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The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did

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Jesse Hernandez, a senior cook at the University of California Riverside, started hearing rumors that layoffs were coming for the residence hall and dining staff just weeks after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last March.
For a while, it seemed all talk.
But sure enough, he and much of the university’s dining staff found themselves out of work for the summer, joining the <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/colleges-are-using-covid-as-an-excuse-for-austerity-unions-are-pushing-back/">650,000 higher education workers nationwide</a> who were laid off due to collegiate austerity programs in the wake of pandemic-induced financial strife.
“We got blindsided, honestly,” Hernandez said.
Now — with the help of his labor union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299 — Hernandez is trying to make sure mass layoffs never happen again. In his role as a member action team leader, he is organizing workers and meeting with administrators about issues that go beyond what happens on the job site. But while AFSCME 3299 has responded to the pandemic by taking a more expansive view of how to approach collective action, colleges as a whole appear to still be beholden to a financial paradigm that put Hernandez’s job, and thousands of jobs like his, in jeopardy.
In part, that may be because the endowment system many schools use to remain solvent brought colleges and universities significant financial rewards amid a rapid rise in stock prices. Those gains followed a major dip in the stock market immediately after the first US Covid-19 outbreaks — and quickly falling prices, in part, led to stark austerity measures.
Now, only a year after laying off hundreds of thousands of people, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21279216/higher-education-college-america-student-debt">higher education industry appears to be bouncing back</a>.
The education and health services industry saw 87,000 people hired in the month of May, according to the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-by-industry-monthly-changes.htm">US Bureau of Labor Statistics</a>, and 129,000 people hired in the two months prior. And there are signs of more hiring to come. For example, the University of Michigan just announced it would be ending a year-long hiring freeze at the beginning of the 2022 fiscal year in July.
But despite those strong numbers, the number of those hired hasn’t yet equaled the number who lost their jobs. And as thousands of collegiate workers wait to see whether their jobs will return, some have begun to question why austerity measures were put in place at all — particularly given the strong returns many schools saw on endowments and how much of schools’ emergency funds have now been shown to have gone unspent.
It’s important to remember all the uncertainty around the coronavirus when the first outbreaks hit. Social distancing was a new concept to millions of people, the debate about whether to sanitize your groceries raged, and many <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/coronavirus-vaccine-timetable-concerns-experts-invs/index.html">experts scoffed at the idea</a> that a vaccine would be available before 2022. No one knew when, or if, the pandemic would be over. And the stock market responded by going into freefall.
“The stock market was down,” said <a href="https://www.shu.edu/profiles/robertkelchen.cfm">Seton Hall University professor and higher ed expert Robert Kelchen</a>, and colleges “were unsure about their future.”
Unsure how long the pandemic would affect their finances and fearing a prolonged pandemic might mean years — if not decades — of falling enrollment, tuition collection, and damage to endowments, austerity budgeting very quickly became the norm for many schools, both public and private. Many laid off and furloughed faculty and staff, froze hiring for temporary workers, and put off capital projects that weren’t already underway, according to Andrew Comrie, professor at the University of Arizona. Many also <a href="https://www.cfodive.com/news/higher-education-finance-pandemic-covid-19/596972/">turned off the air conditioning in unused buildings</a> and stopped paying for food deliveries and classroom maintenance because so few students were still on campus.
State school revenues are at the mercy of state budgets, and by April 2020, states were anticipating budget shortfalls of a combined $500 billion, as budgets were slashed amid concerns about tax collection and lost tourism revenue. For instance, a steep drop in tourism in Hawaii forced Gov. David Ige to request a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/11/public-colleges-and-universities-brace-for-steep-budget-cuts-spurred-by-the-pandemic-475393">15 percent reduction</a> in the general account that funds the campuses in the state’s university system. The university systems of Alaska and Nevada also lost millions.
