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Your Evening Briefing

Your Evening Briefing

(Bloomberg) --

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scaled back her ambitions for Congress's next coronavirus bailout package, abandoning an $800 billion infrastructure plan and other Democratic priorities—including funding for community health centers and access to clean water and broadband. Instead, she is focusing on additional direct payments to individuals and expanded loans to businesses.

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Here are today’s top stories

France reported its deadliest day on Friday, with 588 new fatalities. Italy saw its number of new coronavirus cases and deaths stabilize. Germany’s Angela Merkel ended her self-quarantine while U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson still has symptoms. The World Health Organization urged countries to keep lockdowns in place, warning that lifting them too quickly could lead to a resurgence of the virus. Here’s the latest.

Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday warned that New York’s health system was nearing capacity as he announced data showing more than 10,000 new infections in one day. More than 100,000 New Yorkers are now confirmed to have had the virus, and almost 3,000 have died. Grimly, city crematories are operating 24 hours a day. New Jersey is in a similar situation, with nearly 30,000 cases. Both states are scrambling to secure medical equipment, commandeering unused ventilators from facilities in less-impacted areas as officials warn they are just days away from exhausting supplies. Doctors, nurses and paramedics have been entering wards in improvised gear, including garbage bags and rain ponchos. The last-ditch scramble for supplies show what may be coming to the rest of America as the disease spreads. 

The Pentagon eased restrictions on which patients can be treated at a field hospital in New York City’s Javits Center and on the hospital ship USNS Comfort after a public outcry.

Mortgage firms spent years lobbying against tougher regulation and stricter capital requirements, arguing their lending didn’t pose a risk to the financial system. Now, many of those companies say they are in desperate need of a bailout to stave off bankruptcy and (yet another) collapse of the U.S. housing market.

Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Georgia Republican already the subject of a pandemic-related stock trading scandal, is in the hot-seat again. She sold a total of $46,027 worth of stock in an online travel company in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a European travel ban. Loeffler and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, are worth an estimated $500 million.

Coronavirus is testing the limits of international relations. Italy officially welcomed aid from Russia, but a mainstream Italian newspaper accused some of the Russian military staff of being spies. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Trump has been feuding with 3M over the export of respirators. The company produces 35 million masks a month from a pair of U.S. factories, which serve customers across North America. 

U.S. employment plummeted last month by a degree not seen since the last recession, in an early glimpse of the devastation to come. Payrolls fell 701,000 from the prior month and the jobless rate jumped to 4.4%—the highest since 2017—from a half-century low of 3.5%, and is expected to surge in the coming months. The S&P 500 fell 2.1% for the week.

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Your Evening Briefing

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