From the Asbury Park Press and the Associated Press
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Sunday morning state officials are considering a statewide curfew as one way to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.
“We’re not there at a statewide level on either of those steps, but we could be,” said Murphy, who had called in to WBLS 107.5 FM. “The curfew is probably, of the two, is probably the more immediate one under consideration. But these are the things we have to consider, we have no choice.”
There were 69 other known coronavirus cases in New Jersey as of Saturday, and officials expect that number to rise as testing becomes more available.
The spread of the virus has altered daily life for New Jersey residents and with every day, there are more cases confirmed and new calls for social-distancing.
HOBOKEN CURFEW
Hours after announcing that gyms, health clubs, day cares and movie theaters would join the list of closures in Hoboken, Mayor Ravi S. Bhalla announced the forthcoming curfew and additional restrictions.
The citywide curfew that begins Monday will be in effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and requires all residents to remain in their homes, barring emergencies. People who are required to report to work are exempted, the statement released late Saturday said.
To further limit gatherings, the city’s Office of Emergency Management will not permit restaurants and bars to serve food within their premises. Bars that don’t serve food will be shut down, effective Sunday at 11 a.m. Any establishment that serves food will be allowed to conduct takeout and delivery service.
The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia and The Philadelphia Inquirer LLC reached a tentative three-year contract agreement with raises and a workforce diversity provision, the union and company said Thursday.
The 338 union members began voting on the tentative contract on Thursday and are expected to continue voting through 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
The tentative contract contains a onetime lump-sum payment equivalent to 2.5% of a union member’s salary in the contract’s first year, plus a $500 signing bonus.
In the second year, the company would raise pay for Guild members by 3%. The third year would include a 2% raise.
Although many individual Guild members have received raises in recent years, the new contract would include the first across-the-board raises since August 2009 for newsroom reporters, photographers, digital producers, audience engagement, and other editorial staffers, in addition to finance, advertising, and circulation employees.
With news breaking about the coronavirus, the company and the union concluded talks more than two weeks before the current contract expires on March 31. The two sides negotiated for five months. The company is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
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“I said it would be a win for all of us for this [no-pay-raise] narrative to change,” said Diane Mastrull, the guild president and lead negotiator. “We have so many important things to do here for them to be overshadowed by something like no raises.
“By no means is anyone getting rich from this contract, but we could not have employees worried about whether they would be able to pay their bills year to year,” she added.
Inquirer publisher Elizabeth H. Hughes spoke with negotiators on Thursday and told them that, given the coronavirus and the potential impact on the economy, they had to finalize a deal, Mastrull said.
Hughes, a former magazine executive who took her position in Philadelphia in early February, declined to comment on specifics before union members voted on the contract. She noted that the process was far advanced when she arrived.
Hughes added, “I am happy with where we are.”
Hughes said that “our industry is certainly not immune to what’s going on in the world. We are in a bear market, and I think everyone is aware of that. With a tentative agreement, we are focused on what’s important, serving the community with journalism that matters.”
The tentative contract continues its health benefits and “includes extensive language committing the company to the recruitment, employment, promotion, training and career development of a diverse workforce,” the union said in an email announcing the tentative contract.
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Editor’s Note: Normally, we applaud the entrepreneur who seizes on a marketing opportunity to cash in. Not so much in the case of this guy whose get-rich-quick plan was short circuited by Amazon. Thank you, New York Times, for such an interesting story. What do you think? Share your view by clicking on the ‘comments’ link. — Frank Brill
An Amazon merchant, Matt Colvin, with an overflow stock of cleaning and sanitizing supplies in his garage in Hixson, Tenn.Credit…Doug Strickland for The New York Times
On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.
Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”
Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.
The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.
Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.
“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”
Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers’ accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.
Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.
Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.
Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn’t find it for less than $50.
“You’re being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain,” she said of the sellers.
Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.
These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.
As they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.
Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.
At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15 percent and eBay roughly 10 percent, depending on the price and the seller.
As the coronavirus continued to spread Friday across southeastern Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf announced that all K-12 schools will be closed for 10 school days starting Monday.
The Wolf administration will decide at the end of the 10-day period, or March 27, whether to extend the closure into the week of March 29.AdvertisementPauseUnmuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time-0:31Fullscreen
“We understand that these are trying times and recognize the impact of the coronavirus on our students and communities,” Wolf said in a statement. “First and foremost, my top priority as governor – and that of our education leaders – must be to ensure the health and safety of our students and school communities.”
The decision followed Wolf’s directive Thursday that all schools in Montgomery County, the hardest hit by COVID-19 so far, close for two weeks. Earlier Friday afternoon, neighboring Bucks County had followed suit, canceling in-person classes for the next two weeks because of the number of employees who live in Montgomery County.
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Pennsylvania joined at least seven other states, including Maryland and Virginia, in closing all schools for at least a week. As of 2 p.m., about 22,000 schools had been closed or were scheduled to close, affecting at least 15 million students, according to Education Week. That didn’t include all closings in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Pennsylvania’s order affects more than 1.7 million school children alone in public and private schools.
Pennsylvania’s case count jumped to 33 from 22 on Friday, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, including a pediatric patient in Monroe County. The Lehigh Valley’s first and only case of coronavirus so far was reported Thursday morning in Northampton County.
No school district will be penalized if it fails to meet the 180 day or school hours requirements, Wolf said in a statement.
Bethlehem Area Superintendent Joseph Roy said he’s concerned what working parents will do for childcare now that schools are closed for two weeks. That was one of the reasons why Roy didn’t shut down Bethlehem Area’s 22 schools.
“It’s not like summer where there’s camps,” he said. “There’s nothing. It’s a major problem.”
