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Stranger Than Fiction
A brief daily note of things you might find interesting or useful
I’ll be sharing stories from doctors, nurses and other medical workers who are on the frontlines of COVID-19. You can read them here. The article will continue to be updated with new stories. If you know frontline workers who would like to be included, let me know.
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TOP NEWS
Another 5.2 million Americans filed for unemployment, raising the total in a month to 20 million. Some workers are seeing long delays in receiving payments for unemployment due to overloaded, decades old filing systems. Economists don’t expect the numbers to fall until mid-May or longer.
Business leaders say Trump’s goal of a May 1 reopening date for much of the country is unrealistic. Trump has tried to assemble chief executives from across the country to participate in his working group, many never agreed and were surprised to hear they were included.
Many small businesses have been shut out of stimulus money. Franchise companies that provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers are ineligible for the money allocated by Congress due to how the Small Business Administration is interpreting the law.
Security forces enforcing the lockdown in Nigeria to curb the spread of Covid-19 have killed more people so far than the virus itself. According to the National Human Rights Commission, “there were 8 documented incidents of extrajudicial killings leading to 18 deaths”, it said. According to the latest figures published on Wednesday night, 12 people in Nigeria have died of Covid-19, out of a total of 407 confirmed cases.
WHAT I’M READING + WATCHING + LISTENING TO
THE COMMENT
“We got a note about a conference call, like you’d get an invite to a Zoom thing, a few lines in an email, and that was it. Then our CEO heard his name in the Rose Garden? What the [expletive]?” said one prominent Washington lobbyist for a leading global corporation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “My company is furious. How do you go from ‘Join us on a call’ to, ‘Well, you’re on our team?’”
THE STRANGEST
THE AV ROOM