Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal Monday April 19, 2021 [CCLXXVII, US ed.] 7890863141

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MONDAY, APRIL 19, 2021 ~ VOL. CCLXXVII NO. 90

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Last week: DJIA 34200.67 À 400.07 1.2%

NASDAQ 14052.34 À 1.1%

STOXX 600 442.49 À 1.2%

10-YR. TREASURY À 27/32 , yield 1.571%

OIL $63.13 À $3.81

Business & Finance  More stocks have been propelling the U.S. market higher lately, a signal that further gains could be ahead, but how smooth the climb might be remains up for debate. A1

World-Wide  Growing concerns over Alexei Navalny’s health have sparked calls for mass protests this week across Russia to demand the opposition leader’s release, with the U.S. warning there will be consequences if he dies. A1  U.S. health authorities came close to simply warning about a blood-clotting risk from J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine, but decided to recommend pausing use out of concern doctors would improperly treat the condition. A1

 The president’s decision to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan overrode recommendations of top military commanders, who feared it could undermine security there. A7  Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said he and his Republican colleagues could support an infrastructure bill of around $800 billion, a sum well short of Biden’s $2.3 trillion proposal. A4  The gunman in the shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis legally purchased two semiautomatic rifles after being detained by authorities and having one other gun confiscated. A3  The U.S. and China said they would work together to set more ambitious goals to tackle climate change. A7  Mexico increased detentions and deportations of migrants in March, and said efforts against irregular migration continue. A8 CONTENTS Arts in Review... A13 Business News....... B3 Crossword.............. A14 Heard on Street... B10 Markets...................... B9 Opinion.............. A15-17

Outlook....................... A2 Personal Journal A11-12 Sports....................... A14 Technology............... B4 U.S. News............. A2-6 Weather................... A14 World News........ A7-9

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s 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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 Outlook: GDP set to soar, jobs not as much.................... A2  GOP dangles infrastructure consensus.................................... A4

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BY THOMAS M. BURTON AND BETSY MCKAY

U.S. health authorities came close to simply warning about a blood-clotting risk from Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine, but they decided to recommend pausing use out of concern doctors would improperly treat the condition, people familiar with the matter said. Over the previous four weeks, U.S. health officials had become alarmed about similar blood-clotting conditions in Europe involving a Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca PLC, the

people said. The officials dug into a U.S. vaccine safety database and identified the cases of great concern, but they debated what action to take. By the night of April 12, the officials resolved that urgent action was needed, the people said. Four of six women in the U.S. who developed the clots days after vaccination had initially been given blood thinner heparin, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its use could have worsened the patients’ condition, the people said. That night, top U.S. health officials agreed during a Zoom

meeting to take the strongest step: publicly recommend pausing the vaccine’s use while probing the adverseevent cases, the people said. Since the announcement, the Food and Drug Administration has been studying other reports of additional blood clotting among J&J vaccine recipients, but it hasn’t confirmed whether any reflect the same phenomenon, the people said. Yet officials are growing more persuaded, the people added, that the six cases reported so far are related to the shot. Health officials are now

Oil-and-Gas Landmen Now Hunt for Wind and Sun

Fatal Tesla Crash Investigated

Job to secure drilling rights shifts to deals to place turbines, solar panels BY REBECCA ELLIOTT

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 Scientists in the U.K. plan to reinfect dozens of adult volunteers who have recovered from the virus to better understand protection from previous illness. A6

 Americans abroad return for a shot............................................. A6  Chile sees Covid-19 cases, deaths surge.............................. A8

Worry Over Mistreating Clots Drove Push to Pause J&J Shot

Carter Collum used to spend mornings shoulder to shoulder with competitors in the record rooms of East Texas courthouses, hunting for the owners of underground natural-gas deposits. At night, he made house calls, offering payments and royalties for permission to drill. Mr. Collum worked as a landman, tracking the owners of oil and gas trapped in rock layers thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface and getting their signatures, a job about as old as the American petroleum industry.

He started around 2006, a couple of years before the shale boom took off and pushed prices for drilling rights in East Texas to more than $15,000 an acre from around $250. Successful landmen, racing to knock on doors ahead of rivals, earned six-figure incomes. “It was kind of like the Wild, Wild West,” said Mr. Collum, 39 years old. His predecessors in the field included former President George W. Bush and Aubrey McClendon, the late fracking pioneer who co-founded ChesaPlease turn to page A10

MOSCOW—Growing concerns over the health of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny have sparked calls for mass protests this week in cities across Russia to demand his release as well as a warning on Sunday from the U.S. that there will be consequences if he dies. Supporters of Mr. Navalny called for large-scale demonstrations to demand his release amid fears about his deteriorating medical condition, setting the stage for an escalation in the standoff between President Vladimir Putin of Russia and an opposition movement that has struggled to break his hold on power. The activist has been on a hunger strike for almost three weeks and is in critical condi-

Two men died after a Tesla vehicle that authorities believe was operating without anyone in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree Saturday night near Houston. B2

 BP slots $1.3 billion for Permian flaring............ B1

U.S. Warns Russia Over Navalny’s Care BY ANN M. SIMMONS

SCOTT J. ENGLE

 The Consumer Product Safety Commission told people with young children or pets to stop using Peloton treadmills after an inquiry found dozens of instances of injuries. B3

looking at limiting the J&J vaccine to older people and could make public a decision as early as this week. Another option is allowing a return to widespread use but with an added warning about the benefits and risks. FDA officials are waiting to see what a vaccine advisory panel to the CDC recommends, the people said. The CDC panel, called the Advisory Committee on ImmuPlease turn to page A6

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 Two men died after a Tesla vehicle that authorities believe was operating without anyone in the driver’s seat crashed in Texas. B2

A greater number of stocks have been propelling the U.S. market higher lately, a signal that—if history is any indicator—more gains could be ahead. What remains up for debate, however, is how smooth the climb will be. Indicators that point to a stronger and more resilient stock market have been hitting rare milestones recently as the continuing bull run has once again widened. In the past week, stocks ranging from UnitedHealth Group Inc. to L Brands Inc. to Vulcan Materials Co. hit 52-week highs, joining 184 others in the S&P 500 that did the same. Those gains have helped extend the benchmark index’s rally for the year to 11%—notching 23 records along the way. Investors and analysts often look to technical indicators that measure the breadth of the market’s rally for clues about where it is headed next. A market is generally considered healthier when more stocks are rising together, and signs of strong participation are typically viewed as a signal that a rally has legs. In contrast, a market with poor breadth— such as the one in the late 1990s near the peak of the dot-com bubble—indicates fewer stocks with larger market capitalizations are carrying the load. Lately, signs of strong breadth have abounded, a rePlease turn to page A2

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the U.S. hit a milestone as almost 130 million people 18 or older, or 50.4% of the total adult population, have received at least one vaccine dose, while Johnson & Johnson’s shot remains under review. A2

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 Penske Media agreed to acquire a 50% stake in South by Southwest, the tech, music and movie festival in Texas that has been hurt by the pandemic. B1

BY CAITLIN MCCABE PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

 BP plans to spend about $1.3 billion to collect and capture byproduct natural gas from Permian Basin oil wells, with an announcement expected on ending routine flaring there. B1

YEN 108.81

Technical indicators suggest more gains, but some question how smooth they will be

 WeWork’s plan to list stock by merging with a blank-check company has echoes of its approach in 2019, when the shared-office provider’s IPO imploded. A1

 A Maryland hotel magnate behind an 11th-hour bid to acquire Tribune Publishing is working to find new financing and partnership options after his partner withdrew from the deal. B1

EURO $1.1982

Bull Run In Stocks Widens, Signaling Strength

What’s News

 Citigroup plans to scale up its services to wealthy entrepreneurs and their businesses in Asia as the bank refocuses its operations in the region. B1

HHHH $4.00

WSJ.com

tion, his team said, adding, “His life hangs in the balance.” On Saturday, a medical trade union with ties to Mr. Navalny cited the results of medical tests they said they obtained from the activist’s lawyer as showing he was at risk of imminent kidney failure, which could lead to cardiac arrest. U.S. officials warned Russia on Sunday that there would be consequences if Mr. Navalny dies. “We have communicated to the Russian government that what happens to Mr. Navalny in their custody is their responsibility and they will be held accountable by the international community,’’ national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN. The U.S. warning comes amid escalating tensions with Moscow. President Biden made Please turn to page A7

The New York Power Lunch Is Back i

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New days, no jacket; cocktails now on the menu BY CHARLES PASSY The New York power lunch is back, with new rituals for the see-and-be-seen set: Make sure you’re there on the right day, try out a new wardrobe and Midtown is no longer a must. Business people say they are embracing the opportunity to meet with clients and colleagues over a meal once again. “I’m sick of my own tuna sandwich,” said Adam Schwartz, co-chief executive officer of Angelo Gordon, a New York-based investment firm. Please turn to page A10

WeWork Listing Plan Echoes Its Failed IPO BY JEAN EAGLESHAM AND ELIOT BROWN WeWork, which had one of the most spectacular IPO implosions in recent years, is trying to go public again—and some of the factors that worried regulators on the first deal are back again. WeWork isn’t doing an initial public offering this time, but merging with a specialpurpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Rules around SPACs are looser than for IPOs, giving WeWork more leeway to tout its future. The shared-office provider is expected to merge with a SPAC called BowX Acquisition Corp. later this year. As the two entities promoted the deal to investors, they painted an optimistic scenario for the company’s growth and profitability.

BowX’s chairman described WeWork in a call with investors as a $5 billion revenue company, though that figure is a projection rather than a current number. When describing WeWork’s size, the company counted units that WeWork doesn’t own directly. WeWork is predicting a rapid recovery from the pandemic downturn, which hit its business particularly hard because few people were using offices, much less shared space, and because it was still on the hook for long-term leases. The company is also using a new profit measure that shows higher margins than it claimed in late 2019. In the run-up to the IPO, the Securities and Exchange Commission told WeWork to change certain profit and growth meaPlease turn to page A8

For personal, non-commercial use only. Do not edit, alter or reproduce. For commercial reproduction or distribution, contact Dow Jones Reprints & Licensing at (800) 843-0008 or www.djreprints.com.

A2 | Monday, April 19, 2021

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

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U.S. NEWS

THE OUTLOOK | By Sarah Chaney Cambo

ECONOMIC CALENDAR

GDP Set to Soar, Hiring Not as Much

Index performance, year to date 15%

S&P 500 Equal Weight Index S&P 500

10

5

0 2021 022

April

Percentage of S&P 500 stocks trading above moving averages*

NYSE advance-decline line†

100%

200000

200-day moving average

80

150000

60

100000

40

50-day moving average 20

50000

Nov. 2020

'21

The S&P 500 has already surged 87% from its March 2020 trough. centage of S&P 500 companies trading above their shorterterm 50-day moving averages and watch for when the number crosses 90%—another rare bullish sign. Stocks in the S&P 500 also surpassed that threshold last week. During the past 15 instances when that has happened, the index has likewise ended higher one year later 14 of the times, according to an analysis by Keith Lerner, chief market strategist for Truist Advisory Services. The average annual gain for those 15 times, according to his analysis: 16.4%. Analysts said both indicators are optimistic signs for the market—but note they are flashing at a starkly different time than in the past. Often when such breadth milestones are hit, the S&P 500 is coming off a correction—a drop of at least 10% from a recent high— or a much bigger fall. In contrast, market condi-

2019

'20

'21

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*Analysis based on current S&P 500 constituents †An indicator of market breadth, is the cumulative number of net daily advances. Data through April 15. Sources: FactSet (index performance, moving averages); Dow Jones Market Data (advance-decline)

tions today are far different— leading some analysts to question how much further the bull market can run in the months ahead. The S&P 500 has already surged 87% from its March 2020 trough. Driving the powerful rally have been massive levels of stimulus from the Federal Reserve and Congress, as well as surprisingly strong economic data. Despite early expectations that the U.S. rebound would be lethargic, everything from employment reports to consumerspending indicators have often come in better than expected. A faster-than-anticipated Covid-19 vaccine rollout and an eager crop of individual investors have also juiced markets. “The one thing we know is that the stock market leads [the economy] in recovery…and the big, initial rip has likely already happened,” Mr. Lerner said. “The technicals still suggest upside…but I’d expect periodic pullbacks along the way.” While measures of strong breadth have historically preceded gains six and 12 months ahead, history has shown they don’t preclude short-term setbacks along the way. And outside the S&P 500, there have been signs of weakness in parts of the market lately. Just a few weeks ago, many of the technology and growth companies that have long been investor favorites dragged the Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. Ultimately, however, owing to continued support from the Fed, laggards—especially the growth stocks that continue to dazzle investors—haven’t stayed down for long.

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Continued from Page One versal from much of the past year when a small group of large technology stocks drove much of the market’s gains. Last week, the percentage of stocks in the S&P 500 trading above their 200-day moving averages crossed 95%, rising to the highest level since October 2009, according to data through Thursday. Only during three other periods since the start of 2000 has that measure surpassed and then hovered above 95% for several days, according to a Dow Jones Market Data analysis based on current index constituents. “It’s so rare to see that,” said Frank Cappelleri, a desk strategist and executive director at Instinet. “It shows how strong participation must have been over the last number of months for that to occur. It’s a small sample size but typically has only happened at a beginning stage of a longer-term move.” Indeed, during the past three times that the indicator first crossed the 95% threshold—in May 2013, September 2009 and December 2003—the S&P 500 went on to post gains both six months and a year after the threshold was breached. Similarly, market watchers tend to keep tabs on the per-

5%

0 Real GDP

FORECAST

–5

Employment

–10

–15 1Q 2020

1Q ’21

Source: Labor Department; Bureau of Economic Analysis; Wall Street Journal Economic Forecasting Survey

happen overnight,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said at a press conference last month. The sharp fall in workforce participation shows no signs of quickly reversing. Even though job openings exceed pre-pandemic levels, Google Trends data show worker searches for jobs online declining. Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor, said this recent drop “raises concerns that laborforce participation may not recover quickly even after the pandemic is over.” Long-term unemployment poses another hurdle. There were 4.2 million Americans

in March facing jobless spells of at least 27 weeks, up from 1.1 million in February 2020. “The longer people remain unemployed, the more those skills do start to atrophy and then it’s harder for them to get back into the labor force,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo’s Corporate and Investment Bank.

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he result could be bottlenecks that discomfort consumers, at least temporarily, until labor demand and supply are brought into balance. For instance, lines at airport security checkpoints this summer could grow long as workers attempt to serve an influx of travelers. Salons might require hairdressers to log longer hours so they can serve the many customers who went a year without a haircut. Restaurants could raise wages to attract workers, and as a result, pass on the costs through higher menu prices. “Over the next few months you could see really strong demand, and you could get some of these pressures…in terms of wages, etc.,” said Mr. Bryson. But he added, “our sense is it’s not like this is an upward spiral that’s going to last for years.” —Gwynn Guilford contributed to this article.

Still, investors and analysts see many areas for concern. Some 32% of fund managers surveyed by Bank of America Global Research in April said that they view a bond market “taper tantrum”—meaning a possible rise in Treasury yields once the Fed indicates it will tighten monetary policy—as the biggest tail risk for markets. Investors are also closely monitoring sentiment levels, which many view as overly stretched. In the past five months, investors have plowed more money into global stock funds on a net basis than they did during the prior 12 years combined, a Bank of America analysis of EPFR data show. Meanwhile, earlier this month, nearly 57% of investors reported having a bullish outlook for the stock market over the next six months, a survey

from the American Association of Individual Investors showed. That marks the highest level since January 2018. Extreme bullish sentiment tends to appear near the end stages of bull markets, noted Jason Goepfert, president of Sundial Capital Research, which is why, he said, it has been unusual to see that occurring at the same time that technical indicators are pointing to further gains. “It’s hard to find any instance that’s remotely similar to this. We’ve seen extremes like this before in breadth readings, but not coupled with a market that has been so strong,” he said. In addition to moving averages, investors and analysts said they are also watching other bullish indicators. The New York Stock Exchange advance-decline line—a popular cumulative indicator that tracks the number of all securities rising minus the number falling on the exchange each day—has risen, hitting a record last week, according to data through Thursday starting at the end of March 2016. At the same time, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index— which weights every company equally, no matter its size—has on a year-to-date basis outpaced its traditional marketcap-weighted counterpart, another signal that it isn’t only heavily weighted stocks that are driving markets higher. For now, the wide rally will likely help offset frothy sentiment, said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co. But, she noted, if participation begins to deteriorate while sentiment remains elevated, “that is what you want to keep an eye on.” “At this stage, what I’d expect to continue to see is a rotational series of pullbacks— especially in places where there has been too much speculative excess or where the fundamentals don’t support rich valuations,” she said. “For now I don’t think there’s a high risk of something where the bottom falls out for the broader market overall.”

