Biden Administration Taps Private Sector to Invest in Central

Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday unveiled the agreements of 12 companies and organizations to invest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as part of the administration’s efforts to deal with a surge of migrants from Central America at the U.S. southern border.

Among the companies involved, Microsoft Corp. has agreed to expand internet access to as many as three million people in the region by July 2022 and to establish community centers to provide digital skills to women and youths.

Mastercard Inc. will seek to bring five million people in the region who currently lack banking services into the financial system and to give one million micro and small businesses access to electronic banking. The yogurt maker Chobani has agreed to bring its incubator program for local entrepreneurs to Guatemala. Nespresso, a unit of Nestlé SA, plans to begin buying some of its coffee from El Salvador and Honduras with a minimum regional investment of $150 million by 2025.

Democratic and Republican administrations have struggled to find long-term solutions to handling surges in migrants from Central America, many of whom say they are driven by poverty and violence in their home countries. The region was hit hard last year by two disastrous hurricanes.

Biden administration officials have said the aim in part is for greater private-sector involvement to outlast shifts in policy and government aid between administrations, reducing over time the motivations for migrants to make the often dangerous journey to the U.S. border.
When GameStop’s stock took off in January, it caught a lot of people by surprise, especially institutional Wall Street investors. Why was a stock for a struggling video game retailer shooting up almost 2,000%?

The explanation at the time was that a group of people on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets all started buying the stock at the same time.

But the forces that drove GameStop’s surge go much deeper than online chatter. The moment was driven by changing dynamics in investing, new trading technology (which one investor described as giving the keys of a Porsche to a teenager), resentment of Wall Street and even pandemic isolation.

Our five-part special podcast series, “To The Moon,” tells the full story of the GameStop saga, and invites listeners onto the roller-coaster ride that was GameStop—to feel what it was like for the individual investors who were suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight, and to hear why they wanted to risk their life savings in the first place.

A protest march in downtown Seattle led to at least four arrests Saturday afternoon, the Seattle Police Department said. 

Three of the protesters were arrested for obstruction and resisting arrest and the fourth was arrested for carrying an illegal fixed blade knife, Q13 FOX in Seattle reported. The protesters were between 25 and 33 years old. 
The three protesters allegedly interfered with officers who were attempting to arrest another protester wanted for an alleged assault. That person was able to get away, police said. 

The protests marked the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of his murder last month. 
The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill proposed by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN) requiring President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence related to any potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The American people deserve to know about the origins of COVID-19. They deserve to know how this terrible pandemic that has ravaged the globe and our country, how it got started and what China’s role was in starting it,” Hawley said on the Senate floor.

Hawley, who first called for an international investigation into China’s role in the spread of the virus in March 2020, noted that there has been increasing speculation from government officials on the possibility the virus originated from the WIV.
Mark Eaton, the 7-foot-4 shot-blocking king who twice was the NBA Defensive Player of the Year during his career with the Utah Jazz, has died, the team said Saturday. He was 64.

The Jazz said that police said Eaton was found lying in the road around 8:30 p.m. Friday after apparently crashing his bike in Summit County, Utah. According to the team, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office said that Eaton was taken to a hospital, where he later died, and that there was no reason to believe a vehicle was involved in the accident.

“The Utah Jazz are profoundly saddened at the unexpected passing of Mark Eaton, who was an enduring figure in our franchise history and had a significant impact in the community after his basketball career,” the team said in a statement.
A house under foreclosure in Las Vegas displays a sign on Oct. 15, 2010, saying that it’s now bank-owned. Sen. Sherrod Brown has vowed increased scrutiny of Wall Street banks, in part after a surge in foreclosures in his hometown in Ohio over a decade ago.