Elite private universities, on the other hand, often have larger budgets, due to the size of their endowments, but those budgets are usually funded by investment income, meaning they grow when the markets are doing well and shrink when they’re in a downturn. At schools like <a href="https://covidinfo.jhu.edu/financial-implications-and-planning/april-update-on-financial-implications-planning/">Johns Hopkins</a>, the initial market shock reduced the university’s investment income and concurrent budget by millions of dollars. Such losses, along with an expected decrease in tuition revenues and dorm fees, caused some schools to push the panic button.
Broadly speaking, an endowment is a kind of <a href="https://www.headwater-ic.com/sites/default/files/users/CBMason/topicsPapers/Topics_2015-04,Endowments.pdf">nest-egg investment fund</a>, meant to provide stability, as a “bastion of the institution’s perpetuity,” as Francois Furstenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me.
At the nation’s largest private schools, these funds can range in value from <a href="https://emorywheel.com/endowment-increases-by-less-than-1-in-2020/">$7.94 billion at Atlanta’s Emory University</a> to <a href="https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy20_financial_overview.pdf">$41.89 billion at Harvard</a> and are used to pay for everything from building projects to endowed scholarships. They have come to be seen as so central to a school’s continued existence that at many of the country’s largest private universities, boards of trustees spend millions of dollars on consulting fees to maximize their returns. Some institutions, like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, spend more on consulting fees than on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/opinion/stop-universities-from-hoarding-money.html">financial aid for an entire student body</a>.
All this exposure to risk paid dividends for private schools last year, literally, as the stock market began an unexpected rapid rebound, gaining almost 32 percent in just three months.
For example, by October 2020, Johns Hopkins reported a <a href="https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/10/austerity-measures-will-be-kept-despite-budget-surplus">budget surplus of $75 million</a>, a <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-era-of-artificial-scarcity?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in">$126 million swing</a> from the stark projections that led to austerity measures just months prior. Northwestern University announced an <a href="https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/01/13/uncategorized/university-announces-83-4-million-surplus-for-fiscal-year-2020/">$83.4 million surplus</a> for the fiscal year in January. Yale University reported an even more astounding <a href="https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/yale_surplus_city_deficit/">$203 million surplus</a> in November 2020.
“They obviously prepared for the worst back in the middle of last year,” Comrie said. “But once the market rebounded in the fall, it’s a whole lot tougher to defend that level of austerity when literally two months before, it wasn’t there.”
Elite private schools did fine, and so did the public schools with large endowments. As Lee Gardner, a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, told me, “Any school where you’ve got [billions] in the endowment qualifies.” Across the United States and Canada, that means more than 100 institutions managed the coronavirus-induced economic crisis in part by way of their endowments, from the <a href="https://thebestschools.org/features/richest-universities-endowments-generosity-research/">University of Chicago to Virginia Commonwealth University</a>.
But much of these gains was of little immediate help to schools navigating the other effects of the pandemic, or to those faculty and staff wondering about the fates of their jobs.
“In many cases, the endowment is restricted for particular purposes,” Kelchen said. “Seventy-five percent of the endowment may be restricted for using on student financial aid or paying for buildings or endowed faculty positions. The amount that’s unrestricted can be fairly small.”
Increased investment income could mean more spending on those restricted areas — scholarships, salaries, dining, and so on — in the years to come, but could not be moved to protect jobs. That’s because while colleges do turn the endowment into revenue every year — by taking tiny percentages of the interest, never the principal, to put into operating funds. They don’t like going over allotted percentage caps.
“It is generally considered a bad idea to do anything more than that,” Gardner, the Chronicle of Higher Education writer, said. “Because what you are doing is you are eating into the college’s future. I understand that you don’t want to hear that when people are losing jobs. But that is the charge you are given as a university administrator: Protect the institution, protect the next few years.”