Roy said the district is ironing out plans, such as whether it will have lessons for students and how to get meals to students who are dependent on the district for meals.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education announced Friday that it received a federal waiver allowing eligible schools to serve meals to low income students in a non-congregate setting, such as a drive-through or grab and go, during this closure. The department said it would work to assist school districts with its efforts.
In Allentown, 77% of its 17,000 students live in poverty. When the district announced it was closing Thursday and Friday because an employee was being tested for coronavirus, many were concerned about students receiving meals if the closure is longer.
Because of Allentown’s high poverty rate, all students receive free breakfast and lunch. Allentown, one of the state’s largest school districts, was the first in the Lehigh Valley to announce it was closing as a precaution because of the coronavirus.
Wolf has asked Pennsylvanians to avoid malls, movie theaters, gyms and other gathering places, and “strongly encouraged” the suspension of planned large gatherings, events, conferences of 250 individuals or more.
His works often caught passers-by unawares. One was so lifelike that, after 9/11, firefighters are said to have tried to rescue it.
J. Seward Johnson Jr.’s sculpture “Double Check” survived the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His lifelike creations were often displayed in public settings. Credit…Susan Meiseles/Magnum Photos
J. Seward Johnson Jr., a sculptor who may be responsible for more double takes than anyone in history thanks to his countless lifelike creations in public places — a businessman in downtown Manhattan, surfers at a Florida beach, a student eating a sandwich on a curb in Princeton, N.J. — died on Tuesday at his home in Key West, Fla. He was 89.
His family said through a spokesman that the cause was cancer.
Mr. Johnson had another distinction besides his art. As a member of the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical and consumer products giant, he was one of six siblings who, in a high-profile court case in the 1980s, sought to overturn his father’s will, which left his vast fortune to a former maid, Barbara Piasecka Johnson, whom the senior Mr. Johnson had married late in life. A settlement was reached just before the case went to the jury, giving the children a share of the estate but leaving most of it to Mrs. Johnson.
But more enduring were the sculptures, which often caught passers-by unawares; many would pause for a closer look and, in the cellphone age, a picture. One sculpture in particular became something more than a curiosity. It was a work Mr. Johnson called “Double Check”: a seated businessman reviewing the contents of his briefcase.
The sculpture was in Liberty Park near the World Trade Center when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, left the area in ruins. Many other artworks in the buildings and outside were destroyed that day, but the man with the briefcase, though knocked off his perch, survived, covered in debris.
The sculpture is so lifelike that firefighters are said to have tried to rescue it. It became a makeshift memorial — a symbol of endurance to some, a reminder of the bodies never recovered to others. In 2006 it was installed in the newly named Zuccotti Park, not far from its original spot.
“I thought of him as a businessman Everyman — with his briefcase — getting ready for his next appointment, and people identified with him,” Mr. Johnson told The New York Times in 2005. “So when he survived, it was as if he was one of them — surviving as well.”
Mr. Johnson at work on his first sculpture, “Stainless Girl.” It won a contest sponsored by U.S. Steel.Credit…The Seward Johnson Atelier, Inc.
John Seward Johnson Jr. was born on April 16, 1930, in New Brunswick, N.J. His father was the son of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson. His mother, Ruth Dill Johnson, was a native of Bermuda whose father had been Bermuda’s attorney general.
Mr. Johnson, by his own admission a poor student, was sent to the Forman School in Litchfield, Conn.
“It was a place for dyslexics,” he told The Times in 2002, “although we weren’t called that then.”
He tried college at the University of Maine, where he studied poultry husbandry. (“It was the only thing they’d let me into,” he said.) Then, in 1951, he joined the Navy.
After leaving the Navy in 1955 he took a management job in the family company, but a troubled first marriage, to Barbara Kline, proved distracting. He is said to have hired private detectives to raid his own house in the middle of the night hoping to catch her in an indiscretion; she was alone, thought the detectives were intruders and shot one of them, injuring him.
Soon after their divorce in 1964, Mr. Johnson married Cecelia Joyce Horton, who got him interested in art. Sometimes they would paint together, although he wasn’t very good at it.
“I didn’t like what I could do with paint,” he told The Times, “so my wife suggested sculpture because I had some mechanical ability.”
He took some classes and made his first piece, in stainless steel. It won a contest sponsored by U.S. Steel.
One of Mr. Seward’s many lifelike sculptures, “Gotcha” (1993).Credit…Carl Deal III
“I thought, oh gee, this is great, maybe sculpture isn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Johnson told the newspaper U.S. 1 in 2002. “I never won anything after that.”
UPDATE: March 11, 2020: A bill banning single-use plastic bags (SB 5323) has been sent to Gov. Jay Inslee for final approval. If he signs it, which is considered likely, Washington will become the ninth state with some form of bag policy. Another bill setting post-consumer recycled content standards (HB 2722) has also passed both chambers of the state legislature, following final amendments, and is also off to Inslee for consideration.
Dive Brief:
Washington state is considering establishing minimum post-consumer recycled content (PCR) standards for plastic beverage containers (HB 2722), banning single-use plastic bags that do not meet minimum content standards (SB 5323), and banning expanded polystyrene products (SB 6213).
The first bill has passed the state House and the latter two have passed the state Senate, with further committee hearings scheduled this week. But it is unclear how each might ultimately fare. A prior version of the bag ban, for example, passed the Senate last year before stalling in the House.
Groups like Zero Waste Washington are supportive of these bills and other waste-centric legislation. Heather Trim, the organization’s executive director, told Waste Dive the uptick reflects a growing national trend. “I think there’s going to be a lot of plastics-related legislation across the United States because there’s so much public interest,” she said.