CORRECTIONS  AMPLIFICATIONS Health authorities in Chile on Friday released the results of a study of 10.5 million people, including recipients and nonrecipients of the vaccine, on the efficacy of Sinovac Biotech’s Covid-19 shot. In some editions Saturday, an article about China’s plan to approve a foreign Covid-19 vaccine incorrectly said the study was of 10,500 people who received Sinovac’s vaccine. Christopher Wray is the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A World

News article on Saturday about Russia expelling U.S. diplomats incorrectly said he was the director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence.

Notice to readers Wall Street Journal staff members are working remotely during the pandemic. For the foreseeable future, please send reader comments only by email or phone, using the contacts below, not via U.S. Mail.

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Thursday: The European Central Bank’s policy meeting is expected to be fairly uneventful, with officials likely leaving interest rates and the pace of bond purchases unchanged. “The tone should be similar to that of March, with the ECB waiting to see how financing conditions develop and when the recovery begins in earnest,” economists at TD Securities said in a note. U.S. applications for unemployment benefits in the first full week of April fell to the lowest level since the pandemic struck. Economists are forecasting an uptick in jobless claims for the week ended April 17, though the overall level is expected to remain near a pandemic low. The U.S. housing market has been constrained by tight supplies and rising prices, and economists are estimating a decline in existing-home sales for March as limited inventories continue to hold back potential buyers. The market took off during the summer of 2020 as buyers took advantage of low interest rates and the pandemic prompted demand for homes with space to work remotely. Friday: Surveys of purchasing managers are expected to show that the U.S. economy continued to outpace its European counterparts. While a rapid vaccination program and more fiscal stimulus has boosted the services sector in the U.S., Europe’s service providers continue to falter under tight restrictions and a larger share of unvaccinated consumers.

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Real GDP and employment, change from fourth quarter 2019

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E

conomists point to several forces behind employers’ hesitancy to hire. For one, it’s unclear when the pandemic will end. Though vaccination rates are rising, so too are the daily totals of Covid-19 cases in many parts of the country as variants of the virus spread and business restrictions ease. Further, many companies face uncertainties over whether they will see permanently weaker demand due to the pandemic’s effects. For instance, business travel might never fully return to

its previous levels. A longlasting shift to remote work could damp business at cafes and shops near offices. “They’re very happy to see this surge as everything reopens, but they still have tremendous uncertainty over what their revenue stream is going to look like,” said Steven Blitz, chief U.S. economist at TS Lombard. Even after an employer posts a job opening, the hiring process can take weeks or months. Meanwhile, the labor pool changed and shrank during the pandemic. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who are holding or seeking jobs—called the prime-age labor-force participation rate—was 81.3% in March, down from 82.9% in February 2020, a loss of 1.9 million workers. Many of those people dropped out of the labor force to care for children while schools are closed. Others have stopped looking for work out of fear of contracting or spreading the coronavirus. The $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill enacted in March also sent new stimulus checks to many Americans and extended a $300-aweek jobless-aid supplement, which could also be deterring some people from seeking work. “It’s just a lot of people who need to get back to work, and it’s not going to

U.S. WATCH

RORY DOYLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Bull Run In Stocks Widens

period of this year. That would lift output to nearly 4% above its pre-pandemic level measured in the fourth quarter of 2019. Meanwhile, the economists expect employers to add 7.1 million jobs in the 12 months ending in December 2021, a gain of 5%. That would leave employment 1.6% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019. Job growth will trail GDP for two key reasons, economists say. First, many companies will be reluctant to hire workers until they are convinced the pickup in consumer demand will endure. Second, millions of workers dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic and might take time to return.

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.S. employers might have trouble hiring workers fast enough in coming months to keep up with the projected burst of economic growth. Consumer spending at restaurants, hotels and salons is already starting to take off as the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic eases and more people get vaccinated and draw on their stimulus checks and savings. But many economists expect economic activity to pick up faster than payrolls, at least initially, for several reasons, causing bottlenecks and wage pressures. This happened last year for many manufacturers that experienced labor shortages as Americans working from home ordered more furniture, exercise equipment and other goods than before the pandemic. This year, it is likely to be the case particularly for providers of services requiring proximity to people, since they saw the biggest drops in business and employment during the pandemic and are poised to see the biggest rebound in demand this year. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal project U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced—will grow 6.4% this year, measured from the fourth quarter of last year to the same

ASSEMBLED: Live music drew a crowd over the weekend at the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Miss. The festival was virtual last year. HEALTH

NORTH CAROLINA

Half of All Adults Got A Covid-19 Vaccine

Oldest American, At Least 115, Dies

Half of all adults in the U.S. have received at least one Covid-19 shot, the government said Sunday. Almost 130 million people 18 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine, or 50.4% of the total adult population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Almost 84 million adults, or about 32.5% of the population, have been fully vaccinated. The U.S. cleared the 50% mark just a day after the reported global death toll from the coronavirus topped three million, according to totals compiled by Johns Hopkins University, though the actual number is believed to be significantly higher. The country’s vaccination rate, at 61.6 doses administered per 100 people, currently falls behind Israel, which leads among countries with at least five million people with a rate of 119.2. The U.S. also trails the United Arab Emirates, Chile and the U.K., which is vaccinating at a rate of 62 doses per 100 people, according to Our World in Data, an online research site. —Associated Press

A woman who grew up picking cotton, got married at 14 and went on to become the oldest living American with more than 120 great-great-grandchildren has died peacefully in her home, according to her family. Hester Ford was either 115 or 116 years old depending on which census report was accurate. Either way, she was the oldest living American when she died Saturday in Charlotte, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which tracks supercentenarians. It listed her age as 115 years and 245 days. “She was a pillar and stalwart to our family and provided much needed love, support and understanding,” said her great-granddaughter, Tanisha Patterson-Powe Ms. Ford was born on a farm in Lancaster County, S.C., in 1905, if you accept the more conservative estimate of her age. She married John Ford at age 14, and gave birth to the first of her 12 children at age 15. The couple moved to Charlotte, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her husband died in 1963. “I just live right, all I know, Ms. Ford said when asked about the secret to her longevity. —Associated Press

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Monday, April 19, 2021 | A3

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U.S. NEWS

Women gathered at a Sikh place of worship in Indianapolis to mourn victims of Thursday’s mass shooting at a FedEx facility. law-enforcement official said. Indiana has a red-flag law that allows police to seize a firearm from a suspect who is considered to be a danger to himself or others. Any seizure requires a court hearing within 14 days to determine the suspect’s threat level. A finding of dangerousness might lead not only to the seizure of the firearm, but to a ban on obtaining others. It is unclear how Mr. Hole was able to purchase new guns just months after his original firearm was confiscated. It is possible local officials

didn’t follow through and obtain the final court order that would have ensured he couldn’t buy another weapon, said Allison Anderman, senior counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. A spokesman for the police department said officers can initially confiscate the weapon but the filing with the court has to be done by the prosecutor’s office. A spokesman for the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office said it is gathering information on the matter. Among those who died were four members of the Sikh com-

munity. The Sikh Coalition, a national advocacy group, said it was in touch with law-enforcement and government officials, pushing for a thorough investigation into the shooter’s motive and changes that would protect minority communities. As with the Atlanta shootings in March—in which six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent—Thursday’s shooting has sparked questions about whether the attack was motivated by ethnic or religious animus. “We fully expect that authorities should and will conduct a

full investigation—including the possibility of bias as a factor,” the coalition said. “We are not ruling out any motive at this time,” Mr. Keenan said. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department is leading the investigation. “The FBI continues to work with IMPD and other law enforcement partners to find a motive for this senseless act of violence, and will be meticulous and thorough in our investigation and devote as much time as needed to find answers for the victims’ families,” Mr. Keenan said.

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INDIANAPOLIS—The gunman in Thursday’s shooting here legally purchased two semiautomatic rifles after being detained by authorities and having one other gun confiscated, police said, as they try to determine the shooter’s motives. Brandon Hole, a 19-year-old former employee of FedEx Corp., killed eight people and injured several others, before taking his own life at the company’s ground facility here Thursday night, police said. He had worked at the facility for two months, from August to October 2020, according to FedEx. Police have identified those who died in the shooting as Matthew Alexander, 32 years old; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Kaur Johal, 66; Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Sardar Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74.

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BY NORA NAUGHTON AND LAURA KUSISTO

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted a trace on the two weapons used in the attack and found Mr. Hole purchased the rifles legally in July and September 2020, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said on Twitter. Mr. Hole was on the radar of local authorities as having mental-health issues and risk factors for violent behavior. In March 2020, his mother contacted law enforcement to report he might try to commit “suicide by cop,” according to Paul Keenan, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Indianapolis field office. Mr. Hole was temporarily committed at a local hospital for evaluation of his mental-health needs that month by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, and police seized a shotgun at his residence, Mr. Keenan said. Based on items observed in Mr. Hole’s bedroom during the seizure, he was interviewed by the FBI in April 2020 but wasn’t found to be a risk of racially motivated violence or to have committed a crime. The shotgun wasn’t returned to Mr. Hole because he didn’t want it back, a

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Authorities detained suspect, confiscated shotgun at his home before FedEx killings

MAXINE WALLACE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Indiana Gunman Had Legal Rifles

Shootings in Texas, Wisconsin Leave Six People Dead MIKE DE SISTI/MILWAUKEE JOURNAL-SENTINEL/AP

BY ELIZABETH FINDELL

Officials on Sunday investigated a deadly shooting in Kenosha, Wis.

Gunmen remained at large in Austin, Texas, and Kenosha County, Wis., after each killed three people in what police described as targeted incidents. In Kenosha County, a confrontation at a bar early Sunday left three dead and two people injured. Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said that authorities were still searching for a suspect. “We do not believe this was a random act,” Mr. Beth said. “We believe our suspect knew who he was targeting.”

Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, tweeted on Sunday that his “heart breaks” for the people of Kenosha, the same area where a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times on Aug. 23, paralyzing him and sparking weeks of protest and violent unrest. Mr. Evers tweeted that he and his wife were “thinking of the families and loved ones affected and the entire Kenosha community as they grieve and grapple with yet another tragic incident of gun violence.” The shooting in Austin hap-

pened in an apartment complex on the northwestern side of the city, police said on social media. Police said that the killings were an isolated domestic-violence situation and that there was no risk to the general public. Police shut down a portion of Highway 360 and advised residents to shelter in place as they searched nearby areas for the suspect. Paramedics responded just before noon to the shooting, which left two women and a man dead, authorities said. Austin interim Police Chief Jo-

seph Chacon identified the suspect as Stephen Nicholas Broderick, 41 years old, and said preliminary information indicated he is a former lawenforcement officer. Mr. Broderick’s name and age matched a former Travis County Sheriff’s Office detective who was arrested last year and accused of sexually assaulting a child. Chief Chacon urged Austin residents to check on friends who live in the area. “We are concerned that he may take a hostage and be himself sheltering somewhere waiting for us to leave,” he said.

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California legislators proposed more than a half dozen major bills last year to address the state’s affordable-housing crisis, which researchers say is one of the worst in the nation. None of them passed. Most died or were withdrawn, people involved in the processes said, in large part because of campaigns waged against them by the state’s powerful construction-workers union. California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 450,000 ironworkers, pipe fitters and other skilled laborers, has blocked numerous bills it says don’t guarantee enough work for its members. It contributes tens of millions of dollars to political candidates and campaigns, engages in aggressive lobbying, and pays for advertisements that portray opponents as lackeys of greedy developers. Legislative insiders say the success of the union known widely as “the Trades” is one of the main reasons Sacramento politicians have struggled to pass bills streamlining construction approval and easing zoning restrictions. Researchers say those steps are urgently needed to address skyrocketing real-estate prices and rents, as well as homelessness. “They’re a gatekeeper for any significant legislation moving through Sacramento” on housing, said Ben Metcalf, managing director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, and former head of the state’s Housing and Community Development agency. Despite the state’s robust economy, about 7.1 million of California’s 40 million residents live in poverty when factoring in housing costs, according to the California Budget & Policy Center. A 2018 report by the state’s Department of Housing

and Community Development found California has a shortage of 1.5 million affordable rental homes for low-income families. At the heart of the dispute is the Trades’ insistence that proposals to incentivize home building require certain numbers of construction workers be graduates of apprenticeship programs that are mostly union-run. Easing restrictions, they argue, makes a developer’s land more valuable and that wealth should be shared through labor protections and higher wages. They also say that the standards, known as “skilled and trained,” help combat minimum-wage abuses in the construction industry. “You cannot build affordable

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‘The Trades’ is one of the main reasons lawmakers struggle to pass bills. housing and address poverty by driving construction workers and their families into poverty,” said Robbie Hunter, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council. Builders say apprenticeship requirements drive up the expense of affordable-housing construction in a state where it can cost as much as $700,000 a unit to build in dense, urban areas. They also argue that the unionbacked provisions could slow or halt construction of affordable homes in lower-income rural and inland areas where there isn’t enough available union labor. Housing advocates want the ability to forgo union labor on projects where a developer doesn’t get any bids that fulfill the skilled and trained requirements, or if those bids are significantly higher than the lowest alternative.

In a state dominated by Democrats, deference to organized labor isn’t novel. The California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, wielded immense power in the debate over when to reopen schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nurses’ unions hold sway over healthcare legislation. In addition, local governments and neighborhood groups have opposed many housing bills. The Trades are among Sacramento’s most prolific donors. Since 2015, the State Building Trades and its affiliated local unions have given more than $90 million to state candidates and campaigns, according to an analysis by California Target Book, a nonpartisan state election guide. About $16.6 million came from the main statewide umbrella organization led by Mr. Hunter, who said affiliated locals make their own campaign decisions. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who clashed with the Trades in 2019 over bills to expand the number of housing projects requiring union wages, has attempted to broker deals between unions and industry in the past. This year he is seeking support from organized labor as he fends off a likely recall election. The Democrat’s office declined to comment. Last May, days before a key legislative deadline, the Trades objected to about a half dozen housing bills, some of which they had previously said they wouldn’t oppose, according to legislators, staff members and advocates. Housing advocates say they have unsuccessfully pushed for a compromise with the Trades that would allow legislation to speed construction to pass this year if it includes more union jobs. “Until we come to a resolution, it’s going to make housing policy very hard in California,” said State Senate Housing Committee Chairman Scott Wiener.

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Union Blocks California Plans For More Affordable Housing

PS 179 in New York City, where officials are investing $120 million to expand K-12 summer school.

Districts Gird for Summer School BY JENNIFER CALFAS Educators nationwide are planning to make summer school look more like summer camp this year. School districts are aiming to enroll more summer school students than usual as they try to create new learning opportunities and better prepare them for the year ahead. Educators also hope that getting children in grades K-12 back into the classroom will help with the emotional and mental toll from months of remote or disrupted schooling due to the pandemic. Drawing on billions of dollars in federal aid, districts are expanding programs, lengthening half-days to full days, working in partnership with community organizations and adding activities like sports, field trips and debate classes. In new guidance, Louisiana recommends schools create programs similar to summer camps for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. “In this pandemic, kids have lost out on more than just reading and math,” said Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley. “They’ve lost out in art and music and P.E. and social experiences and field trips.” The federal government in

March approved more than $122 billion in aid for schools, earmarking 1% for states to use to fund summer programs. Some districts are allowing any of its students to enroll in summer school at no cost. It isn’t just for those who need to make up failed classes. Broward County Public Schools in Florida is offering academics in the morning and activities through community

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organizations like the YMCA in the afternoon, said Daniel Gohl, chief academic officer. Further north in Jacksonville, Duval County Public Schools will offer rising first- through ninth-graders a six-week, five-days-aweek program with more outdoor activities and field trips. “Rather than computers, students will experience more hands-on exploratory learning in a program that feels like summer camp,” said Tracy Pierce, the district’s chief of

marketing and public relations. In New York City, officials are investing $120 million to expand summer school, offering a five-days-a-week summercamp-style program for K-12 students. The program could be used by about 200,000 students, officials said. Researchers at the Rand Corp. who have studied how summer school students fare academically have found the most successful summer programs were voluntary, lasted the full day and spanned at least five weeks for five days a week. They included at least three hours of language arts or math classes, offered enrichment activities, had no more than 15 students in a class, and were tuition-free. At West Contra Costa Unified School District, in the Richmond, Calif., area, summer school will be based in school buildings so schools can tailor programs to their students’ needs. In the past, students were grouped at central locations. The district plans to bring back students to their classrooms on April 19 after more than a year of remote learning, and leaders see the summer as a chance to help students get reacclimated. “I’m more excited for summer than the spring,” said chief academic officer Rubén Aurelio.