But some labor unions, educators, and college experts are now arguing that — at least for the largest public and private collegiate institutions — emergency budget cuts weren’t worth it, given that many had prepared emergency funds for crises like a pandemic.
These massive funding pools, sometimes called “rainy day funds” by collegiate officials and activists, often come from endowments, and can be found in the UC system that employed Hernandez and at many other institutions. The University of Massachusetts network boasts an <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/colleges-are-using-covid-as-an-excuse-for-austerity-unions-are-pushing-back/">emergency stabilization fund of around $125 million</a>. Board of Trustees member Michael V. O’Brien once joked that the money would only ever be spent in the event of “a completely unforeseen cataclysm,” an “asteroid strike,” for example.
Rutgers University, where media studies professor Todd Wolfson teaches, has a similar fund. Wolfson said he learned about the rainy day fund from the University’s chief financial officer.
“I was like, well, this is the largest health crisis in the history of this country,” Wolfson said. “Do you not consider this a moment to use your frickin’ rainy day fund? And they said, ‘We’re thinking about it.’ But they ultimately never ever did.”
Wolfson said schools shied away from pulling excess dollars from rainy day funds and endowments because of broad concerns that had little to do with their missions as educational institutions — including how such a move would look to creditors.
“To them, their rating from Moody’s” factored into schools’ reticence, Wolfson said. “And their ability to take out a loan in the future and not have slightly worse terms, and the desire to grow and grow and grow [the total value of their endowment] and get bigger and bigger, it feeds a logic in it of itself. Growing an endowment for the sake of growing an endowment.”
In general, schools offered little rationale for refusing to use their emergency funds, and their statements around layoffs tended to be vague. For example, in a precursor to announcing their own spate of layoffs, Northwestern’s president said reducing jobs was necessary because the pandemic had placed <a href="https://www.northwestern.edu/leadership-notes/2020/update-on-university-finances.html">“extreme pressure on all our major functions and on associated revenue streams</a>.” When asked about their financial strategies during the pandemic, many of the country’s wealthy private schools — including Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Yale — did not provide comment.
<a href="https://forgeorganizing.org/author/liz-perlman">Liz Perlman</a> — the executive director of AFSCME 3299, the University of California labor union representing 28,000 service workers — told me that austerity in the face of such funds is “lazy policymaking.”
Perlman said AFSCME 3299 identified several alternatives to austerity that could have kept UC’s employees at their jobs, including drawing on some of the $14.8 billion the system possesses that is categorized as short-term or long-term investment funding, meaning it can be spent as the system sees fit. Instead, the university system, California’s third-largest employer, almost laid off 3,000 AFSCME 3299 workers in 2020; the <a href="https://afscme3299.org/media/uc-announces-wave-of-layoffs-hundreds-of-workers-to-protest-wednesday/">number laid off</a> was actually closer to 200, a reduction the union believes was due to its activism.
It wasn’t just the existence of rainy day funds or the rapid market turnaround that makes austerity questionable, however. There is also the fact that, particularly at the largest schools, advocates like workers unions began to develop new, more equitable alternatives to traditional austerity measures.
Todd Wolfson, the Rutgers media studies professor and president of the university’s largest educators’ union, believes that there are alternatives to austerity that can still yield savings in a crisis, and that can be useful in situations with rapidly changing conditions, like the pandemic.
His union, for instance, presented Rutgers with a plan in which every unionized worker agreed to voluntary furloughs in exchange for no layoffs; Wolfson said it would have saved the university upward of $150 million.
“There’s a way to do this that’s collaborative, that really lifts up the university as a moral beacon for how to handle a crisis,” Wolfson said. “As opposed to a neoliberal-driven institution that punishes whomever it has to punish in thinking about its bottom line. To this day, it’s a mystery to me why they said no.”
