future geologic surveys.

"It's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions," said Jim Reilly, USGS director, in a press release.

The moon's pockmarked surface acts like a record of its history and the new map distinguishes between different geologic formations and time periods, using striking color to record the moon's past. The map is dominated by the pinks of the Imbrian era, which occurred some 3.5 billion years ago. During that time, the moon was smashed by asteroids, creating many of the impact craters we can see on the surface today.

A full-size version of the map can be found here.

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NASA's incredible new moon map will serve as blueprint for human missions - CNET

NASA astronauts on ISS tell John Krasinski that Earth is still beautiful – CNET

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Nick and Joe Jonas are at your 2020 prom.

John Krasinskiwent above and beyond on the latest episode ofSome Good News-- to space. Astronauts on the International Space Station flashed a floating SGN banner with a background noZoomconference could ever top: the colossal curve of the Earth, shrouded in cloud.

NASA tweeted out a clip of the episode on Tuesday, saying "Yes, @JohnKrasinski -- that just happened!"

In the clip, the NASA astronauts say our planet is beautiful and that even an Earth in crisis is still worth returning to. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan, along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, returned to Earth on April 17.

Krasinski has also been touting a virtual prom for high schoolers holed up at home, and during episode 4 on Sunday, he delivered. Balloons, streamers, full-on DJ set and, yes,the Jonas Brothers in tow, Krasinski put on a show to rival every teen movie. (Jump to 12:33.)

The YouTube show, created to shine a light on all the ways people are helping and entertaining each other in this time of lockdown, has a reputation for the spectacular, from celebrity cameos to grand gestures for those deserving.

As for celebrity cameos, Brad Pitt replaced Robert De Niro as SGN's weather reporter. Yes, you read that right. (Jump to 6:55.)

Krasinski then proceeded to throw the biggest names together in organizing a virtual prom for the class of 2020. He consulted ex-The Office costar Rainn Wilson, Chance the Rapper and the Jonas Brothers, who performed Sucker via Zoom for those dressed up in their bedrooms.

And then the capper: Billie Eilish and her brother and songwriting partner Finneas O'Connell dropped by to perform Bad Guy. Class of 2020, hope you enjoyed virtual prom.

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NASA astronauts on ISS tell John Krasinski that Earth is still beautiful - CNET

OSU Receives NASA Award to Study Weather for Drones – AviationPros.com

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NASA awarded a team of Oklahoma State University researchers $5.2 million over the next four years to study low-level wind and turbulence forecasting.

The research aims to improve the safe operation of drones in both urban and rural environments, particularly in the field of advanced air mobility that could one day include autonomous transport of people and cargo.

NASA's University Leadership Initiative Award totals $32.8 million and will also go to teams at Stanford University, the University of Delaware, North Carolina A&T State University and the University of South Carolina.

Each of these teams is working on important problems that definitely will help break down barriers in ways that will benefit the U.S. aviation industry, said John Cavolowsky, director of NASAs Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program in Washington, D.C.

OSU investigators include professors Jamey Jacob, Brian Elbing, Imraan Faruque and Nicoletta Fala. Jacob, the director of OSUs Unmanned Systems Research Institute, is the projects principal investigator. Researchers from the OSU institute have worked with NASA in the past.

Selection to the NASA University Leadership Program confirms OSUs expertise and preeminence in unmanned systems, particularly in the area of unmanned aircraft for weather and meteorological applications, Jacob said.

NASA hopes the University Leadership Initiative will unite its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and prominent American research universities to produce new, innovative ideas. Jacob said the NASA University Leadership Initiative program allows university and industry teams to provide unique solutions to the most complex problems facing aeronautics today.

"The challenge our team is addressing will have an impact across a wide range of aircraft, not only helping advance the integration of drones and urban air taxis into the national airspace, but also increasing the safety of air transportation and airport operations for all aircraft from airliners and general aviation aircraft alike, he said.

OSUs team includes members from Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Nebraska, the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Vigilant Aerospace Systems Inc. AirXOS and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

2020 The Oklahoman

Visit The Oklahoman atwww.newsok.com

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NASAs new rover is headed to the perfect spot to hunt for life on Mars – BGR

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NASAs Mars 2020 mission launch date is rapidly approaching, and weve seen all the signs that the Perseverance rover is just about ready to make the long journey to the Red Planet. What will it find when it arrives? Thats a question nobody can answer, but new research by scientists at Stanford suggests that the rovers targeted landing site may be a great place to look for signs of life.

NASA chose the rovers landing location a large bowl-shaped depression known as the Jezero crater because its located in an area where ancient martian rivers flowed, carving channels and depositing sediment into layers. This is ideal for scientists hunting for signatures of life as it offers the opportunity to study material that was on the surface over a long period of time.

Stanford scientists used aerial images of the Jezero crater and the surrounding area to build a model of how the area developed. They found that the sediments deposited near the dried-up river delta have a high probability of preserving signs of ancient life, if it did indeed exist.