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GOP Dangles Infrastructure Consensus Sen. Cornyn says core of spending bill could pass, as Biden set to push $2.3 billion plan BY JOHN D. MCKINNON WASHINGTON—A senior Republican senator said he and his colleagues could support an infrastructure bill of around $800 billion, underscoring GOP interest in a bipartisan fix for the nation’s aging roads and patchy broadband service. The comments by Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) on Sunday signal that Senate Republicans are seeking a compromise on infrastructure, ahead of Presi-

dent Biden’s meeting with lawmakers on Monday to push his own $2.3 trillion plan. Republicans generally have raised concerns that Mr. Biden’s package is too costly and has too many what they see as non-infrastructure elements. Asked on Fox News Sunday whether he could support an infrastructure package of around $800 billion, Mr. Cornyn said: “There is a core infrastructure bill that we could pass…So let’s do it and leave the rest for another day and another fight.” Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), also on Fox News Sunday, said that Democrats should work to find a bipartisan agreement with Republicans on elements of the White House infrastructure

plan before pivoting to a second, broader package that Democrats pass along party lines. “Then we show our people that we can solve their problems” on a bipartisan basis, Mr. Coons said. “I think in the next few weeks we should roll up our sleeves and sit down and find ways that we can support to make these critically needed investments.” In Monday’s meeting with lawmakers, Mr. Biden is expected to discuss his own plan, including “highways, drinking water systems, broadband and the care economy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week. A bipartisan group of lawmakers held a call on the issue last week.

A major Republican criticism of the Biden administration’s framework is that it includes some funding, such as $400 billion for caring for senior and disabled Americans, that they don’t believe should be considered infrastructure. Administration officials argue that such measures are important to the economy’s efficient functioning, just as roads and bridges are. Republicans also are generally concerned about Mr. Biden’s plan to offset the cost of his package with corporate tax increases, saying they could hurt job creation. While Democrats have the option of approving a package along party lines using a budget maneuver called reconcili-

ation, they have said they want to try to reach a bipartisan agreement first. Reconciliation also limits lawmakers to passing provisions related to the budget, likely preventing them from approving some elements of Mr. Biden’s plan, such as its worker protections. Finding a way to pay for the package will be a central issue in the discussions between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans have blasted the proposed corporate tax increases, which include raising the corporate rate to 28% from 21%, as a nonstarter, with some instead advocating for raising user fees, like the gas tax. While Mr. Biden is opposed to raising the gas tax, some

Democrats want to consider it as an option for raising revenue. Other Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) have indicated they don’t support elements of the tax plan, calling for a more modest increase in the corporate rate, for example. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), however, pledged to try to advance Mr. Biden’s package. “Our roads, bridges, highways, public transit, airports, housing, and electric grid are all in need of an overhaul,’’ he wrote in a tweet last week. “I will work…to pass the #AmericanJobsPlan—a big, bold bill that will create jobs, invest in infrastructure, and help combat climate change.”

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Rickie Grooms, above right, of Pike County, Ohio, voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and Republican candidates ever since. In Delaware County, Brindi Hellinger, seen below with her granddaughter, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but for Joe Biden in 2020.

HAIYUN JIANG FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)

On the surface, Ohio looks like an island of calm after the turbulent 2020 election: Donald Trump won the state by 8.07 points in 2016 and won it again by 8.02 points in 2020. But underneath those stable results, the state saw significant swings at the county level that suggest forces are at work remaking the electorate. Delaware County, just north of Columbus, the state capital, moved away from Mr. Trump by 9 percentage points. Pike County, 90 minutes to the south, moved toward him by 12 points. Both have voted for the Republican candidate for president in every election since 2000, including 2020. But stark demographic differences between them illustrate larger political shifts in Ohio and beyond. Delaware County is growing, and Pike is shrinking. More than half the adult population in Delaware has a college degree. In Pike, the figure is about 13%. Delaware’s median household income is well over double that of Pike. The population in both counties is mostly white, though Pike’s is more so. And in the past few elections the two have changed places. Delaware, once solidly GOP, voted for Mr. Trump by less than 7 percentage points, and Pike—once a hotly contested battleground that Republican Mitt Romney won by a single vote in 2012— gave Mr. Trump a 49-point margin of victory in 2020. The two counties illustrate a broad trend in American politics, particularly in the industrial Midwest, where Mr. Trump changed the political dynamics in a big way. Since the turn of the century, poll data show suburban and college-educated voters have trended Democratic, while rural voters without degrees have drifted toward the GOP. Mr. Trump seems to have speeded that shift. What happens with the vote in Pike and Delaware in Ohio’s 2022 gubernatorial and Senate races might shed light on Mr. Trump’s longterm impact on American politics.

“We’ve always had a lot of independent voters in Delaware County, traditionally they would have leaned more Republican. But the voters around here have changed, become more moderate, and I’ve seen those changes even in myself,” said Karl Gebhardt, former chair of the Delaware County Republican Party who acknowledges he didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. The changing attitudes could be campaign challenges in the next election cycle, as both parties plan their messaging and campaign spending, said Ohio Republican strategist Jai Chabria. “Donald Trump’s going to loom large for the next election, everyone understands that,” Mr. Chabria said. “But the next candidates that are going to be successful are the ones that understand where the Trump voters are and are able to speak to it authentically.” Recent shifts in Ohio have extended far beyond Delaware and Pike. Nearly half of the counties in Ohio shifted 4 percentage points or more toward or away from Donald Trump in 2020 compared with 2016, and there are some clear patterns in the data. The seven counties in the state that shifted more than 4 percentage points away from Mr. Trump were above the state’s average for college degrees, and most were far above it. The 34 counties that shifted toward Mr. Trump by more than 4 points were below the state’s average for bachelor’s degrees, most far below. But in Pike and Delaware, the two biggest movers in the state, area officials sense the size of the changes might make them more durable. “The day will come, and I think it will be fairly soon, when you will see a Democrat representing Delaware County,” Mr. Gebhardt said, adding that thought was inconceivable a decade ago. Down in Pike, the story is reversed. “If I had told you we’d have three Republican county commissioners in Pike 15 years ago, you’d have laughed me out of here,” said Tony Montgomery, one of three Republicans

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Ohio’s Election Results Mask Broad Shifts

overseeing the county. Behind the changes are a mix of economic and political shifts in the nation’s two main political parties, and the influence of Mr. Trump. Delaware County’s population has grown by more than 20% since 2010, and in that time the percentage of the population with at least a bachelor’s degree, increasingly a

group of strength for Democrats, has climbed 5 percentage points to more than 54%. Brindi Hellinger, a registered Republican in Delaware County, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but his behavior pushed her to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. “As time went by it just got more and more ridiculous,” she said. Voter apathy, particularly among those who might lean

Democratic, also likely plays a role. Eric Howard, a Pike County native, said he voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 but became turned off by politics and hasn’t voted since. Jerry Miller, one of the three Republican commissioners in Pike, said a partisan atmosphere that has deepened as people rely on national news media has reshaped politics in

the GOP’s favor. He said he has felt the shift in his own campaigning. “This last election, I would knock on doors and introduce myself, and the first question, before I could finish, would be, ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’ ” he recalled. “I would tell them I was a Republican, and they’d just say ‘Well, you’ve got my vote.’ ”

Funds Flow to Republicans Who Voted to Impeach Trump BY JOHN MCCORMICK AND CHAD DAY As they prepare to face primary challengers, the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 raised significantly more money during the first quarter of 2021 than they did two years earlier. The group, leveraging the power of incumbency, also swamped their GOP primary opponents in almost every instance during the first round of fundraising since angering Mr. Trump with their votes, new Federal Election Commission filings show. While all the incumbents outraised challengers who filed campaign finance reports, it is early in the twoyear election cycle, and money is just one factor in typically low-turnout primaries. Mr. Trump’s political-action

First-quarter campaign fundraising Liz Cheney (Wyo.) Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.) Raised Top fundraising challenger

Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio) Peter Meijer (Mich.) John Katko (N.Y.) Tom Rice (S.C.) Fred Upton (Mich.) David Valadao (Calif.) Dan Newhouse (Wash.) $0 million Source: Federal Election Commission

committees could also weigh in financially on some of the contests, and his endorsements could carry significant weight with the party’s base. The PACs aren’t required to report their latest totals until July, but one of them, Save America PAC, started the year

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with $31 million in the bank and has continued to raise money since then. In a speech earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he called out all 10 by name, Mr. Trump told his supporters to “get rid of them all” in next

year’s elections. Nine of the 10 incumbents already have primary challengers, in some cases multiple ones. Some GOP strategists worry such party infighting could undermine their prospects of taking back control of Congress in 2022, though half

of the districts represented by Republicans who voted for impeachment were won by Mr. Trump by 5 percentage points or more in November and are unlikely Democratic takeover targets. The race for Wyoming’s single House seat is a good example of the dynamics at play. The $1.5 million raised by the main campaign committee for Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the highest-ranking House Republican who is contending with impeachment-vote consequences, represented almost five times what she raised in the first quarter of 2019. Ms. Cheney, who survived an effort by pro-Trump colleagues to remove her from her party-leadership post, had more than $1.4 million in her campaign account at the end of March after the best fundraising quarter of her political career. Some of her top donations included $10,000 apiece from the Believe in America

PAC of Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) and the Republican Jewish Coalition PAC. Three Republican candidates filed fundraising reports as part of running against Ms. Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Some of Mr. Trump’s strongest supporters in Congress also recorded robust fundraising. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), an ally of Mr. Trump who was removed from her committee assignments this year over her past embrace of conspiracy theories, raised $3.2 million. Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who has strong ties to Mr. Trump, raised $2.1 million during the quarter. About 80% of Ms. Greene’s quarterly fundraising dollars came from contributions of $200 or less, the sort of donations Mr. Trump is effective at driving. Mr. Jordan’s smalldollar proportion was nearly as high.

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A6 | Monday, April 19, 2021

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

U.S. NEWS

Americans Abroad Return for a Shot BY STU WOO

As of last month, her area was inoculating only people over 70, so Ms. Walling decided it was time to risk a three-legged flight to get vaccinated in Tucson. They plan to depart on May 15 unless Spain offers shots before then. “We’re in that vulnerable age group,” she said. “We really need to get vaccinated.” Rules on who can get shots vary by state, making it difficult to say for sure whether an American traveling back can get one easily just by landing. Many countries, meanwhile, restrict foreign travel. England, for example, forbids international vacations but allows residents to travel abroad with a reasonable excuse, such as business trips and funerals. Some Americans are also hesitant to return to the U.S. to get vaccinated because that might complicate their receiving “vaccine passports” in their residence countries that could be required for entry into restaurants or for travel. On Facebook groups for American expats, people trade advice on navigating the local and American requirements for traveling to the U.S., as well as tips for booking vaccinations. The appointment website for CVS Health Corp., the big pharmaceutical chain offering vaccines, doesn’t

work outside the U.S., for example, and some regions require a local identification card. Others require nothing. In suburban Tokyo, Kat Callahan was fed up with the glacial vaccination pace in Japan, where about 1% of the population has gotten a dose. The 37year-old civics teacher and union organizer has underlying health conditions and felt increasingly uncomfortable about taking progressively crowded trains into the city for meetings that had to be held in person. “I don’t feel comfortable going out,” she said. Then she saw that New Mexico, where she maintains legal residency, was a vaccination leader. She checked that appointments were plentiful, and booked a five-week trip to Albuquerque that starts later this month. “New Mexico got their stuff together, and I knew I wouldn’t be burdening any fellow Americans,” she said. “There is a shot with my name on it.” On a Facebook group for Americans in London, Matt Heligman shared his experience of getting his first dose in the U.S. earlier this month. “I don’t get a lot of thanks for that because a lot of people just criticize me for traveling,” said Mr. Heligman, the 39-

year-old chief operating officer of an interior-design company. “Some people might say it’s jumping the queue.” Mr. Heligman disagrees. His job requires frequent travel between the U.K. and U.S., and appointments for both the first and second dose, which he will get when he returns to

the U.S. later this month, happened to line up with business trips. He said getting inoculated helps protect the people he encounters while traveling, while also helping Britons. “That’s two doses I’m taking that [England’s National Health Service] doesn’t have to administer,” he said.

University of Oxford scientists plan to reinfect dozens of adult volunteers with the coronavirus in the second U.K. clinical trial to study deliberate Covid-19 infection in quarantine—this time among people who have already recovered from the virus. Such “human challenge” trials are controversial because they involve intentionally infecting healthy humans, and the U.K. is the only country so far conducting them with Covid-19, researchers said. The new trial is focused on the boundaries of human immunity and the effects of the virus on the body from the moment of reinfection. Better understanding of protection from previous illness will help fasttrack new treatments and vaccines, Oxford researchers say. The first Covid-19 challenge study, led by Imperial College London infectious-disease researchers, started in March with a handful of volunteers isolated inside London’s Royal Free Hospital. That study received a pledge of more than $45 million from the U.K. government. Oxford’s trial is funded by the London-based Wellcome Trust, a healthcare-focused charitable foundation. As many as 64 people aged 18 to 30 will be quarantined in staggered phases starting as soon as next month, according to Helen McShane, an Oxford vaccinologist who is leading the trial. In the late 1700s, British doctor Edward Jenner applied material from cowpox and smallpox lesions to children and adults and recorded the reactions. The experiments paved the way for modern vaccines. But in the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. and other countries have steered clear of purposely infecting healthy people with the coronavirus. Critics argue the risks aren’t justified, given the broad presence of naturally circulating virus and the success of vaccines already available. Some say newer variants make the older strain used in the U.K. challenge trials less relevant. Proponents argue there is no substitute for the precision of controlled studies. They have been used to study diseases including typhoid, malaria and tuberculosis and to develop vaccines. With Covid-19, Prof. McShane said, “We don’t know whether someone has not been infected because they haven’t been exposed or [because] they have protective immunity.” Controlling exposure will help with those questions, she said.

cines less effective. The campaign had been picking up steam partly due to the launch of J&J’s vaccine, which is easier to store and requires only one dose. The FDA and CDC drew criticism from some health experts that the joint recommendation would exacerbate fears among those already hesitant to get vaccinated and set back a push to develop the communitywide immunity needed to stop the virus from spreading. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock and Dr. Fauci weighed the implications of a

public announcement, the people said. The officials, along with Peter Marks, the FDA’s vaccines chief, decided that caution and safety should take precedence, the people said. “It is imperative for healthcare workers to know that the treatment of these clots is different than our current standard of care,” Dr. Walensky said during a White House briefing last week. The private deliberations among top federal health officials resulting in the recommended pause haven’t been reported before. This account of the rapid turn of events culminating in the recommendation is based on interviews with

people familiar with the discussions. Helping the decision making, the people said, were two sources for reports about the rare adverse events. One source, the people said, was health regulators in Europe. They had been looking into reports of unusual clotting cases involving another vaccine, from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, based on a similar technology as J&J’s. In March, health authorities in several countries on the continent restricted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot to investigate clotting cases. This month, European medicine regulators extended

their probe to J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine. The J&J reports in the U.S. came from the other source of blood-clot cases: the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Doctors and the public report safety issues to the three-decade-old database. The people filing reports don’t know whether the events are truly vaccine-related, but the FDA and CDC investigate these. The first report of a bloodclot case in a person who got the J&J vaccine was filed March 19, the people said. By last Monday, VAERS had six reports, all involving women. One had died, while others were or had been in intensive care. The federal health officials worried the risk of clots might be significantly greater than initially suspected, if the problem was really focused just on younger women, one person said. About 1.5 million women between ages 18 and 50 had gotten J&J’s vaccine by that time, according to the CDC. Given the blood-clot cases involving people who got the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, the U.S. health officials also worried about these similar vaccines, the people said. At 8 p.m. last Monday, Mr. Becerra joined other senior health officials to discuss what to do, the people said. After a clinical review of the cases, participants in the meeting discussed potential responses. One option was to warn doctors against using heparin, one of the people said, since heparin was often

given to clotting patients. In one case, doctors administered the medication to a 48year-old woman after finding extensive blood clots in veins in her brain and abdominal cavity, along with an alarmingly low count of platelets in her blood. Despite the heparin, blood clots continued to form, according to an account J&J presented to the ACIP and a description of the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. The woman was switched to another blood thinner called argatroban, along with intravenous immune globulin, according to the J&J and NEJM accounts. Her platelet count improved substantially over the next five days, but she remained critically ill early last week. She had been vaccinated two weeks before developing symptoms. Discussion shifted to recommending a pause, one of the people said, after participants discussed whether adding a warning might trigger calls for stronger action. One concern: the ACIP might convene and counsel such action while the cases were probed further. The group quickly agreed that if there was going to be a push for a pause in a few days, it would be safer to do so immediately to avoid possible new clotting cases, one of the people said. Such drastic action would also attract the kind of public attention that could prompt reporting of any other bloodclot cases.