The university ultimately went with its own plan, laying off 1,000 workers, disproportionately women and people of color; 400 adjunct professors were told they wouldn’t be returning the following year, saving Rutgers $4.5 million, which is roughly <a href="https://www.app.com/story/sports/college/rutgers/2019/12/03/greg-schiano-contract-perks-car-jet-use-country-club-wardrobe/2596807001/">the yearly salary of head football coach Greg Schiano</a>.
But the school’s strategy shifted with the arrival of a new president, Jonathan Holloway, in July. At a virtual summit in October, Holloway said that Rutgers would need to continue to find savings, given that, despite its endowment, Rutgers was not among the schools that profited during the pandemic — though its <a href="https://www.rutgersaaup.org/here-are-the-facts-about-the-fiscal-emergency/">losses were revised down</a> from an estimated $200 million to a much more manageable $54 million.
“We have a very large workforce, but when we don’t have jobs for them because our students aren’t here, like, ‘What do we do?’” <a href="https://www.tapinto.net/towns/new-brunswick/sections/rutgers-university/articles/rutgers-holloway-on-rutgers-layoffs-we-have-done-everything-we-can">Holloway said at the virtual summit</a>. “We’ve worked very hard to find as many other kinds of jobs that they’ll be trained into, but at some point all that stops. And this has been the real frustration of the pandemic. You can try and try and try and all of a sudden, the math doesn’t work anymore and you have to make these really difficult decisions.”
In February 2021, Holloway and Wolfson’s union came together on a smaller work-sharing agreement that will keep the university from enacting further layoffs through the end of the Covid-19 crisis.
“I reached out to President Holloway, I said, ‘Hey, this is a moment. Let’s try to figure out if we can bargain a deal ... we’re not gonna be able to get everything back but at least get on a better footing and try to figure out what’s next,’” Wolfson said.
The union at Rutgers wasn’t alone in finding creative solutions to keep workers employed; the University of California system agreed to a deal with AFSCME Local 2399 whereby workers at several universities could voluntarily transfer to UC hospitals so they could keep jobs within the university system.
Some workers made the move, guaranteeing a job for themselves. AFSCME said it fought hard to give them that option, and that the deal kept thousands more workers from being laid off.
Perlman, the AFSCME executive director, helped negotiate the agreement. But she said that while it helped, it wasn’t good enough, that a university system with $40 billion in funding shouldn’t be laying off the poorest members of its community.
“If you live in a bubble and you actually count beans and nuts, then that makes sense,” Perlman said. “But if you actually look at the real world, those humans are actual Black and brown low-wage service workers who were also the same humans and their family members who were showing up at UC hospitals with Covid and then dying from it.”
And Perlman noted that the first person who died of Covid-19 in California was an AFSCME union member, a truck driver at UC Santa Cruz.
While the pandemic has led to some changes — including more union activity — overall, little has changed with respect to schools’ financial underpinnings. For instance, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/system/files/media/IHE_2021-Presidents-Survey.pdf">Inside Higher Ed’s</a> 2021 survey of university presidents found only 17 percent saying they would make larger than planned draws from the endowment to increase revenue in future economic crises.
That response may come from the fact that so many schools are entering this phase of the pandemic in strong shape. The same poll found 80 percent of presidents are confident their institution will be financially stable over the next 10 years, an increase from the 57 percent that agreed before the pandemic hit in 2020.
“The sky did not fall,” Gardner said. “I hope that does not imbue false confidence for the people who run these institutions that they shouldn’t be as prepared as they possibly can be or be as cautious as they can be in the event that something like this comes up again.”
Hernandez feels the same way. Just weeks ago, he and the staff at Riverside got word that they’d be laid off again this summer. He’d never experienced that insecurity before last summer. Now, it’s a running theme.
“We’re cooks, we’re storekeepers, people who feed the students in our department,” Hernandez said. “And we’re trying to figure out, why is it that we suffer?”
Gregory Svirnovskiy is a student at Northwestern University and a politics and policy intern at Vox through the university’s journalism residency program.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22521935/austerity-university-college-covid-19-pandemic-service-workers-labor-unions">https://www.vox.com/22521935/austerity-university-college-covid-19-pandemic-service-workers-labor-unions</a>

