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Good afternoon and welcome to the Sunday edition of Notes on the News, your guide to the week ahead and the best of our weekend reads. Here's what we're watching: a potential deal to buy Slack, new Covid-19 restrictions in U.S. cities, and Supreme Court arguments over whether to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census. Let us know what you think by replying to this email. |
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| PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS |
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1. Salesforce could move quickly to buy Slack. The business-software giant is in advanced talks to acquire the office communications company, and while there is no guarantee a deal will happen, the two parties could reach an agreement early this week, according to people familiar with the matter. |
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2. Major U.S. cities to tighten Covid-19 curbs. Los Angeles plans to ban multi-household gatherings starting Monday, and San Francisco will suspend many indoor activities today. Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who today announced plans to reopen public schools, has predicted the city could be heading for the second-toughest tier of restrictions in a statewide three-tier system. |
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3. Supreme Court to scrutinize Trump's census plan. The justices are scheduled on Monday to hear arguments on the president's attempts to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the population-based calculation that distributes seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College. |
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4. S&P examines Tesla's challenging debut. S&P is expected to release results Monday of its consultation with big investors on whether it should make an unprecedented move and split the auto juggernaut's S&P 500 debut over two trading days in December. Regardless of the outcome, investors and traders expect the market for Tesla shares to heat up even further. |
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5. Hong Kong activists expect imprisonment. Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam—three prominent young figures in the city's pro-democracy movement—face sentencing on Wednesday after they pleaded guilty to inciting a large protest outside police headquarters last year. |
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6. Data expected to show labor market continues to slowly heal. Friday's November jobs report is likely to show U.S. employers notched the seventh straight month of job gains, but at a notably slower pace than in October. Economists expect the unemployment rate to tick slightly lower, underscoring the severe damage from the pandemic. |
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7. Predicting the global economy's trajectory in 2021. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is on Tuesday set to release its first new forecasts since a series of promising developments in the race to vaccinate populations against Covid-19. |
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93% — The decline in public-transit revenue in San Francisco during the pandemic. Public-transit agencies across the U.S. are cutting service and reducing their workforces as they face a cash crunch. Federal funding that agencies received from the spring’s relief package is starting to run out, and local tax revenues that support many transit systems have shriveled. 21 — The number of states that signed an agreement last year, along with Washington, D.C., allowing them to share information and confidentially explore using the courts to secure federal mandates on greenhouse-gas emissions. The plans speak to how aggressive state governments have become in their efforts to sway Washington on climate change. $16.3 billion — The amount raked in by leveraged and inverse ETFs through the first 10 months of the year, on pace to top 2008’s record haul of $16.7 billion, according to Morningstar. A hunt for bigger returns has led investors to plow money into funds offering a chance to double or triple daily returns but at sizable risk. |
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Pausing loan payments during coronavirus is producing uneven results. The federal government helped millions of Americans through the early months of the pandemic by allowing them to defer payments, with little negative effect, on mortgages and student loans, two markets in which it holds huge sway. But the government’s reach doesn’t extend to credit-card lending, auto loans or personal loans, and borrowers with those forms of debt ended up with much less relief. The divergence in how the programs are playing out reflects that the tools used to restart an economy are usually blunt, and can have unexpected effects. |
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| What Everyone Wants to Know |
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| Ki's Steak and Seafood in Glendale Heights, Ill. PHOTO: LUCY HEWETT FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
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Restaurant holdouts are defying shutdown orders. Some restaurants are rejecting a new round of Covid-19 shutdown orders, saying that serving customers indoors is their only way to stay in business and that they can do so safely. Businesses and trade groups have filed lawsuits against the bans and criticized policies that they say have made restaurants scapegoats for the coronavirus’s spread. Restaurant operators in Pennsylvania, New York City and Illinois have held rallies calling for dining rooms to stay open. A Stanford University study published earlier this month found restaurants and cafes have been among superspreader sites where many people have contracted Covid-19 after gathering at close quarters. |
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Biden aims to appoint liberal judges after Trump’s conservative push. President-elect Joe Biden in January will begin an effort to recalibrate the federal judiciary with more liberal appointees who embrace a robust judicial role in addressing national problems and protecting an evolving spectrum of individual rights, a shift from the conservative appointees under President Trump. Trump and Senate Republicans are determined to leave no vacancies for Biden to fill. But once he takes office, Clinton and Obama appointees might begin to step down with the assurance that a Democratic president can appoint like-minded successors. Xi's China has little room for dissent. While China’s Communist Party has long punished people seen as threats to its rule, government authorities under leader Xi Jinping have engaged in the most relentless pursuit of dissenters since the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, according to academics and activists. Xi’s crackdown has snared women planning protests against sexual harassment, human-rights lawyers once given leeway and Marxist students advocating workers’ rights. Many have endured lengthy detentions and various forms of psychological pressure. |
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| Competitive swimmer Chloe Isleta, 22, in the pool before practice. PHOTO: COURTNEY PEDROZA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
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Floats at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade roll down an empty Manhattan street, mourners in Buenos Aires wait to see the casket of soccer superstar Diego Maradona, and a young girl interacts with Santa through a plexiglass barrier at a New Jersey mall. Here's what our photo editors think are the best images of the week. |
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| Leona Helmsley circa 1989. PHOTO: PL GOULD/IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES |
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Go watch: "Empires of New York," a docuseries looking at the outsize and era-defining personalities of Ivan Boesky, Donald Trump, John Gotti, Leona Helmsley and Rudolph Giuliani in 1980s New York. |
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