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Continued from Page One nization Practices, is scheduled to meet Friday to review the pause, after putting off a vote on how to proceed during a meeting last week. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said he expects J&J’s vaccine to return to use in the U.S. by Friday. “I believe we’ll be back with some sort of indication a little bit different from before the pause,” Dr. Fauci said Sunday on ABC. Among the more than seven million people in the U.S. given J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine before the pause, the total of six were reported to have developed cerebral-vein blood clots and also registered low counts of the colorless cells in the blood known as platelets that help the blood to clot. J&J has said it is aware of the blood-clot cases and working with health authorities. Company researchers recently sent a letter to a medical journal saying there wasn’t evidence to establish a connection between the vaccine and the adverse events so far. The recommended pause disrupted a vaccination campaign that is racing to inoculate as many as possible before coronavirus variants emerge that could render vac-

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Chloe Zeitounian, above, showing her vaccination card in London. At right, Cheryl Walling, with her husband and grandchildren in Rota, Spain, plans to fly to Arizona to get vaccinated.

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BY JENNY STRASBURG

FROM TOP: BETTY LAURA ZAPATA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; BROOKE CHUMLEY

LONDON—Frustrated by slow and uncertain vaccination drives around the world, some of the nine million Americans living abroad are coming home to get their Covid-19 shots. For many, the risks of a long journey home are worth the reward of a vaccine that offers protection and peace of mind. But the trip also comes with the anguish and moral ambiguity of leaving behind friends, colleagues and even spouses who might not get access to a shot for months because they don’t hold a passport from the world’s wealthiest country. “I’ve definitely seen people talk about vaccine tourism,” said Chloe Zeitounian, a 32year-old American actor in London who visited the U.S. earlier this month. “That’s basically what I did.” The U.S. and U.K. are roughly on par in vaccination rates, but recent supply disruptions have slowed Britain’s rollout for younger people. The country is also relying heavily on a shot developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC. Regulators here have restricted people under 30 from receiving it because of a possible link to rare but potentially serious blood clots. Ms. Zeitounian preferred to avoid that one, which isn’t distributed in the U.S. As she stood in line at a New Orleans convention center and learned it was offering a dose of the two-shot vaccine from Moderna Inc., she called her British husband in London. “Is what I’m doing right?” asked Ms. Zeitounian, who was in the U.S. to apply for a visa. She plans to get her second dose on a U.S. business trip later this year unless she gets it in Britain first. In the vaccine rollout’s early days in the U.S., there were short supplies, booking difficulties and confusion over who could get a shot. But the U.S. drive has accelerated, with 38% of adults having received at least one shot and 24% fully vaccinated. A tipping point for many expats came when they saw President Biden set April 19 as the date all adults in the U.S. would be eligible for a shot. Reinforcing the image of widespread access was a parade of friends back home sharing jubilant vaccine selfies on Facebook and Instagram. “They’re getting vaccinated right and left,” said Cheryl Walling, a 61-year-old retiree in Spain, speaking of her compatriots back in Arizona. “I’m jealous. I’m so jealous.” Ms. Walling and her husband retired to the beach town of Rota a year ago to spend time with their daughter, their U.S. Navy-serving son-in-law and two grandchildren.

U.K. Set To Begin New Test With Virus

Anthony Fauci said he expects the J&J vaccine to return to use in the U.S. by Friday.

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Monday, April 19, 2021 | A7

WORLD NEWS

The U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, said they would work together to set more ambitious goals to tackle climate change, a rare statement of agreement at a time of heightened bilateral tensions. By Sha Hua in Hong Kong and Andrew Jeong in Seoul John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy on climate change, said Sunday that his meetings with his counterparts in Shanghai were productive, adding that the two sides discussed the possi-

bility of China “enhancing” the commitments that leader Xi Jinping made last September, to reach peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality— net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions—by 2060. “This is the first time China has joined in saying it’s a crisis,” Mr. Kerry told reporters in Seoul, a day after wrapping up a four-day China tour to meet with climate officials. Mr. Kerry said that the Chinese delegation underscored that the climate issue must “be addressed with urgency. And they talked about ‘enhancing.’ So the language is strong.” The joint statement also said the U.S. and China would cooperate to provide investment and financing for developing countries to shift their economies toward lower emissions. China’s Ministry of Ecology

and Environment said in a separate post on its official WeChat account that “China and the United States will strengthen cooperation and work together with other parties to address the climate crisis.” During his time in Shanghai, Mr. Kerry, the first senior Biden administration official to visit China, met face-to-face with counterpart Xie Zhenhua and talked to Vice Premier Han Zheng by video link, state news agency Xinhua reported. “We talked a lot about coal,” Mr. Kerry said. Mr. Kerry’s Asia trip comes before President Biden hosts a virtual climate summit to mark Earth Day, having invited the leaders of 40 countries to join the April 22-23 event. Mr. Xi hasn’t formally confirmed his attendance, but people familiar with the matter said he would participate. Sun-

John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy on climate change day’s joint U.S.-China statement said only that both countries “look forward” to the summit. At the end of the Earth Day summit, the Biden administration is expected to announce a new goal for reducing U.S. emis-

sions. The meeting is intended to build momentum ahead of a United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. Climate negotiators are seeking to set more ambitious climate goals than those agreed to in the Paris climate pact, which aims to cap average global annual temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius. If China makes a more robust pledge on climate, it may choose to do so before Mr. Biden’s summit. Chinese leaders on Sunday open their own international meeting, the Bo’ao Forum for Asia, on the southern island of Hainan. Mr. Kerry’s visit took place amid heightened tensions between the two countries and bilateral frictions over trade, technology and human rights. But the Biden administration has also said it wants to carve out space for cooperation with

Navalny Concerns Escalate

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Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, who leads NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all recommended retaining the current force of 2,500 troops while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement, U.S. officials say. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, himself a retired military commander for the region, shared the concerns of the senior officers, cautioning that withdrawing all U.S. troops would suspend what amounted to an insurance policy for maintaining a modicum of stability in the country, the officials said. Mr. Biden carefully weighed the military’s input, officials say, but was determined to bring involvement in America’s longest-running war to an end by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks that led to U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. The president’s decision, his most important yet as com-

Continued from Page One public on Thursday retaliatory measures against Russia over election interference, the SolarWinds cyberattack and other malign activity. In response, Russia said it would expel 10 U.S. diplomats and bar a number of senior U.S. officials from entering the country. The protests, called for April 21 in the central squares of Russian cities, would fall on the same day Mr. Putin is scheduled to deliver his annual address to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s national legislature. Although the demonstrations are called for the evening, following Mr. Putin’s daytime speech, and the Kremlin hasn’t announced the topics the Russian leader plans to cover, the prospect of violent clashes could undermine Mr. Putin’s efforts to present a domestic agenda that highlights unity and stability, some analysts said. The demonstrations offer a direct rebuff to the Kremlin leader, they said. “It’s like an answer to Putin. You say something to the nation and then we also send a message to the nation as well,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert on Russian domestic

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By Michael R. Gordon, Gordon Lubold and Vivian Salama

mander in chief, reflected the calculation that the potential for terrorist threats in Afghanistan had diminished and that nothing less than a date certain for removing U.S. forces could avoid renewed fighting with the Taliban and an openended military commitment. Senior administration officials said Sunday that shifting U.S. security priorities and a dispersed terrorist threat justify Mr. Biden’s decision. “The terrorism threat has moved to other places, and we have other very important items on our agenda, including the relationship with China,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on ABC’s “This Week.” The White House says it will guard against the risk of a new terrorist danger in Afghanistan by maintaining warplanes and counterterrorism capabilities at bases outside of the landlocked country. “It’s not just about Afghanistan anymore. Al Qaeda is in Yemen. ISIS is in Syria and Iraq. Al Qaeda is in Somalia and Syria and many other places,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added that, “we need to allocate our resources in a way that allows us to protect the homeland against a variety of threats from a variety of countries and continents, not just from Afghanistan.” Current and former military

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President Biden’s decision to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan ran counter to the recommendations of his top military commanders, who feared it could undermine security in the country.

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Biden Overrode Generals’ Advice On Afghanistan

policy at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It means they can articulate a counter opinion in this way.” The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment about the planned protests, Washington’s warning of consequences for Russia if Mr. Navalny dies, or on the failing health of the opposition politician. Last year, Mr. Putin used his national legislature speech to make public sweeping constitutional amendments that included a provision to allow him potentially to remain in power until 2036. Mr. Navalny led a campaign to boycott the July referendum on the amendments, saying the vote would be falsified regardless of the real outcome. Mr. Putin claimed 78% of Russians supported the measures, a victory members of the opposition said have emboldened the Russian leader and his allies to exert pressure on potential challenges to his rule. The European Union expressed deep concern about reports of Mr. Navalny’s declining health and called on the Russian authorities “to grant him immediate access to medical professionals he trusts.” “The Russian authorities are responsible for Mr. Navalny’s safety and health in the penal colony, to which we hold them to account,” it added, noting that EU foreign ministers would discuss the matter via videoconference during a meeting on Monday. The rallies called for next week pose a major test for Russia’s besieged opposition

Beijing on climate change, nuclear proliferation and the global pandemic response. The end of overseas coal financing is almost certainly decided, according to a person familiar with the discussions. In recent months, Beijing has signaled an increased willingness to tackle climate issues, with China’s main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, now drafting a climate road map, according to people familiar with the process. “It is an encouraging step towards cooperation amid great geopolitical challenges,” Zou Ji, a Paris Agreement negotiator for China and the current president of Beijing-based nonprofit Energy Foundation China, said of the U.S.-China negotiations and joint statement. —Keith Zhai in Singapore contributed to this article.

GHULAMULLAH HABIBI/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Envoy says talks, which come amid tensions between the countries, were productive

U.S. EMBASSY SEOUL/GETTY IMAGES

U.S., China Vow to Cooperate on Climate

Afghan soldiers secure a base previously used by U.S. forces. President Biden plans to pull out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11. officials say, however, that the lack of a small but capable military presence in Afghanistan, including surveillance drones, would greatly complicate any U.S. effort to project force from air bases in the Persian Gulf, aircraft carriers or possible bases in central Asia. Even protecting the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, they say, may prove to be a challenge. “What I can tell you is that this was an inclusive process and their voices were heard and their concerns taken into consideration,” Mr. Austin told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday, while declining to explain his own views or those of the generals. “But now that the decision has been made, I

call upon them to lead their forces, to lead their forces through this effort.” With the president’s order in effect, people involved in the planning said the military was hoping to pull troops out of Afghanistan by early July. Much of the military’s thinking has been shaped by the Obama administration’s efforts in 2011 to bring what it called a “responsible end” to the Iraq conflict by pulling troops out from the country. Top military officials, including Mr. Austin, who was then the U.S. commander in Iraq, had drawn up plans to keep thousands of troops in the country to train Iraq’s troops. But the failure of U.S.

movement and threaten to trigger a confrontation with security forces. On Friday, Russia’s general prosecutor’s office said it had filed a request seeking to outlaw Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund and regional branches of his campaign, by branding them as “extremist groups” under legislation typically reserved for terrorist organizations and violent religious sects. The initial detention of Mr. Navalny in January for parole violations sparked the biggest popular protests in Russia in

ing their willingness to take to the streets in support of Mr. Navalny had passed 460,700. “It would mean they can’t organize anything and people who are cooperating with them also are extremists,” the analyst said. “That is a problem.” Mr. Navalny has complained of poor treatment since his incarceration in a Russian prison, where he is serving a 2½-year prison sentence after being convicted of violating the parole conditions, including when he was recuperating in Germany after a near-fatal poisoning attempt last year. He said there has been a lack of medical attention for what he described as debilitating back pain and numbness in his legs and one hand. Prison authorities have refused to allow Mr. Navalny to be assessed by a doctor of his choice. They told The Wall Street Journal in written correspondence that the activist was receiving all necessary medical assistance and being treated like all other inmates in accordance with the law. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in March that although “atypical in terms of his worldview,” Mr. Navalny was “responsible for his deeds under the law,” like any other Russian citizen. Mr. Navalny’s team said on Sunday the opposition politician was “being killed, in a scary way, in front of all of us,” and it was time to act. “We do not know how long he will be able to withstand,” his team said.

The opposition leader has complained of poor treatment in prison. nearly a decade. But the demonstrations led to brutal police violence. More than 6,000 people were detained, many were fined and some of Mr. Navalny’s closest allies were put under house arrest. They subsequently decided to temporarily halt demonstrations. Mr. Kolesnikov said opposition leaders likely decided to move ahead with demonstrations earlier than planned because of the prospect of Mr. Navalny’s organization and affiliations being declared “extremist groups.” By late Sunday, the number of signatures of those declar-

and Iraqi negotiators to settle on an accord for a continued U.S. military presence and Mr. Obama’s desire for a clean end to the war led to the removal of all U.S. troops. That was followed by the fall of Mosul, Iraq’s secondlargest city, to Islamic State militants and the return of thousands of U.S. advisers and special operations forces three years later. “Our experience in Iraq in 2011 would suggest that we may be taking on a high-risk strategy by assuming that terrorist organizations won’t grow and expand, the Afghan government forces can defend their country, and our reputation in the region and globally

won’t be negatively affected,” said retired Gen. Joseph Votel, who succeeded Mr. Austin as the head of the Central Command and whose thinking reflects the views of many serving defense officials. Mr. Biden challenged assumptions that had endured over many years about the U.S. role in Afghanistan. One was that maintaining forces there gave the U.S. and its allies leverage with the Taliban. As the White House saw it, however, extending the deployment of U.S. troops risked reigniting the U.S. fighting with the Taliban. If that conflict grew, an administration official said, even more U.S. troops might need to be sent.

“ Everything was always very tidy. Then my family noticed how disorganized I had become.” —Theresa, living with Alzheimer’s

When something feels different, it could be Alzheimer’s. Now is the time to talk.

Visit

alz.org/ourstories to learn more

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WORLD NEWS

People let guard down after getting first shot of Chinese vaccine; cases and deaths surge

BY JUAN MONTES

People waited to leave after receiving the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in Santiago, Chile, this month. the results of Friday’s study. The lower protection from Sinovac’s single shot means the benefits of the vaccination campaign could take longer but health officials think some level of herd immunity will be reached by June or July. However, health professionals say the virus will probably be around indefinitely, given the potential for new variants, many of which are already prevalent in neighboring countries like Brazil. They warn that further restriction and lockdowns could be required. Despite the surge, Chilean officials defend the vaccine, saying it is effective after the full regimen of two doses and is already helping to protect the elderly, making this surge less deadly. While severe cases and infections among older people have been dropping, many Chileans let their guard down too soon, public-health experts say. “As a country, we trusted that, because of the vaccine, we were sort of out of it. But of course we aren’t.” said Mr.

Jordán, a businessman and prominent mountaineer who has scaled Mt. Everest and maintained precautions after his first vaccine dose. Independent public-health experts say the Chilean government sent confusing messages as it celebrated the vaccine rollout, by far Latin America’s fastest, and eased social restrictions to help the economy. Millions of Chileans worn out by the pandemic saw that as a green light to travel within the country during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer holidays. People flocked to bars, restaurants and crowded beaches, many not wearing masks. Theater resumed, with the virus sweeping through one play, infecting virtually all of the actors and killing two. Jaime Mañalich, who was health minister at the start of the pandemic, said the full two-dose regimen must be completed. “The fundamental message is that the start of a vaccination campaign is a very good thing, but you can’t relax the health measures,” he said.