vox The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did

Jesse Hernandez, a senior cook at the University of California Riverside, started hearing rumors that layoffs were coming for the residence...

What Top European Agency Official Said On AstraZeneca Use Amid Concerns

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="What Top European Agency Official Said On AstraZeneca Use Amid Concerns" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-04/las1uf2_astrazeneca_625x300_26_April_21.jpg" title="What Top European Agency Official Said On AstraZeneca Use Amid Concerns" /></div>
Italy on Saturday restricted AstraZeneca vaccines to people aged 60 and over (File)
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Rome:
A top official in the European Medicines Agency said it might be worth abandoning AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine for all age groups where alternatives are available, in an interview published Sunday.
Marco Cavaleri, the EMA's head of vaccine strategy, also told Italy's La Stampa newspaper that the Johnson & Johnson jab should be preferentially used for the over 60s.
Both so-called viral vector vaccines are authorised for everyone over 18 but have been dogged by reports of rare blood clots. The EU has also authorised two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
Italy on Saturday restricted AstraZeneca vaccines to people aged 60 and over following concerns about the heightened health risks for younger people.
Asked if it would not be better to ban AstraZeneca including for the over 60s, Cavaleri said: "Yes, and it is an option that many countries, such as France and Germany, are considering in the light of the increased availability of mRNA vaccines.
"However, incidents were very rare and after the first dose. It is true that there is less data on the second dose, but in the United Kingdom it (the vaccination programme) is going well."
He added: "Among young people the risks of illness decrease, and the message for them could be to use preferentially the mRNA vaccines, but the choice is left to individual states."
He noted the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine has "fewer problems than AstraZeneca" while noting it had been less widely used.
"With one dose it is useful for some categories that are difficult to reach, but it remains an adenovirus (vaccine) and it is preferable to reserve it for the over 60s," he said.
Messenger RNA genetic technology trains the body to reproduce spike proteins, similar to that found on the coronavirus. When exposed to the real virus later, the body recognises the spike proteins and is able to fight them off.
Viral vector vaccines like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson use genetically-engineered version of a common-cold causing adenovirus as a "vector" to shuttle genetic instructions into human cells.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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Italy on Saturday restricted AstraZeneca vaccines to people aged 60 and over (File) Rome: A top official in the European Medicines Agen...

Emmanuel Macron Sparred With Boris Johnson Over Brexit Geography At G7

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Emmanuel Macron Sparred With Boris Johnson Over Brexit Geography At G7" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-06/9c52vui4_emmanuel-macron-boris-johnson-reuters_625x300_13_June_21.jpg" title="Emmanuel Macron Sparred With Boris Johnson Over Brexit Geography At G7" /></div>
Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron attend a bilateral meeting during G7 summit
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Carbis Bay, England:
French President Emmanuel Macron stepped into the Brexit maelstrom on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit by sparring with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the post-Brexit geography of the United Kingdom and France.
Ever since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the two sides have been trying to solve the riddle of what to do about the United Kingdom's Northern Ireland which has a land border with EU member Ireland.
Over years of discussions, the two sides have made little headway, agreeing multiple texts and deals only to find that their solutions fall well short of expectations, and then bickering over what to do.
Ultimately, the discussion keeps coming back to the delicate patchwork of history, nationalism, religion and geography that intertwine in Northern Ireland.
The latest spat comes after Britain's Telegraph newspaper reported that Macron had suggested during talks at the G7 with Johnson that Northern Ireland was not part of the United Kingdom after the prime minister queried how he would react if French courts prevented the shipment of Toulouse sausages to Paris.
"The president said that Toulouse and Paris were part of a single geographic area and that Northern Ireland was on an island," the Elysee Palace said.
"The president wants to highlight that the situation was quite different and that it wasn't right to draw this kind of comparison," the Elysee said.
The British-run region remains deeply split along sectarian lines: Many Catholic nationalists aspire to unification with Ireland while Protestant unionists want to stay in the UK.
British foreign minister Dominic Raab voiced his criticism of the EU for treating Northern Ireland as if it was a separate country rather than part of the United Kingdom, and that this approach was causing damage to the British province.
"Various EU figures here in Carbis Bay, but frankly for months now and years, have characterised Northern Ireland as somehow a separate country and that is wrong. It is a failure to understand the facts," he told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme.
BREXIT RIDDLE
The EU does not want Northern Ireland to be a backdoor into its single market but will not accept a border between the province and the Republic of Ireland. The two sides agreed to put checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom as part of the Northern Ireland protocol, the element of the Brexit divorce deal that relates to trade in the province.
Britain now says those checks are too cumbersome and divisive and pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland say the deal contravenes a U.S.-brokered 1998 peace deal that brought an end to three decades of violence.
Britain will do "whatever it takes" to protect its territorial integrity in a trade dispute with the European Union, Johnson said on Saturday, threatening emergency measures if no solution was found.
"It is time for the government to stop talking about fixes to the Protocol and get on with taking the necessary steps to remove it," said Edwin Poots, leader of Democratic Unionist Party, Northern Ireland's largest political party.
He said he has written to Macron whose comments he described as offensive and ignorant.
Macron reminded Johnson that it was a British decision to leave the bloc.
"He reminded (Johnson) that the UK's exit from the EU was a British decision and that it was necessary to stick to the word given," the Elysee said. "The President then steered the conversation back to the key issues of the G7."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/frances-emmanuel-macron-sparred-with-boris-johnson-over-brexit-geography-at-g7-2462883">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/frances-emmanuel-macron-sparred-with-boris-johnson-over-brexit-geography-at-g7-2462883</a>

