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Good afternoon and welcome to Notes on the News. It's Sunday, May 2. Here's what we're watching this week: The court battle between Apple and the maker of "Fortnite" begins, the U.S. will restrict travel from India, and Elon Musk hosts "Saturday Night Live." Let us know what you think by replying to this email. Thanks for reading. |
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| PHOTO: CJ GUNTHER/SHUTTERSTOCK |
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1. Epic Games and Apple meet in court. The trial, which starts Monday, pits the world’s most valuable publicly traded company against the maker of videogame "Fortnite." At stake is the question of how to define a market in the digital age. |
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2. Opioid case to test legal theory. The city of Huntington, W.Va., and the surrounding Cabell County are seeking more than $1 billion from drug distributors McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health. The trial, which begins Monday, will test a theory put forward in more than 3,000 other lawsuits. |
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3. U.S. employment is expected to post another solid gain. The April jobs report is set to show businesses hired more workers to meet rising demand for an array of goods and services. Even with another big gain, however, the economy will still have millions fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic. |
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4. Another busy earnings week is on tap. Quarterly results from companies such as CVS, Pfizer and Lyft on Tuesday and GM, Uber and Costco on Wednesday will provide clues about the strength of the economic recovery. Americans are holding more stocks than ever as stellar earnings reports have boosted major indexes. |
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5. Antony Blinken heads to Ukraine amid tensions with Moscow. The secretary of state will visit Kyiv, as Russia has amassed a military presence near Ukraine's border. The trip comes after President Biden last month proposed that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold a summit in a third country in the coming months. |
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7. Elon Musk hosts SNL. Hosting the long-running late-night comedy show will be a departure for the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, though he has enjoyed the entertainment-industry spotlight before, including cameos in "Iron Man 2" and "The Big Bang Theory." 📰 Enjoying this newsletter? Get more from WSJ and support our work with a special subscription offer. |
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$32.4 billion — The value of Tesla shares that Elon Musk can now claim after the electric-car maker hit roughly half of the targets laid out by the board in his landmark 2018 compensation package, according to a securities disclosure. 15% — The expected increase in spending on advertising by U.S. companies this year from 2020. Many companies had severely cut back on marketing expenses in the early months of the pandemic, but now advertising is coming back strong. 145 million — The number of daily active users of Microsoft’s workplace-collaboration tool, Teams. That's almost double the year-ago figure and up from around 20 million in November 2019. Amid the pandemic, results for tech behemoths such as Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have surged. |
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| What Everyone Wants to Know |
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| Ryan Vaughters, a communications studies major at Vanderbilt University. PHOTO: KRISTINE POTTER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
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Lots of jobs await the class of 2021. So does plenty of competition. New college graduates are entering one of the hottest job markets on record in recent years as the U.S. economy pulls out of its pandemic lockdown. But many who graduated last year are still trying to find their first big break. People who went back to graduate school to put off job hunting in 2020 and younger workers who were laid off are hitting the market, too. Workers under the age of 25 were terminated during the spread of Covid-19 at rates 79% higher than older workers, according to Gusto data from March 2020 through March 2021. Not all sectors are hiring equally. The top industries looking to hire new grads are tech, financial services, education and professional services, according to data from job-search site Handshake. The fewest job listings are in sectors hard hit by the pandemic, including hospitality, retail and natural resources. With extra competition, it will take work to stand out. Experts say grads should practice virtual interviewing, be ready to explain how they spent an unpredictable 2020 and prepare to adapt if their dream job doesn’t materialize. |
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Why so many millennials fall prey to impostor syndrome. Many in the millennial generation are familiar with “impostor syndrome,” the phenomenon of doubting your own hard-won success and feeling like a fraud in certain spaces. This kind of self-destructive thought pattern can also infiltrate your feelings about your finances—and all too often does for millennials. One source of many millennials’ insecurity is the scars of the 2008 recession, says Maggie Germano, a financial coach. At that point, millennials were either early in their careers or still in school, so they had little or nothing in the way of reassuring experiences to fall back on. More than a decade—and another recession—later, many are still hesitant to claim their newfound success. Luckily, there are ways to shake off the doubts and retool your thinking, such as talking openly with peers and reaching out to a trusted mentor and asking questions about their own financial paths. GOP’s blue-collar agenda is still a work in progress. After the November election, many Republican leaders looked at the surge of blue-collar voters into their party and concluded that their best hope for winning the next time was to cement the GOP’s image as “the party of the working class.’’ But Republicans haven’t yet unified behind a policy platform to support that goal. The approach to a working-class agenda “has varied a lot within the party,’’ said Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a group of conservative economic thinkers. President Biden used his speech to Congress on Wednesday to show that he was eager to compete for those voters as well, labeling part of his domestic agenda as a jobs program for blue-collar workers. |
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| PHOTO: PETROS KOY/MERGE RECORDS |
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Go listen to: "Second Line," the new album from New Orleans-born singer Dawn Richard. The Journal's critic writes that the record interprets the city’s storied parades with futuristic R&B and electronic beats. |
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