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bia to Indonesia elsewhere— that have started to roll out the Sinovac vaccine. On Friday, Chilean authorities released the results of a study of 10.5 million people, showing the vaccine was 16% effective against infection after one dose and 67% effective after a second dose. The study also found it to be 80% effective in preventing death from Covid-19 two weeks after a second dose. That is lower than the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, for example. Research published in February in the Lancet medical journal found that one dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine was 85% effective in preventing symptomatic disease 15 to 28 days after being given, according to a peer-reviewed observational study of about 9,000 people in Israel. Research also found the vaccine’s efficacy to be 91.3% up to six months after getting the second dose, Pfizer and BioNTech said. In response to a request for comment, Sinovac pointed to

MEXICO CITY—Mexico increased detentions and deportations of migrants in March as the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador steps up law enforcement against a wave of illegal immigration that has created havoc for the Biden administration. Detentions of Central American migrants jumped 32% to 15,800 in March from February, and more than doubled compared with March of last year, according to data from Mexico’s immigration agency shared with The Wall Street Journal. Deportations rose 61% from February to 9,400 last month, and were up 65% from a year earlier. Mexican officials said efforts against irregular migration are continuing in April after more than 170,000 migrants were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in March, the highest number in 15 years. The number of unaccompanied minors at the U.S. border, most of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, hit a record. The influx of migrants, most of them fleeing poverty, unemployment and violence in their home countries, has led to overcrowding at shelters and overwhelmed U.S. immigration authorities, posing an early challenge for President Biden. Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to visit Mexico and Guatemala in coming weeks to discuss ways to address the causes of the migrant surge. Ms. Harris is serving as Mr. Biden’s point person on talks with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The Mexican government has deployed along its southern border around 9,000 soldiers and members of the National Guard, a military police created in 2019 mainly to fight organized crime, as well as

more than 150 immigration officers, Mexican officials said. “They are everywhere now,” Israel Flores, a 26-year-old Honduran, said of Mexican immigration officers. Mr. Flores had planned to take a bus from Comitán in southern Mexico to the U.S. border, but decided to wait in southern Mexico until things calm down. “The way is not clear anymore. You have to be very careful now,” he said. Authorities have installed dozens of checkpoints in the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico’s immigration agency said. “We are reinforcing our presence at the border [with Guatemala], in order to avoid children and teenagers being used as passports to get to the U.S.,” said Francisco Garduño, the commissioner of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, at a recent event in Chiapas. Mexico’s actions mirror those taken in recent years: When a crisis at the U.S. southern border erupts, the U.S. asks Mexico to do more to stem the flow of migrants. In mid-2014, a surge in unaccompanied children led President Barack Obama to ask Mexico to tighten law enforcement. That year, detentions of migrants who were in Mexico illegally hit an eight-year high. The current response also has echoes of 2019, when President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all Mexican exports if Mexico didn’t do more to stop Central American migrants. Detentions soared 40% that year from 2018. “What we are seeing is a continuity, an inertia of Trump’s strategy to use Mexico as a key tool to contain the influx of migrants,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, an immigration expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and former head of the country’s immigration agency.

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ESTEBAN FELIX/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY RYAN DUBE Several days after receiving his first dose of a Chinesemade coronavirus vaccine, Rodrigo Jordán fell ill and tested positive for Covid-19. The 61year-old was hospitalized near his home in the Chilean capital, Santiago, for nine days and needed supplemental oxygen to pull through. Across Chile—which has mounted one of the world’s most rapid vaccination campaigns using the vaccine made by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd.—health authorities are scrambling to deal with a surge in new infections and deaths. More than 7.6 million people, half of Chile’s adult population, have received at least one vaccine dose, most made by the Chinese drugmaker, making the country a testing ground for a vaccine Beijing is supplying to countries across the developing world. The problem, public-health officials say, was that people in general overestimated the effectiveness of the vaccine after only one of the two recommended doses and moved to ease up on pandemic-control restrictions too soon. “With one dose, we know the protection is very weak,” said Claudia Cortés, an infectious-disease expert at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, where about 10% of the Covid-19 patients at her hospital have received one shot. “It was not clearly explained that you need two doses—that you need to wait.” It is a lesson for other countries—from Brazil to Colombia in Latin America; Ser-

Mexico Moves Against Illegal Immigration

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Chile Gets Dose of Reality

WORLD WATCH

SPACE TRAVEL

American, 2 Russians Return to Earth An American astronaut and two Russians have returned to Earth after six months aboard the International Space Station.

A Soyuz space capsule carrying NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed Saturday in the steppes of Kazakhstan. There now are seven people aboard the ISS: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russians Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov

Train Crash Kills 11, Injures Nearly 100

arrived on April 9; Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, came aboard in November on the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience, the first ISS docking under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. —Associated Press

person close to WeWork said including the India and China franchises gave a sense of the reach of the portfolio. The growth forecast assumes that occupancy of WeWork buildings doubles from 47% at the end of last year to 95% in 2024. Mr. Mathrani said occupancy could rise further because the company’s membership model means the same space can be sold more than once. “You can actually go over 100%,” he said. In 2019, the SEC questioned that view. “Tell us how your assumed workstation utilization rate of 100% is realistic,” the agency asked the company in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The prediction was dropped by WeWork. WeWork has long been criticized, including by the SEC before the IPO, for presenting its numbers in a way that converted its loss-making business into something that ap-

peared to be profitable. The company seems to be doing something similar today. As many companies do, WeWork used a measure that excluded basic costs such as administrative and marketing expenses, and focused on the expected performance of sites when they were up and running. Today, the company calls the measure “mature building margin,” which it puts at 27% based on 2019 figures. Under previous leadership, WeWork reported significantly lower margins for a similar metric. In a fall 2019 investor slideshow, after the failed IPO and ouster of WeWork’s co-founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, the company said its mature “location contribution margin” was 21% for buildings open more than two years in the first half of 2019. A person close to the company said WeWork has changed since 2019, and the two metrics aren’t directly comparable.

Crowds gather around a train that derailed north of Cairo on Sunday, killing at least 11 people and injuring dozens more. and companies, holding the Kremlin accountable for interference in last year’s presidential election and the hacking of federal agencies. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Moscow would respond to the move. —Associated Press

EGYPT

A passenger train derailed Sunday north of Cairo, killing at least 11 people, Egyptian authorities said. It was the latest of several rail accidents in recent years. Four train wagons ran off the tracks at the city of Banha, just outside Cairo, the railway authority said. The train was traveling to the Nile Delta city of Mansoura from the capital, the authority said. The Health Ministry said beside the dead, at least 98 people were injured. Most suffered broken bones, cuts and bruises. Train wrecks and mishaps are common in Egypt, where the railway system has a history of badly maintained equipment and mismanagement. The government says it has launched a broad renovation and modernization initiative. President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said in March 2018 that the government needs about 250 billion Egyptian pounds, equivalent to $15.95 billion, to overhaul the run-down rail system. Sunday’s accident came three weeks after two passenger trains collided in the province of Sohag, killing at least 18 people and injuring 200 others. —Associated Press

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The Czech Republic said it was expelling 18 Russian diplomats it has identified as spies in a case related to a huge ammunition depot explosion in 2014. Prime Minister Andrej Babis said Saturday the move is based on “unequivocal evidence” provided by the intelligence and security services that points to the involvement of Russian military agents in the blast in an eastern town that killed two people. Interior Minister Jan Hamacek, who is also serving as foreign minister, said the 18 Russian embassy staffers were clearly identified as spies from the Russian intelligence services known as GRU and SVR and were ordered to leave the country within 48 hours. The explosion, which took place on Oct. 16, 2014 in a depot in the town of Vrbetice where 50 metric tons of ammunition was stored, claimed two lives. Jennifer Bachus, chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, said the U.S. supported the Czech action. The Czech announcement came two days after the U.S. said it was expelling 10 Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions against dozen of people

MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY/REUTERS

Russians Expelled Over 2014 Explosion

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CZECH REPUBLIC

FROM PAGE ONE

WeWork Plan Echoes Past Effort Continued from Page One sures that it was using. The recent investor presentation by BowX has “echoes of the company’s approach in 2019,” said Minor Myers, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who specializes in corporate finance. “The SEC could push back hard again,” he said, unless WeWork tones down these claims in its official filings with regulators, expected later this month. A WeWork spokeswoman said the company “will always work with the SEC to ensure our disclosures comply with their requirements.” An SEC

spokesman declined to comment. BowX didn’t respond to requests for comment. SPACs raise money as a shell company in an IPO and then look for a private business to combine with, a deal that transforms the target into a public company. Many of these targets are startups, often with little revenue and no profits, that have used optimistic projections to promote their deals. SPACs have displaced traditional IPOs as the main route for private companies to list on stock exchanges. SPACs accounted for 75% of all IPOs from January through March, more than double their 35% share for the same quarter last year, according to data provider Dealogic. The SEC earlier this month warned companies going public through SPACs against making unrealistic projections. The concern comes after several young companies touted plans to

reach multibillion-dollar annual revenues in just a few years. SEC rules limit companies doing IPOs from making projections or talking publicly. Both are permissible in SPAC deals. Backers of the SPAC process have said the rules give startups a chance to chart their visions to investors, which critics have said is unnecessarily difficult in IPOs. WeWork’s proposed deal, valuing it at $9 billion including debt, is due to be voted on by BowX shareholders later this year. Trading in BowX on March 26, the day the deal was made public, was more than 100 times the volume the day before, and the shares closed at $11.71, up 13% from their $10.33 opening. On Friday, they finished at $12.07. The WeWork call with investors included its chief executive officer, Sandeep Mathrani, and BowX’s chairman, Vivek Ranadivé, who called

WeWork a $5 billion revenue company “just with their existing capacity.” Revenue isn’t projected to go over $5 billion a year until 2023, according to the company’s slides. The pitch describes the company as a “massive growth opportunity,” with “850+ loca-

Shared office-space company plans to go public by merging with a SPAC. tions,” more than a million workstations and over 450,000 memberships. Those tallies include WeWork’s China and India operations, which aren’t part of the entity that is being merged and aren’t included in its financial statements, according to the small print on the slides. A

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WORLD NEWS

Mourning Queen to Remain in Public Eye BY MAX COLCHESTER On Wednesday, Queen Elizabeth, newly widowed and still officially in mourning, will turn 95 years old. Little fanfare is expected. Since her husband, Prince Philip, died on April 9, the queen has undertaken a period of silence. Britain hasn’t heard from its longest-serving monarch but has merely observed her, most recently sitting masked and alone as her husband’s coffin was lowered into the royal vault in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Yet during that period she has continued to do what she has done for nearly seven decades as monarch: work. Four days after Prince Philip’s death, the queen attended a retirement ceremony

for a royal courtier who had been instrumental in planning her husband’s funeral. She later took a phone call from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The monarch will continue her long record of public service, palace officials say. The queen will continue to undertake ceremonial events and lean on other senior members of the family to represent her when she can’t. Perhaps the only noticeable change following Prince Philip’s death is that she will be increasingly based at Windsor Castle while Buckingham Place undergoes repairs, said Ingrid Seward, a monarchy expert and author of the book “Prince Philip Revealed.” “She needs to keep going,” said Ms. Seward. “Because as she herself has said, ‘If I stop,

I drop.’” For years, royal courtiers have braced for the psychological reckoning that the monarchy—as well as the country— will face when the queen dies. It will be the severing of Britain’s last high-profile living link to its age of empire and of victory in World War II. Britons under the age of 70 have grown up knowing only one monarch. The House of Windsor is the last European monarchy to continue the practice of coronation. Marking her departure and the anointment of her successor will be critical to that transition and to maintaining the mysticism so vital to sustaining inherited power. Paving the way to that moment is delicate. Queen Elizabeth “has almost uniquely had

the ability to perform public ceremonies, often of a fairytale character, while maintaining her dignity, without any sense of pomposity or arrogance,” said Robert Blackburn, professor of constitutional law

Most Britons think the queen has done a ‘fairly good’ or ‘very good’ job. at King’s College London. The queen sought to gradually involve her eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, in running royal matters after her diamond jubilee in 2012, which marked 60 years of her reign.

But he is a different character from his mother. While the queen prides herself on acting as a symbol, to the point of being banal, Prince Charles has styled himself an activist on issues ranging from architecture to badger culling. “Under a future King Charles III, therefore, the monarchy is more likely to become involved in public controversy, which in turn could lead to questions being raised about the future of the monarchy itself,” Mr. Blackburn said. In Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime, the British monarchy completed its evolution from an institution that took from its subjects to one that continually has to give back to earn its place. Today, the queen voluntarily pays income tax and represents numerous charities.

That toil has paid off. Polling by YouGov shows that 79% of Britons think the queen has done a “fairly good” or “very good” job as monarch. Despite the demise of Britain’s empire, she remains head of state of 16 countries, including Canada, Papua New Guinea and Australia. The government of one of them, Barbados, says it intends to become a republic by November. How many of this group will remain after she is dead is unclear. The queen is unlikely to retire. She made a vow at age 21 to serve her country for her whole life. Abdication in European monarchies is rare. There have only been four in the past century, according to the Constitution Unit, a research group at University College London.

Britain’s Prince Philip Remembered in Ceremony Marking His Life and an Enduring Monarchy

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Denmark on the island of Corfu in 1921, he served with distinction in the Royal Navy during World War II and then married the queen—then still Princess Elizabeth. He had been by her side since she became queen in 1952. He died on April 9, aged 99. Despite the Covid-19 restrictions, the monarchy still put on an elaborate funeral rich in pageantry to mark his passing. Members of the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, the British Army and Royal Air Force stood to attention in bright spring sunlight on a pristine lawn at Windsor Castle before the service, as military bands played. At right, pall bearers carrying the coffin containing prince Philip’s remains entered St George’s Chapel. The ensuing tightly choreographed ceremony, minutely planned with large input from Prince Philip himself, spoke to his full life. The end of the funeral ends an eight-day period of national mourning. Parliament will resume passing laws and scheduling on the British Broadcasting Corp. will return to normal. —Stephen Fidler

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LONDON—The British royal family bade farewell to Prince Philip, the country’s longest-serving royal consort, during a ceremony adapted to conform to Covid-19 social-distancing rules but that remained rich in symbolism that spoke to the prince’s devotion to the queen and his deep attachment to the British military. A masked Queen Elizabeth sat alone on Saturday, surrounded by empty seats in St. George’s chapel at Windsor Castle, and watched as her husband of over 73 years was lowered into the royal vault in a funeral without precedent in the monarchy’s long history. Because of the pandemic, only 30 members of Prince Philip’s family, including three of his relatives from German nobility, were allowed to attend the service in person. The mourners outside the castle walls were urged not to congregate in the April spring sunshine. Instead, the country was invited to tune in on television to commemorate a prince born in Greece but who dedicated his life to furthering the British monarchy. Born a prince of Greece and

For personal, non-commercial use only. Do not edit, alter or reproduce. For commercial reproduction or distribution, contact Dow Jones Reprints & Licensing at (800) 843-0008 or www.djreprints.com.

A10 | Monday, April 19, 2021

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Dozens in the room Typically, he started by identifying either the largest tract of land in that area or the easy pickings, a family he already knew, for instance. He conducted title searches with a courthouse computer and record books, tracing who had bought, sold or inherited those mineral rights over the years.

business dress code has shifted in a more casual direction to suit the neighborhood. “There’s no need to put on a jacket,” he said. New York’s office occupancy is still low. In a survey of major employers released in March, the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents business leaders, found that just 10% of office workers in Manhattan have returned. Even looking ahead, survey respondents said they expected occupancy would reach only

45% by September. Some key New York spots for business dining remain closed. The Grand Central Oyster Bar attempted a reopening at one point last year, only to reclose almost immediately because of the limited response. Executive chef Sandy Ingber remains doubtful about giving it another go until at least a few more months. “I just don’t see it,” he said of the foot traffic in the area. Still, Gherardo Guarducci, co-founder of SA Hospitality

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Thunder Ranch wind farm in Noble County, Okla. Landmen who used to track down the owners of oil-and-gas rights for fossilfuel companies increasingly now work to persuade ranchers to sign over land for wind and solar farms. Below, Lee Grubb, in black jacket, spoke to an Oklahoma landowner.