news world Emmanuel Macron Sparred With Boris Johnson Over Brexit Geography At G7

Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron attend a bilateral meeting during G7 summit Carbis Bay, England: French President Emmanuel Macron ste...

Joe Biden, Wife Jill To Have Tea With Queen Elizabeth As G7 Ends

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Queen Elizabeth will greet the Bidens in the Quadrangle of the Windsor Castle
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Windsor:
U.S. President Joe Biden and his wife Jill will have tea with Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle on Sunday at the end of the G7 summit and as he wraps up the British leg of his first international trip since taking office.
The 95-year-old British monarch will greet the Bidens in the Quadrangle of the castle, home to the royal family for nearly 1,000 years and where she has spent much of her time since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
After their arrival, a Guard of Honour formed of The Queen's Company First Battalion Grenadier Guards will give a Royal Salute, and the U.S. National Anthem will be played, Buckingham Palace said.
The queen has already met the Bidens on their visit to Britain, having hosted a reception for the leaders of the Groups of Seven rich nations and their spouses on Friday night in Cornwall, on the southwest tip of England where a three-day summit has been held.
"Joe and I are both looking forward to meeting the queen," Jill Biden said after they arrived in Britain on Thursday. "That's an exciting part of the visit for us."
Biden will become the fourth president and first lady she has received at Windsor, following the Trumps in 2018, the Obamas in 2016, President George W. Bush and his wife in 2008 and the Reagans in 1982.
During her 69 years on the British throne, the longest reign of any English monarch, there have been 14 U.S. presidents, of which Elizabeth has met all bar Lyndon Johnson.
Despite the loss in April of Prince Philip, her 99-year-old husband of more than 70 years, and her age, the queen has shown her determination to carry on with her official duties as head of state during the high-profile G7 summit.
After hosting the leaders on Friday where she cracked a joke during the official photocall, she provoked more laughter at another official engagement for a local project immediately afterwards when she cut a cake with a long ceremonial sword.
On Saturday, she was back in Windsor for a military parade to mark her official birthday, the first one she has marked without Philip.
After leaving Windsor, Biden will head off to a NATO summit in Brussels on Monday, a U.S.-EU summit on Tuesday and a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva the following day.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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news world Joe Biden, Wife Jill To Have Tea With Queen Elizabeth As G7 Ends

Queen Elizabeth will greet the Bidens in the Quadrangle of the Windsor Castle Windsor: U.S. President Joe Biden and his wife Jill will ...

Gas Pipe Explosion Kills 12, Injures 138 In Chinese City: Report

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China blast: The injured are still under emergency treatment, reports said (Representational)
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Hong Kong:
A gas pipe explosion in a residential community in a central Chinese city killed 12 people and injured 138, state media CCTV reported Sunday.
One hundred-fifty people were evacuated following the deadly accident in the city of Shiyan in Hubei province, it said, of which 37 are critically injured.
The explosion caused a food market building to collapse at 6:30 a.m., local media reported. Footage from CCTV shows wreckage and shattered glass covering the first floor of the collapsed building, where people were having breakfast and buying groceries when explosion happened.
People can be seen walking in a rubble-strewn street between damaged buildings.
Hospitals in Shiyan are asking residents to donate blood, as the injured are still under emergency treatment, CCTV said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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news world Gas Pipe Explosion Kills 12, Injures 138 In Chinese City: Report

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Israel Parliament Set To Vote On Anti-Benjamin Netanyahu Government