There probably was water for a significant duration on Mars and that environment was most certainly habitable, even if it may have been arid, lead author Mathieu Laptre said in a statement. We showed that sediments were deposited rapidly and that if there were organics, they would have been buried rapidly, which means that they would likely have been preserved and protected.

Thats incredibly important, as exposure on the surface could have easily destroyed evidence of life before it had a chance to be covered in layers of sediment and preserved. The sediment layers are believed to have formed rapidly, but only when specific conditions were present on the surface. The active formation of the river delta may have only taken 20 to 40 years, but that formation was likely discontinuous and spread out across about 400,000 years, according to the scientists.

People have been thinking more and more about the fact that flows on Mars probably were not continuous and that there have been times when you had flows and other times when you had dry spells, Laptre explains. This is a novel way of putting quantitative constraints on how frequently flows probably happened on Mars.

The Mars 2020 mission is slated to launch in late July or early August of this year. The timeline is tight, and NASA cant afford to miss the launch window. If for some reason the launch is delayed beyond the early August limit, the entire mission would have to be pushed back to 2022 at the earliest due to the nature of the orbits of Mars and Earth.

Image Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, wearables, smartphones, and future tech. Most recently, Mike served as Tech Editor at The Daily Dot, and has been featured in USA Today, Time.com, and countless other web and print outlets. His love ofreporting is second only to his gaming addiction.

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NASAs new rover is headed to the perfect spot to hunt for life on Mars - BGR

NASA Tracker Detects Massive Asteroid Passing By Earth On Sunday – International Business Times

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KEY POINTS

NASA is currently tracking a massive building-sized asteroid thats expected to approach Earth on Sunday (April 26). Aside from the incoming asteroid, two other near-Earth objects will fly past the planet this weekend.

According to NASAs Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the massive asteroid has been identified as 2020 FM6. It has an estimated diameter of 820 feet and is currently moving towards Earth at a speed of almost 38,000 miles per hour.

Given its massive size and speed, the asteroid is capable of causing a major impact event on Earth if it hits the planet. Due to this, 2020 FM6 has been classified by NASA as a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Potentially hazardous asteroids are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroids potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth, NASA explained. Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance of 0.05 [astronomical units] or less and an absolute magnitude of 22.0 or less are considered [potentially hazardous asteroids].

According to CNEOS, 2020 FM6 is expected to approach Earth on April 26 at 11:35 p.m. EDT. During its approach, it will be about 0.03673 astronomical units or 3.4 million miles from the planets center.

Aside from 2020 FM6, Earth will also be visited by two other asteroids on Sunday. The first one is called 2019 HS2. CNEOS noted that this asteroid measures about 92 feet wide and is approaching Earth with a velocity of 28,000 miles per hour.

The second asteroid that will arrive on Sunday is known as 2019 GF1. This asteroid is currently traveling across space at a speed of 7,000 miles per hour. It has an estimated diameter of about 65 feet.

According to CNEOS, both asteroids belong to the family of Aten space rocks. This means that 2019 HS2 and 2019 GF1 follow natural orbits that intersect Earths path.

2019 HS2 will fly past Earth on April 26 at 10:40 a.m. EDT from a distance of 0.03488 astronomical units or roughly 3.2 million miles away.

2019 GF1, on the other hand, will approach the planet on April 26 at 7:55 p.m. EDT from about 0.04783 astronomical units or 4.4 million miles away.

Over 17,000 near-Earth asteroids remain undetected in our solar neighborhood. Pictured; an artistic illustration of an asteroid flying by Earth. Photo: NASA

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NASA Tracker Detects Massive Asteroid Passing By Earth On Sunday - International Business Times

Ariana Grande Had the Best Reaction to Chrissy Teigen’s Daughter Luna Singing ‘NASA’ – ELLE.com

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Chrissy Teigen's four year old daughter Luna got a karaoke machine, so her mother shared footage of her singing Selena Gomez's "Hands to Myself" and Ariana Grande's "NASA" on her Instagram Story. The clips were cuteand got Grande's attention. (Having a famous mom with a huge following and tagging Grande can really make things happen.)

Grande's reaction to Luna singing her song ended up being what most fans dream of: Grande watched and featured Luna's cover in her Instagram Story. Grande captioned the clip with an emotional emoji and white heart.

Grande's shoutout comes about a week after Luna celebrated her fourth birthday in quarantine with her mother, dad John Legend, and little brother Miles. Legend revealed on his Instagram that Teigen went out of her way to make Luna's day special by decorating the house and making sure there was plenty of cake.

"Luna's living her best birthday life," he wrote. "Mommy decorated. No preschool friends were able to come, but they sent video messages and she was thrilled. Good memories for her during this strange time."

Teigen and Legend both shared Instagram birthday tributes to their daughter ahead of the day's celebrations. "happy 4th birthday to the queen of our household," Teigen captioned hers. "I could have never prayed for a better little being."

"Happy 4th birthday to our beautiful Luna!" Legend wrote in his post, which featured a gallery of photos taken throughout her life. "I'm so happy I get to be your father, teacher, friend. "

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Ariana Grande Had the Best Reaction to Chrissy Teigen's Daughter Luna Singing 'NASA' - ELLE.com