Often, dozens of landmen were in the room doing the same thing. If you got up from your seat, you left your yellow legal pad face down to prevent the next guy from rubbernecking, Mr. Collum said. Then he chased leads. Negotiations were often done at a family’s kitchen table. Owners of oil or gas mineral rights typically get an upfront payment plus a percentage of the revenue. Mr. Collum focused his pitch on the likelihood his company would drill wells that would deliver royalties and financial security. “I tried to sell the future,” he said.

Sky's the Limit

Dry spell

Note: Forecast reflects employment in oil and gas extraction and associated services, compared with the manufacture, installation and operation of wind and solar facilities. Source: Wood Mackenzie

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Starting around 2015, landman work began declining in an oil-price plunge that forced many shale companies to cut back. Work slowed further when Covid-19 swept the world, weakening oil demand and again forcing companies to retrench. The U.S. oil-and-gas industry has been one of the hardest hit in the pandemic, shedding nearly 75,000 jobs last year, or roughly 19% of positions, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data on oiland-gas extraction and associated services. Jobs involving evaluating and securing new drilling locations, such as landmen and geologists, were among the first cut when companies scaled back. “There’s not much hope in it, really,” said Garet Edwards, a 37-year-old landman based in Oklahoma. “Oil and gas seems to be a never-ending battle.” Mr. Edwards belonged to a generation of Oklahoma State University graduates who jumped into the shale land rush. He recalled the day he drove more than seven hours from Oklahoma to New Mexico to persuade a retired preacher to sign. The deal allowed Devon Energy Corp. to edge out Chesapeake for control of a prized

Renewable energy jobs are forecast to outpace oil and gas around 2032. Employment projections 500 thousand

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drilling area. Last June, Chesapeake, once the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer, filed for bankruptcy protection. Devon agreed last fall to join forces with WPX Energy Inc., a union engineered to weather the pandemic price rout. He, too, thinks back to the boom days. “You didn’t let the grass grow under your feet too long,” Mr. Edwards said. Now, he said, “You can step into any of these little old courthouses, and you might be the only one that’s been there all week.” For two years, he contracted for a renewable-energy developer, signing up landowners to host wind turbines and solar panels. In 2018, he switched sides to represent landowners in renewable and fossil-fuel energy deals. Even that has slowed. He is considering part-time work selling insurance to ranchers. Employment data for landman jobs isn’t broken out by the Labor Department. Membership in the American Association of Professional Landmen tumbled around 20% last year. The organization recently expanded its definition of landman work to cover renewable energy. “For folks that even know

what a landman is, you immediately think oil and gas. And over time, that’s not what you’re going to think,” said Lester Zitkus, president of the landman association and a Gulfport Energy Corp. executive. Lee Grubb, an Oklahomabased landman, said he had around 10 friends working as landmen in 2014, when federal data showed U.S. oil and gas employment at its highest level in recent decades. Only two remain, including Mr. Edwards. The other works for a renewable energy company. “It’s kind of a shocker,” said Mr. Grubb, 39. “It was one of the hottest oil and gas areas in the world for a while, and there’s nothing going on out here now.” Mr. Grubb travels the Southwest persuading ranchers to sign over land for wind and solar farms for Enel Green Power, a unit of the Italian utility Enel SpA. He earns more on average in renewables than he did in oil and gas, where he could go a year or two with little or no land work when prices were low, he said. He also travels more, clocking around 60,000 miles a year making house calls. Many of the people he visits are

more familiar with oil and gas than wind or solar power. Part of his job is educational. Wind and solar leases generally offer less money up front but steadier payments that could stretch for decades, he said. “You’re trying to get everyone’s minds wrapped around that,” Mr. Grubb said. Rick DePriest didn’t need much convincing before he and his wife signed up about a decade ago for wind turbines to be built on their roughly 450-acre property southwest of Oklahoma City. Together, the two turbines bring them about $20,000 a year, money the DePriests plan to use to supplement their retirement. “Low-impact income,” Mr. DePriest said.

Energy exploration Jim Stout, a landman based in the Pittsburgh area, was laid off in late 2019 from EQT Corp., the largest U.S. natural gas producer. Mr. Stout, 42, spent more than a year piecing together jobs that included selling real estate and building storage facilities. His income, he said, fell by about half. “The idea is don’t ever rely on being in one job again,” Mr.

SHANE BROWN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)

Continued from Page One peake Energy Corp. These days, the jobs are going dry. Landmen, after riding the highs of the boom, face weakened demand for fossil fuels and investor indifference to shale companies after years of poor returns. Instead of oil and gas fields, some landmen are securing wind and solar fields, spots where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest. The difference is shale wells eventually empty and, in good times, that keeps landmen on the prowl for new land and new contracts. Wind and solar energy never run out, limiting demand for new leases as well as landmen. Renewable energy jobs are growing in the U.S., but last year roughly three-quarters of them were construction-related, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. Even after last year’s oil-field job losses, U.S. oil and gas production employment is likely to outnumber renewable energy jobs for roughly another decade, according to the firm’s analysis. Tami Hughes, one of the relatively few female landmen, contracts for an international oil company divesting U.S. assets. In 2019, there were more than 100 landmen and support staff on the project, she said. Now, there are eight. “If this job ends, I probably wouldn’t be able to get anything else until the price of oil and gas rises,” Ms. Hughes, 62, said. Mr. Collum remembers the good times, when shale companies couldn’t find new deposits fast enough. They employed small armies of landmen who tracked down nieces, nephews and grandchildren who owned the rights to underground minerals, sometimes unbeknown to owners of the land above. Mr. Collum had his own epiphany around 2006 while working as an assistant pro at the Peach Tree Golf Club in East Texas during a tournament for a group of high-spirited landmen. At his parents’ house the next night, Mr. Collum asked his dad what landmen did. “Anybody that could breathe basically at that point could be a landman,” Mr. Collum said. Weeks later, he joined the ranks. He spent some of his early years working the Haynesville, a natural gas field that stretches from East Texas to northwest Louisiana. As a contract landman for El Paso Corp., Mr. Collum would get assigned a region to lease and a rough budget.

Greek restaurant Estiatorio Milos in Midtown with business associates. With business people still often working from home in different parts of the city, there isn’t as compelling a reason to dine at the usual Midtown spots. Andrew Saba, an assistant vice president at the financial firm AllianceBernstein, has been taking clients to business meals at restaurants in the West Village because it has proved a more convenient location. There, the once-standard

Group, the restaurant company behind Casa Lever, said office occupancy numbers may be misleading. Even if the figures are far below pre-pandemic levels, the people who are returning to the workplace are executives for whom business meals are almost a necessity. “We’re seeing all the top brass,” he said of his dining crowd. Other restaurateurs point to the large number of New Yorkers who have been vaccinated recently and are more comfortable dining out as a result, and say warmer weather has made outdoor dining more popular. “They miss the food. They miss dining out,” said Mario Zeniou, director of operations at Estiatorio Milos, which also has a location at Hudson Yards. On a recent weekday, Mr. Zeniou was overseeing his Midtown spot, which was filled indoors and outside, albeit at the state-mandated capacity of 50% indoors. As servers brought out plate after plate of grilled fish or Greek salad, Mr. Zeniou expressed optimism. “I think New York will come back much faster” than people expect, he said.

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Jonathan Mechanic, left, and Adam Schwartz ate at Casa Lever, a power lunch spot in Manhattan.

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Continued from Page One Mr. Schwartz has dined lately at some of Midtown Manhattan’s most noted power-lunch spots, including Casa Lever. Mr. Schwartz’s recent lunchtime companion at the upscale Italian restaurant was another top executive: Jonathan Mechanic, who chairs the real-estate department at Fried Frank, an international law firm headquartered in the city. As far as Mr. Mechanic is concerned, the days of virtual meetings could soon be numbered as the power lunch resumes its place in the urban fabric. “In-person is way better than anything,” said Mr. Mechanic. “It’s like the major leagues versus sandlot ball.” The rules of the game have changed. Gatherings are more likely to occur on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, since many employees haven’t gone back to the office full

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Power Lunches Are Back

time and are still likely to work Mondays and Fridays from home. Diners are lingering over their food, almost as if the period coming out of the pandemic has prompted them to appreciate the business lunch as a social occasion as much as an opportunity to talk shop. “It’s like they’re more having brunch than lunch,” said Michael Coll, general manager of Nerai, an East Midtown Greek restaurant. There is also the sheer novelty of meeting clients and colleagues after a year of isolation. “You’re so happy to be with people who don’t live with you,” said Marlene Wallach, founder of Gleem Beauty, a skin-care company headquartered in the city. Another shift: enjoying a cocktail or a glass of wine as part of the meal. That was once standard in New York power-dining circles but had changed in recent years with an emphasis on meals as serious and sober-minded affairs, say business people. “I’m looking forward to having a martini” at lunch, said Milton Pappas, a semiretired venture capitalist who has been dining at high-end

JONATHAN MECHANIC

FROM PAGE ONE

Stout said. This month, he started as a full-time contract landman, helping identify and secure land for solar farms. Opportunities for higher pay in fossil fuels make returning one day to the industry attractive, he said, but “it’s hard to see when the next boom phase in oil and gas might be.” U.S. benchmark oil prices have rebounded to around $60 a barrel from a pandemic low of negative $37.63 last April, spurring companies to deploy additional drilling rigs and resume some hiring. Yet employment in U.S. oil and gas production has likely peaked, according to Wood Mackenzie. The firm expects industry jobs to increase some 18% from 2021 through 2027, to around 424,000 positions, before slowly declining as technology improves. Renewable energy and related fields are forecast to attract roughly 60% of the world’s energy investment from 2020 through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, up from around 48% from 2015 through 2019. When shale driller Marathon Oil Corp. laid off Mr. Collum last spring, he figured another oil-and-gas job would be hard to come by. He began taking online real estate classes, but he found a landman job at a small firm in his hometown of Tyler, Texas. The company, Vernon E. Faulconer Inc., operates existing wells rather than drilling new ones, and Mr. Collum works mostly from his desk. He was recently scouting for properties to dispose of wastewater that is produced along with natural gas. He worries about finishing his career as a landman. “Man, I’ve got three girls,” ages 8 and under, Mr. Collum said. “If they came to me and said, ‘Hey, Daddy, I want to do what you do.’ Would I steer them away from it? Yeah, I probably would.”

For personal, non-commercial use only. Do not edit, alter or reproduce. For commercial reproduction or distribution, contact Dow Jones Reprints & Licensing at (800) 843-0008 or www.djreprints.com.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Monday, April 19, 2021 | A10A

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GREATER NEW YORK Struggling to Get Supplies Yang Is Top Pick Among Key Group BY KATIE HONAN

ing to a February survey by the National Community Pharmacists Association, which represents 21,000 independent pharmacies nationwide. Yet independent pharmacies have struggled to obtain vaccines, frequently getting them later than other providers. About half of independent pharmacists around the nation said that their vaccine supply has been inadequate, according to an April survey by the National Community Pharmacists Association. Independent pharmacies in New York City have received just shy of 300,000 doses to date, compared with around 1.13 million at chain pharmacies, according to the city’s health department. Large drugstore chains are getting supply directly from the federal government, while independent pharmacies go through third parties. The city has provided doses to about 200 independent pharmacies. “We have worked on capacity building, readiness for receiving vaccine and on allocation of vaccine to independent pharmacies and we’re grateful for all they do to vaccinate New Yorkers,” a spokesman for the city’s health department said.

STATE STREET | By Jimmy Vielkind

Mr. Fuzaylov, of Voorhies Health Pharmacy, said obtaining vaccines has proven difficult. Glitches with the New York City Immunization Registry also prevented him from uploading required patient information for a month, he said. A technical issue that the city has been working to address has been causing such problems, according to the health department. Administering the shot is also labor intensive and costly, Mr. Fuzaylov said. Medicare increased payments to $40 a dose for the J&J vaccine in mid-March from $28. But Medicaid continued paying just $13.23 a dose, he said. Mr. Fuzaylov was finally beginning to streamline the undertaking and planned to vaccinate more than 70 people with the J&J vaccine on April 13 at an adult daycare center in Sheepshead Bay near his pharmacy. He called off the immunization clinic when he learned of the federal government’s call to pause the administration of the J&J vaccine because of concerns over potential side effects. “I didn’t expect it to be that much work,” Mr. Fuzaylov said of administering vaccines.

This year’s mayoral primary is the first with ranked-choice voting. choice for 40% of registered Republicans age 50 and older. Five other Republican candidates are running for mayor in the largely Democratic city. Of the Democrats surveyed in the poll, 85% said they were either certain or very likely to vote. Of the Republicans, 69% said they were either certain to vote or very likely to do so. “We’re still in a pandemic, and it’s always difficult to predict how conditions in June are going to affect whether people do or do not vote,” Dr. Levy said in an interview. “Amongst this age group, Yang has a decided advantage.” Beth Finkel, the New York state director for AARP, said voters 50 and older are the most consistent voting bloc. Older voters typically are most concerned about affordable housing, pedestrian safety and transit, Ms. Finkel said.

NEW ISSUE/REFUNDING ISSUE

Republicans Make Their Case To Take On Cuomo in 2022

$1,032,000,000*

State of Connecticut

SpecialTax Obligation BondsTransportation Infrastructure Purposes

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MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/PRESS POOL

2021 Series A, B, and C

JESSICA PROUD

Two members of Congress, two former gubernatorial candidates and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s son will address a gathering of Republican leaders in Albany on Monday, as the state party starts to settle its ticket for November—of 2022. NYGOP Chairman Nick Langworthy said in an interview that his singular focus is defeating Gov. Andrew Cuomo in next year’s statewide elections, adding he hopes for a consensus about his party’s candidates before year’s end. “It is imperative that we get the ball rolling,” said Mr. Langworthy. There are now more than twice as many Democrats in the state as Republicans, and the GOP hasn’t won a statewide office since Gov. George Pataki was elected to a third term in 2002. Republicans also lost control of the state Senate majority in 2018, hampering the state party’s efforts to raise campaign money. U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who represents a district in eastern Long Island, on April 8 became the first major GOP candidate to declare a gubernatorial bid. His campaign said he raised $1 million on its first day of operations. In January, Mr. Cuomo reported he had $16.8 million in his war chest. In addition to Mr. Zeldin, Mr. Langworthy said party leaders will hear from U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose district includes the Adirondack Park, and Andrew Giuliani, who worked as a White House aide under former President Donald Trump. Aides to Ms. Stefanik and Mr. Giuliani confirmed they are considering gubernatorial bids. As did Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro and former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, who were the Republican guber-

Philip Luk, owner of the recently established Phils Pill Pharmacy in Woodhaven, Queens, said he has been trying to provide vaccines to his customers. On Feb. 1, Mr. Luk placed his first order for the vaccine through an administrator of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program. For 13 straight weeks, his orders for vaccines were canceled without a stated reason. Mr. Luk finally got his first batch of 100 doses of the J&J vaccine on April 1. By April 6 he had administered all of them and filled a seven-page wait list with names of more people seeking the vaccines. The following week Mr. Luk ordered 300 more doses. Soon he learned that the new order was canceled. “It’s driving me crazy,” Mr. Luk said. Companies that help the federal government deploy vaccines to some independent pharmacies say supply is improving but still isn’t meeting demand. The Biden administration announced on March 29 a commitment to expand the number of pharmacies in the Federal Retail Pharmacy program to 40,000 from 17,000 by Monday.

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Lev Fuzaylov, right, has been providing Covid-19 shots at his Voorhies Health Pharmacy in Brooklyn.