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Israel Parliament Set To Vote On Anti-Benjamin Netanyahu Government" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-05/81gcmcmg_benjamin-netanyahuafp_625x300_31_May_21.jpg" title="Israel Parliament Set To Vote On Anti-Benjamin Netanyahu Government" /></div>
Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed Israeli politics firmly to the right over the years (File)
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Jerusalem:
Israeli lawmakers are to vote Sunday on a "change" coalition government of bitter ideological rivals united by their determination to banish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power.
The crunch Knesset vote will either terminate the hawkish premier's uninterrupted 12-year tenure or return Israel to a stalemate likely to trigger a fifth general election since 2019.
Netanyahu, who is battling a clutch of corruption charges in an ongoing trial he dismisses as a conspiracy, has pushed Israeli politics firmly to the right over the years.
On Saturday night, around 2,000 protesters rallied outside the 71-year-old's official residence to celebrate what they believe will be his departure from office.
"For us, this is a big night and tomorrow will be even a bigger day. I am almost crying. We fought peacefully for this (Netanyahu's departure) and the day has come," said protester Ofir Robinski.
A fragile eight-party alliance, ranging from the right-wing Jewish nationalist Yamina party to Arab lawmakers, was early this month cobbled together by centrist politician Yair Lapid.
On Friday, all coalition agreements had been signed and submitted to the Knesset secretariat, Yamina announced, a moment party leader Naftali Bennett said brought "to an end two and a half years of political crisis".
But the ever-combative Netanyahu has tried to peel off defectors that would deprive the nascent coalition of its wafer thin legislative majority.
'Peaceful transition'
If the new government is confirmed, Bennett, a former defence minister, would serve as premier for two years.
Coalition architect Lapid, who heads the Yesh Atid party and is a former television presenter, would then take the helm.
The anti-Netanyahu bloc spans the political spectrum, including three right-wing, two centrist and two left-wing parties, along with an Arab Islamic conservative party.
The improbable alliance emerged two weeks after an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Palestinian enclave of Gaza and following inter-communal violence in Israeli cities with significant Arab populations.
"We will work together, out of partnership and national responsibility -- and I believe we will succeed," Bennett said Friday.
Sunday's crucial Knesset session is due to open at 4:00 pm local time (1300 GMT), with Bennett, Lapid and Netanyahu all set to speak before the vote.
Netanyahu has heaped pressure on his former right-wing allies to defect from the fledgling coalition while attacking the legitimacy of the Bennett-Lapid partnership.
He has accused Bennett of "fraud" for siding with rivals, and angry rallies by the premier's Likud party supporters have resulted in security being bolstered for some lawmakers.
Netanyahu's bombastic remarks as he sees his grip on power slip have drawn parallels at home and abroad to former US president Donald Trump, who described his election loss last year as the result of a rigged vote.
The prime minister has called the prospective coalition "the greatest election fraud in the history" of Israel.
His Likud party said the accusations refer to Bennett entering a coalition that "doesn't reflect the will of the voters".
'Scorched earth'
Sunday's vote arrives hot on the heels of police crackdowns on Palestinian protests over the threatened eviction of families from homes in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers, a month after similar clashes fuelled the latest war between Israel and Hamas.
It also comes amid right-wing anger over the postponement of a controversial Jewish nationalist march.
Netanyahu favoured finding a way to allow the so-called "March of the Flags", originally scheduled to take place last Thursday, to proceed as planned.
He took that position despite the original route envisaging the march unfolding close to flashpoint areas including the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, where clashes last month triggered the Gaza conflict.
The premier's insistence saw his opponents accuse him and his allies of stoking tensions to cling onto power via a "scorched-earth" campaign.
If Netanyahu loses the premiership, he will not be able to push through changes to basic laws that could give him immunity in regard to his corruption trial.
The controversial flag march is now slated for Tuesday and ongoing tensions surrounding it could represent a key initial test for any approved coalition.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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news world Israel Parliament Set To Vote On Anti-Benjamin Netanyahu Government

Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed Israeli politics firmly to the right over the years (File) Jerusalem: Israeli lawmakers are to vote Sunda...