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In late March, Alexander Klimenko, 81 years old, settled on a stool in his local pharmacy in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A nurse jabbed his arm with the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine after explaining the procedure in Russian. Mr. Klimenko, who takes care of his health and regularly jogs to Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach for a swim in the ocean, got vaccinated more than two months after he became eligible, even though he lives in a neighborhood that in recent months has had one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the city. He hadn’t been sure where and how to sign up for the vaccine, he said, so he put it off until an acquaintance told him about availability at Voorhies Health Pharmacy. Mr. Klimenko had walked in and put his name on the list. “Lyova told me he will call me when they get a shipment,” Mr. Klimenko said, using an affectionate form of the first name of Lev Fuzaylov, owner and pharmacist at Voorhies Health. A couple of days later Mr. Klimenko got the shot. Community pharmacies like Voorhies Health play a crucial role in reaching New York City’s remaining unvaccinated population. By virtue of being local, as well as by the personal connection they have with their patients, often in their native languages, small non-chain pharmacies are able to serve those reluctant or unable to travel to mass-vaccination sites or navigate online registration, as well as those hesitant to get the shot. One in four Americans put their pharmacy as their first or second choice for where they would like to get vaccinated, accord-

BESS ADLER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BY YULIYA CHERNOVA

New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang is the top choice among a crucial group of voters—registered Democrats age 50 and older, according to a poll released Sunday. The poll, by Siena College Research Institute and seniorcitizens’ group AARP, showed that 24% of Democrats in the age group say the former presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur is their first choice in the June 22 Democratic primary. This year’s mayoral primary is the first with rankedchoice voting, which allows voters to rank as many as five candidates. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who are also running for mayor in the Democratic primary, were each the first choice for 13% of Democrats age 50 and up, according to the poll. Democratic candidate Ray McGuire, a former vice chairman at Citigroup, received 9% of first-choice votes from Democrats in this age category, and candidate Maya Wiley, a Democratic candidate and former legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, had 7%, the poll showed. Of the surveyed Democrats, 26% were still undecided. For Republican voters, 44% were undecided. Mr. Yang’s co-campaign manager, Sasha Ahuja, said, “The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day, and our strategy remains the same—making sure as many New Yorkers as possible hear Andrew’s message: Hope is on the way.” A spokesman for Mr. Adams said: “This poll, like others, undercounts Black voters—but Eric Adams will make sure their voice is heard…because he is putting together an historic coalition of support to become the next mayor.” Lupe Todd-Medina, a senior adviser

to Mr. McGuire, said, “The race is wide open, but the movement in this poll is consistent with what we are experiencing on the ground.” Representatives for Mr. Stringer and Ms. Wiley declined to comment. The poll surveyed New Yorkers age 50 and older by phone and online from March 29 to April 8. The 531 registered Democrats and 129 registered Republicans who were surveyed are people who vote consistently in general and other elections, according to Don Levy, head of the Siena College Research Institute. Curtis Sliwa, a Republican mayoral candidate and founder of the street-patrol group Guardian Angels, was the top

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Local pharmacies are crucial in vaccination drive but have trouble getting enough doses

Nick Langworthy hopes a GOP candidate can defeat Gov. Cuomo. natorial nominees in 2018 and 2014, respectively. Mr. Molinaro is also considering a run for the U.S. House of Representatives, but an aide confirmed he will attend the confab. Mr. Astorino said he is seriously considering another gubernatorial run. New York Republicans must also grapple with the legacy of Mr. Trump. He lost his native state in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and is viewed negatively by about two-thirds of the state’s voters, according to a Siena College Research Institute poll released last month. However, the poll found that the former president is viewed favorably by about roughly three out of four Republican voters surveyed. Former Erie County Executive Joel Giambra started his political career as a Democrat before joining the Republican Party in 1999. He said he wished to be considered by party leaders because he believed he had crossover appeal that was important in a blue state. Mr. Giambra—who led a group of New York Republicans that campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016—said Democrats would attack Republicans for their association with Mr. Trump. “This is not Alabama. Joe Biden won by about two million votes,” Mr. Giambra said. “I don’t know how any Republican who was a Trump supporter can over-

come that kind of voter enrollment disadvantage.” Mr. Langworthy dismissed this concern, saying voters wouldn’t focus on Mr. Trump by the 2022 election. He also said Mr. Cuomo, whether or not he is on the ballot, could be an albatross for Democrats. The incumbent governor has been accused of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior by five current and former female aides. He has denied touching anybody inappropriately and apologized if his behavior in the workplace offended anyone. Federal prosecutors are investigating the state’s policies on Covid-19 in nursing homes. Mr. Cuomo has said he is cooperating with the probe and that the state’s actions were in line with federal guidance and crafted to preserve hospital capacity. Mr. Langworthy also said Democratic policies, including the recently enacted state budget that raised taxes on the wealthy by $4.3 billion and includes roughly $2 billion of unemployment benefits for “excluded workers,” including immigrants living in the country unlawfully, would help Republicans make the case against one-party rule. “The left has overreached to a point where they are trying to fundamentally transform our country and our state, and people have had enough,” he said. [email protected]

Honorable Shawn T. Wooden Treasurer of the State of Connecticut Preliminary Pricing Dates Retail Order Period* April 21, 2021

Institutional Pricing* April 22, 2021

(not all bonds will be offered for retail)

Expected Tax Status Interest is federally tax-exempt (non-AMT) and state tax-exempt for Connecticut residents**

For more information on these Bonds, including the Preliminary Official Statement, please visit:

www.BuyCTBonds.com or call 877.552.8266 or contact any of the firms below.

Goldman Sachs & Co., LLC 917.343.7900 Blaylock Van, LLC 877.591.7072

Raymond James 877.295.9116

RBC Capital Markets 800.243.2478

Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC 800.334.6800

Academy Securities 855.212.3239

BofA Securities 888.768.6999

Barclays 212.528.1115

Cabrera Capital Markets LLC 800.291.2388

Citigroup 855.644.7252

Drexel Hamilton, LLC 212.632.0406

Fidelity Capital Markets 800.544.5372

Jefferies 800.567.8567

J.P. Morgan 855.231.8873

Loop Capital Markets 888.294.8898

Mischler Financial Group, Inc. 800.820.0640

Morgan Stanley 888.454.3965

Oppenheimer & Co. 866.208.1368

Piper Sandler & Co. 800.552.0614

Rice Financial Products Company 888.740.7423

Roosevelt & Cross Incorporated 800.348.3426

Stern Brothers 800.466.5519

TD Securities 212.827.7171

Wells Fargo Securities 866.287.3221

*Preliminary, subject to change. ** Before purchasing any Bonds, contact your tax advisor to determine any applicable federal, state and local tax consequences. These Bonds may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time an Official Statement is delivered in final form. Under no circumstances shall this announcement constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of the Bonds in any jurisdiction in which an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities law of any such jurisdiction. Bonds are subject to availability. The Bonds will only be sold by means of an Official Statement.

For personal, non-commercial use only. Do not edit, alter or reproduce. For commercial reproduction or distribution, contact Dow Jones Reprints & Licensing at (800) 843-0008 or www.djreprints.com.

A10B | Monday, April 19, 2021

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

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CAREERS & LEADERSHIP

PERSONAL JOURNAL. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

© 2021 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved.

Monday, April 19, 2021 | A11 level than any other ethnic group of women. Across ethnic groups of both genders, white workers advance at higher rates, followed by Latino, Asian and Black workers. Among CEOs of S&P 500 companies, 3% are Indian and 2% are of other Asian descent, according to MyLogIQ, a data tracker. In industries where Asian-Americans work in large numbers, such as tech, their numbers drop off at senior levels. “There’s this idea that we’re good workers, but not assertive enough to be leaders,” says Henry Fong, 46, LinkedIn’s vice president of legal. “We’re the worker bees, the cogs in the machine.” At Facebook, for example, people of Asian descent represent 44% of employees and hold 25% of leadership roles, according to the company’s diversity report. Asians make up 6% of the U.S. population. “This is a community that’s long suffered from invisibility,” says Soyoung Kang, 46, chief marketing officer at beauty company eos Products. Ms. Kang says she only recently shared stories about her own experience as an Asian woman with colleagues. She has been called racial slurs, including once when she was egged while walking down the street. “It’s cathartic,” she says of these discussions. Among those who have recently spoken out about experiences with racism is Kane Ma, 24, co-founder of startup Kamo Digital Solutions, who shared on LinkedIn about getting beaten up in 2019 shortly after graduating college in Chapel Hill, N.C. His assailants mocked him, he said, telling him to defend himself with kung fu, and later boasted that “white people have power.” “It just felt right to speak up, to let people know this kind of hate is real,” he says. While recent hate crimes have often targeted the elderly or especially vulnerable, racism affects Asians across society, says Eric Toda, 36. “You walk into a room, and they assume I’m the IT guy, or I go into a restaurant and they think I’m DoorDash,” says Mr. Toda, a Facebook marketing executive who signed last month’s ad. In his career, he says, some white colleagues have said they don’t see him as Asian, intending that as a compliment. Some say that discussions of racism and bias happening in many workplaces since George Floyd’s death last summer have paved the way for Asian-Americans to speak out about their experiences, too. At Delta Air Lines, for example, since Mr. Floyd’s killing, Ranjan Goswami, vice president of inPlease turn to page A12

Asian-Americans Push For Visibility at Work Issues of race have come to the fore in many U.S. workplaces; now, more Asian employees say their needs should be heard, too

minority” that belies the economic challenges and discrimination some face. Though Asians have the highest U.S. incomes of any ethnic group, they also have the widest level of income disparities among all ethnicities, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Asian employees also haven’t been particularly demanding in corporate settings, Ms. Mok says. A 2019 Asia Society survey of 2,685 U.S. corporate workers found that Asians and Pacific Islanders tended to prefer more private forms of communication than their peers. “Maybe we believed in the model-minority myth, and that our community didn’t need anything,” she says. While Asians are more likely than members of other ethnic groups to be found in professional jobs and have college degrees, their numbers drop off at executive levels, an Ascend analysis of 2018 government data found. It also found that Asian women drop off in higher numbers at the executive

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“When you’re treated as less sticking out like than American.” a sore thumb, Though many you try harder U.S. companies to blend in,” have devoted sigsays Mr. Lai, 44. nificant resources “But this is a toward advancing new generation, women and emand we feel like ployees of color, we do have a employees of right to be Asian descent are heard.” often overlooked Last month, in workplace di1,000 Asianversity efforts, American busisays Anna Mok, ness leaders— president of AsFacebook executive Eric Toda. including cend, an organiYouTube cozation that founder Steve works to enChen and Zoom Video Communicahance the influence of Pan-Asian tions CEO Eric Yuan—pledged to business leaders. In her conversadonate $10 million to organizations with executives at a range of tions fighting Asian racism, ancompanies, she says, she’s frenouncing their commitment in a quently found their diversity and full-page ad in The Wall Street inclusion plans don’t specifically Journal in which they declared address Asians. themselves “angry and afraid.” The Ms. Mok notes that companies group also called for more support often see the Asian community as for Asian-American employees, prosperous and not requiring assaying, “We are tired of being sistance, a perception of a “model

A Music Director Gets An M.B.A. to Land a Graduate Job at Ford BY PATRICK THOMAS

FROM LEFT: ANNE OWENS; NICK HAGEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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itchell Owens was working as the music director for a number of Catholic churches near Milwaukee when he realized he just wouldn’t be able to earn a salary high enough to support his two toddler sons. After getting a full scholarship to Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business’s fulltime M.B.A. program, he bet that the degree would help him shift into a new, higher-paying role in business. Mr. Owens moved with his family to East Lansing, Mich., got a part-time job at a local church, and took out about $40,000 in federal loans to help cover his living expenses. It was a sharp turn from his original career dream: Mr. Owens, 35 years old and a Detroit native, had fallen in love with music at an early age. After participating in activities like his school’s choir and drama club, he decided to pursue it professionally. “I wanted to perform for a living,” he said. “I loved doing it, even starting in middle school when I started learning piano.” He enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit to study theater but switched to music after a year. To earn money on the side, Mr. Owens took an assistant music di-

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aycee Lai spent years in Silicon Valley trying to avoid calling attention to his ethnic identity. Early in his career, if he left work to get bubble tea, a Taiwanese drink, he’d tell his white colleagues he was getting coffee. When co-workers made comments about his race—such as suggesting that, as an Asian male, he should be in coding rather than sales—he would laugh them off. “For the longest time, AsianAmericans have felt like you can achieve the American dream so long as you shut up and aren’t seen,” says Mr. Lai, who worked at Microsoft and software company VMware before founding his own data-analytics firm, Promethium, in 2018. But amid a wave of outrage and sorrow prompted by a recent surge in verbal and physical attacks against people of Asian descent, that sentiment is changing among many Asian-American professionals. Since the Atlanta shooting last month in which six women of Asian descent were among eight killed, many Asian professionals have talked at company town halls about their experiences of racism and what it means to be Asian in U.S. workplaces and society. Some have pushed for donations from their employers toward issues facing Asian communities, while others have simply called for Asians to be more visible in the workplace.

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BY TE-PING CHEN

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FROM TOP: ANDREW SENG FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; NATE FONG

Soyoung Kang, chief marketing officer at beauty company eos Products.

Above: Mitchell Owens played for two of his children in 2019. Right: in his home office last month.

MAKING THE MOVE FROM MUSIC TO MOTORS Name: Mitchell Owens

rector position at a local Catholic church. “It was better than waiting tables,” he said. After graduation, he gained a master’s degree in vocal performance from Chicago’s North Park University and another in theology from Marquette University in Milwaukee. While living in both places with his wife, Anne Owens, and his first two children, Mr. Owens continued to work as a music director at local churches. Mr. Owens realized while working in Milwaukee in 2016 that despite all his academic credentials and experience as a music director, he was limited in how far he could progress in his career. He had also accumulated roughly $60,000 in student loans and had two sons to support. “The two master’s degrees that I had, they weren’t really gonna help me advance much. I had sort of

Age: 35 Location: Allen Park, Mich. Education: Bachelor of music, voice performance at Wayne State University; Master’s degree in music at North Park University; Master’s degree in theology at Marquette University; Master of Business Administration at Michigan State University Former job: Director of music Aha moment: Realization his salary wasn’t going to be what he

peaked professionally at the age of 27,” Mr. Owens said. “The other big thing was the schedule. For church musicians, your big times are weekends and holidays and several evenings a week. That was gonna be really hard on our family.”

wanted it to be to support his family. The most important piece of advice for changing careers: “Figure out what your goal is. What is the north star that’s guiding you? For me, it was family.” What would you do differently: “Everything that I have encountered in my life and all the decisions I’ve made, even the bad ones, have led me to where I am. In that sense, I wouldn’t change a thing because things have worked out. God has guided my life.”

He considered applying to law school, but instead settled on pursuing an M.B.A., which he figured would give him broad enough business knowledge to pursue a variety of careers. After getting a full scholarship, Mr. Owens en-

rolled in Michigan State’s two-year program in 2017. “From a financial standpoint, it’s less that we wanted a huge income, more that we wanted to be a single-income household so that my wife had the flexibility if she wanted to work, she could, if she wanted to focus on her music and the kids, she could,” he said. Ms. Owens is a harpist. At Michigan State, Mr. Owens specialized in supply-chain management. When he started looking for jobs, he had a tough time finding employers willing to take a chance on a former church musician, he said. “It was really difficult getting companies to take me seriously. They couldn’t really look past my nontraditional background,” he said. “Full-time M.B.A. programs are designed for career switchers. But I was a career switcher in all caps.” He only had two interviews for internships during the first year of his M.B.A. but landed a summer position at Ford Motor Co. After graduating in 2019, he was recruited for Ford’s program that provides a variety of rotational job assignments for college graduates during their first years with the company. These opportunities are in multiple-skill teams that range from IT, human resources and finance. He currently works as a purchasing strategy analyst. Mr. Owens, now a father of four, enjoys the opportunity to rotate positions at Ford and his new career in business but still finds time to do some part-time work in music. “Things are coming together. There’s much more of an opportunity for career advancement since I made the shift,” he said. “My old degree, that opportunity just wasn’t there.”

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

A12 | Monday, April 19, 2021

PERSONAL JOURNAL. | CAREERS & LEADERSHIP

Admit It: You Miss Office Gossip If it’s practiced with kindness and tact, breaking down office rumors with colleagues can actually be healthy for workers

current also serves to counter any overly upbeat or sanitized formal corporate communications coming from on high. “People suspect that in the CSuite or in the senior offices they’re making plans that impact other peoples’ lives that they don’t really know about,” Ms. Halpern says. “Gossip is a counterinsurgency.” Information can flow in the other direction, too. As a CEO, Julie Peck has found that folks aren’t exactly plopping down in front of her desk, spilling their feelings. She’s long relied on a handful of tapped-in people at the companies she’s led to bring her that intel. At a business she ran in Houston, it was a longtime executive assistant. “Everybody trusted her with their deepest, darkest secrets,” Ms. Peck says. It was the executive assistant who absorbed feedback from the rest of the staff and then

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ent these days. How does one share a particularly juicy tidbit discreetly while abiding by social distancing? “You’re not leaning in to whisper about something,” says Rachel Lee, who started commuting back into the nonprofit where she works in the Seattle area four days a week last fall. Before the pandemic, colleagues from all different departments would come to chitchat during their breaks. Gathering context about things like past restructurings calmed her anxieties. Now, Ms. Lee can go a half day without seeing anyone. She often feels as if she’s going into meetings without really knowing how others in the organization feel about proposals and projects. Gossip is an early-warning system, says Nancy Halpern, a New York City-based leadership consultant who helps executives navigate office politics. The verbal under-

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relay positive news, like when you pass along that a co-worker crushed it at a presentation. It also provides stress relief and intellectual stimulation, helps us gain influence and fosters interpersonal intimacy. “You hear the surface story and then you learn what the real story was, and that’s the gossip,” says Gawain Kripke, an advocacy and policy consultant in Washington, D.C. Such chatter has helped the 53-year-old connect the dots on everything from why a vendor landed a contract to colleagues’ career ambitions. Back in the office, body language was usually a crucial part of the exchange, key to establishing trust. Now it’s fair to wonder whether your co-worker is grimacing or smirking under that mask as you spill the tea. Those trickling back to the office say the vibe is just differ-

divulged the upshot to Ms. Peck: People feared her. The feedback spurred Ms. Peck to bake cookies for the staff and host employee roundtables, where she developed a more casual, close rapport with workers. Now leading Vcheck Global, a due diligence and background-investigation company that’s been working remotely during the pandemic, Ms. Peck sometimes sees shoots of her old in-person gossip networks sprouting up on Slack channels. Others have forged new one-onone connections in this strange, unifying moment, and managed to gossip via phone or screen— sometimes even finding it easier than back in the office. Of course, workers broadcast gossip digitally at their own peril. Robyn Pickering, a geochemistry lecturer at a Cape Town, South Africa university, has been invited to private chat rooms on Zoom calls that aim to mimic the gossipy postmeeting debrief that would often bubble up as folks walked out of a conference room. But the threat of accidentally dropping a juicy private message into the public chat box looms. “It’s terrifying to me,” she says. Known for keeping a stash of chocolate cookies and tissues in her office for tête-à-têtes, she misses the camaraderie with colleagues and students. And yet it took a pandemic for her to realize how much time all the conversations were taking. As a single parent to two young children, she’s been shocked by how much she’s gotten done at home. “I was actually very productive,” she says.

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hat’s the latest? Your guess is as good as mine. Gossip, the thread of whispered conversation and conjecture that once flowed through the workplace, has dwindled in our new network of home offices and half-empty headquarters. Detached from many of our work friends, forced to type out most of our thoughts, we’re finding that gossiping feels risky, weird and hard. Serendipitous run-ins with colleagues from other departments by the coffee machine—Did you hear what happened in sales? Did you know she’s leaving?—have been replaced by formal Zooms with little time for chitchat. Hybrid work schedules mean even when we’re in the office, many others aren’t. Stuck on calls with the same five teammates, sometimes it feels like there’s simply no new information to be had. “We already know what everybody has to say,” says Joe Labianca, a management professor at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics. The rosy and righteous among us might say good riddance. And surely at some employers there’s now less drama, and more time for whatever we were hired to do. But there’s a lot we miss. In a recent survey of 504 employees and business owners by law firm Seyfarth Shaw, the top thing people reported longing for after a year of remote work was “in-person and ‘grown-up’ workplace conversations.” “We need to do it,” says Dr. Labianca, who studies gossip, which researchers define as two people speaking evaluatively about someone who’s not there. Dr. Labianca expands the concept to include rumors, like the threat of layoffs. It gets a bad rap, but gossip can

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Continued from page A11 flight field operations, has dedicated weekly time at his all-hands meetings for colleagues to share testimonials and discuss issues around diversity. “We’ve seen people want to discuss things more, and feel empowered to say, ‘We want to talk about it,’ ” he says. Since December, nearly 300 flight attendants have worn pins indicating they have undergone diversity training and are happy to talk with colleagues about such issues. “What started being uncomfortable is now normal,” says Mr. Goswami, who is also executive sponsor of Delta’s affinity group for Asian employees and participated in a recent town hall on anti-Asian hate. With the rise in antiAsian hate crimes, more Asian professionals say they want to band together. Five years ago, when Janet Cho tried to interest Asian colleagues in joining the Asian employee resource group at medical device company Medtronic, she says she got only lukewarm responses. “Now I have folks reaching out, saying, ‘Hey, I want to be engaged, what can I do?’ ” says Ms. Cho, a senior director in global communications in the company’s diabetes unit. The employee group, she says, has been working with Medtronic leadership to bring in psychologists to facilitate discussions for Asian employees, hold listening sessions with the CEO and circulate guides for managers on how to talk about anti-Asian violence with teams. For years, Ed Chan, a 50year-old senior vice president at Verizon Communications, says colleagues didn’t take the company’s Asian employee group very seri-

FROM TOP: BRIANA WYNANT; JANET CHO

A Push for Visibility At Work

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ILLUSTRATION BY YVETTA FEDOROVA

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WORK & LIFE RACHEL FEINTZEIG

Part of the challenge for Asian professionals is speaking up, says Judy Lee, a Pinterest executive.

Janet Cho, a Medtronic executive. ously. “We used to make fun of [it],” he says. “It was mostly about food, fun and some culture.” But lately, he says, the group has flexed its muscle, lobbying Verizon to donate to anti-Asian racism efforts. The company, in turn, has committed $10 million. The group is working with Verizon to create a leadership-training program for Asian employees, much like one that exists for Black colleagues.

“We never asked for one before,” says Mr. Chan, now a leader with the group. “You’ve got to ask for some things to get attention.” Being a squeaky wheel can be especially hard for Asian professionals who grew up in immigrant families and were raised not to complain, says Judy Lee, global head of experiential marketing at Pinterest. Ms. Lee’s family moved to the U.S. when she was three months old. She grew up focused on trying to succeed and pay her parents back for their sacrifices, she says, and was careful to avoid talking about racism. Still, for Ms. Lee, 46, who recently joined her company’s Asian employee group, the uptick in hate incidents has been a wake-up call. She says Asian friends of hers have been spat on in the streets. As a company leader, her silence, she says, had the effect of silencing other Asian colleagues, too. “It’s never too late to use your voice,” she says.

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ARTS IN REVIEW

Monday, April 19, 2021 | A13

ART REVIEW

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CALDER FOUNDATION, NY/ARS, NY/MOMA (4)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Alexander Calder: Artist, Engineer, Giant

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Alexander Calder in 1943, above; an installation view of ‘Alexander Calder: Modern From the Start’ at the Museum of Modern Art, top; Calder’s ‘Sandy’s Butterfly’ (1964), right; and his ‘Lobster Trap and Fish Tail’ (1939) seen above a staircase at MoMA, below

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New York he opening gallery of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Alexander Calder: Modern From the Start,” which hosts a modest, black-and-white installation of seven abstractions, is absolutely stunning. Playful, muscular, fantastical and serene, it’s among the most striking gatherings of Calder’s art I have ever seen. Here are a few of the American sculptor’s large-scale, black sheetmetal stabiles, such as the jovial “Devil Fish” (1937), which seemingly curtsies and flaps its many wings, fins, petals and elephant ears; the prancing, menacing “Black Widow” (1959), ready to seize you in giant pincers; and “Spiny (Maquette)” (c. 1939), whose silhouettes flit among single black beast, herd and parading clan. These all-black sculptures are set off against stark white walls, as is “Snow Flurry, I” (1948), a suspended white mobile about eight feet tall and seven feet across, commandeering the far corner of the room. Drifting, fluttering, nearly invisible, “Snow Flurry, I,” with its white metal planes—glinting, throwing a mirrored-ball scattering of reflections and soft-gray shadows—conjures blizzard, discothèque and ethereal flocks of birds. What’s so special about this show’s initial installation is its unruliness and claustrophobia; and that its crowded sculptures appear to be in continual states of interplay and metamorphosis. The ceiling is relatively low for these big works sporting long limbs and tentacles, crouching backs and arching leaves and blades, which give the museum the makings of jungle, battlefield, circus and cage. Calder’s human-size sculptures share not just our space,

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BY LANCE ESPLUND

forms, scale and demeanor, but also our ground plane; they feel alive and demand that we not merely consider them as works of art, but that we interact with them. MoMA curator Cara Manes, with assistance from curatorial fellows Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, has orchestrated a spirited, synergistic environment from start to finish in this compact retrospective of some 70 sculptures, works on paper and pieces of jewelry, as well as film, photographs and ephemera. It’s the museum’s first major Calder show since 1969. Though smaller and certainly tardier than one of America’s greatest sculptors deserves (especially one considered MoMA’s unofficial “house artist”), it’s cause for celebration. Quintessentially modern, Calder (1898-1976), who trained as both an

artist and an engineer, magically wed qualities of the industrial, artistic and organic. He was equally influenced by Jean Arp’s and Joan Miró’s biomorphic abstractions and Piet Mondrian’s insistently flat, planar geometries, the latter of which—after a revelatory visit to the Dutch painter’s Paris studio in 1930—Calder decided (in his breeze-driven mobiles and mechanized sculptures) to set in motion. Drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection and augmented with loans from the Calder Foundation, “Modern From the Start” begins in the Edward Steichen Galleries and continues in the adjacent Goodwin and Stone Building where, since 1939, Calder’s commissioned mobile “Lobster Trap and Fish Tail” has enlivened and reigned over MoMA’s Bauhaus staircase. The show resumes downstairs and outside in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where you’ll encounter the sculptures “Sandy’s Butterfly” (1964), a carnivalesque combination of windmill, flower and whirligig, and “Man-Eater With Pennants” (1945), an unapologetically intimidating conflation of tree, anchor, flagship and farm machinery—like standing under an alighted helicopter. Yet this exhibi-

seemingly distills and counterbaltion will surprise even diehard ances elements of earth and sky, Calder fans. After its opening heaviness and lightness, precarioussalvo, the show, funneling you into ness and equilibrium—in forms that a narrow corridor, becomes chronconflate craggy rock, highwire act, ological. It includes Calder’s early surfing and solar system. wire portraits, such as “Josephine “Swizzle Sticks” consists of a Baker III”; ink drawings of the cirhanging mobile of angled sticks, cus; and toylike wood and wire sculptures of animals—all from the each of which is anchored by a small lead weight, 1920s and ‘30s. It mounted in front then spills out of a bright red into a single large A striking exhibition plywood rectangallery filled with gle. Initially, a variety of later celebrates the sculptor slightly, masterworks. and his long association swaying the sculpture One section is feels moored devoted to Calwith MoMA. there. But when a der’s endlessly inbreeze gets it ventive jewelry and cutlery: brass, spinning, the silver, iron and steel eddies, spirals, sticks begin to bob and swivel, to insects and birds that are also tap, kiss, bounce and weave. The rings, necklaces, bracelets, sculpture mirrors the movements of brooches, buckles and utensils— swizzle sticks circling the rims of functional, wearable artworks that, glasses, and of revelers moving the subject of a 2008-09 exhibition, around a cocktail party. Not only seldom see the light of day. Another that, but if you listen closely, you’ll area features wood-and-wire wall hear the crossing and bumping of constellations from the 1940s— wood and lead—sounds reminiscent mounted like still-writhing animals, of the clink-and-tinkle ringing of enormous bugs and trophy heads. toasting glasses. Here, too, are three motorized This exhibition, a roaring toast sculptures and the undulating, multo Calder, should become a permatisectioned metal “Candelabra” nent installation. It’s a tribute to (1939), a thrilling, vinelike minione of Modernism’s giants, and a rollercoaster commissioned by living reminder of what made MoMA for its 10th-anniversary celeMoMA modern—from the start. bration dinner. Included also are two of my favorites, the crowd-pleasing “GibralMr. Esplund, the author of “The tar” and the rarely exhibited “SwizArt of Looking: How to Read zle Sticks” (both 1936). “Gibraltar,” Modern and Contemporary Art” a roughhewn-though-delicate, (Basic Books), writes about art wood-and-wire tabletop sculpture, for the Journal.

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A14 | Monday, April 19, 2021

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

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DARREN STAPLES/PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS

SPORTS

Real Madrid and Liverpool players line up before a UEFA Champions League match. Under current rules, teams qualify for UEFA competitions by finishing in the top spots in their domestic leagues.

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Soccer Clubs Plan a ‘Super League’

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The proposal would see Europe’s most powerful teams form their own tournament separate from the Champions League BY JOSHUA ROBINSON

open a new chapter for European football,” Manchester United coowner and Super League vice president Joel Glazer said. Before the Super League reports were confirmed on Sunday evening, UEFA rushed to condemn what it called “a cynical project,” adding that the super league format was “founded on the self-interest of a few clubs at a time.” The organization also vowed to ban any clubs that join the new league from its own tournaments, including the Champions League, and deny their players the chance to represent their national teams. After the announcement became official, UEFA reiterated its threat to ban players and clubs who have signed on to the Super League. Soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, also expressed its disapproval. Talks between UEFA and the top clubs had already led the organization to accept a new format for the lucrative Champions League. The organization was due to unveil an expanded 36-team format on Monday, which would also increase the number of guaranteed games clubs play in the tournament from 2024 on and broaden their TV exposure. Yet the top clubs were still not thrilled by the arrangement. Not only had they sought greater assur-

Weather

presence and leave the Champions League behind for good—though they would still hope to compete in their domestic championships. The English Premier League, which only formed via its own breakaway in 1992 to become the richest soccer league in the world, also criticized the project. Six of its teams—Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—have already signed letters of intent to join, along with Juventus, AC Milan, Internazionale, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid. That group would then expand to at least 20, separated into two pools of 10, organizers said. “The Premier League condemns any proposal that attacks the principles of open competition and sporting merit,” it said in a statement. Even U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to weigh in, joining his outrage to that of French President Emmanuel Macron. “Plans for a European Super League would be very damaging for football and we support football authorities in taking action,” Johnson tweeted. The new system would be modeled more closely on the NFL or Major League Baseball than anything that currently exists in Euro-

Proposals for breakaway setups have rumbled through Europe with some regularity.

a joint statement. “And, in particular, to create a tournament in which the best clubs and players can compete against each other more frequently.” Under current rules, teams qualify for UEFA competitions by finishing in the top spots in their domestic leagues, leaving them open to the vagaries of one bad season. But in a Super League, the founding members would be a permanent

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A small group of soccer’s richest clubs is making a divisive play to dramatically revamp the game’s biggest stage by breaking away from the traditional European structures and setting up a long-rumored Super League. The proposal would see the six most powerful teams in England, plus six more from Spain and Italy, form their own tournament separate from the Champions League, with guaranteed participation—and access to lavish television rights payments—year after year. All of which leaves European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, at odds with some of its most valuable members. Tension has been mounting for years over how to slice up a global television and commercial rights pie that is currently worth more than $3.3 billion a year. Super League organizers, however, have framed it as a way to generate more revenue for an industry battered by the pandemic. The teams will collectively receive a one-time payment of €3.5 billion ($4.18 billion) for joining, the statement said. “By bringing together the best clubs and players in the world to play against each other throughout the season, the Super League will

ances of automatic qualification, but a few were also looking for an ownership stake in the competition itself, according to a person familiar with the matter. As it stands, the Champions League is UEFA property with the Swiss-based organization holding full discretion over prize money. “For years, the Founding Clubs have aimed to improve the quality and intensity of existing European competitions,” the 12 teams said in

pean sports. Whether or not the project can move ahead will depend heavily on its ability to survive likely legal challenges from UEFA and the various domestic leagues. The move has also generated tremendous ill will from the rest of European soccer. Until this point, the European Club Association, led by Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli, had been the main agitator for competition reform. But on Sunday, the ECA came out against a breakaway, arguing that it would undo the work it has tried to do in partnership with UEFA. “A ‘closed super league model’ to which media articles refer would be strongly opposed by ECA,” the group said. Agnelli resigned as chairman less than an hour after the announcement. Proposals for breakaway setups have rumbled through Europe with some regularity in recent years, as the game’s richest clubs seek to maximize their share of soccer’s enormous television payouts. “The motivation behind this socalled superleague is not furthering sporting merit or nurturing the world’s game—it is motivated by nothing but cynical greed,” the UKbased Football Supporters’ Association said on Sunday.

The WSJ Daily Crossword | Edited by Mike Shenk

Shown are today’s noon positions of weather systems and precipitation. Temperature bands are highs for the day.

V ancouver Vancouver

Calgary C

70s ttl Seattle P d Portland Eugene g