coronavirus

US consumer spending took a record nosedive last month as Americans hoarded cash during the coronavirus pandemic, new data show. Personal consumption spending tumbled 13.6 percent in April, marking the largest drop since the feds started tracking the figure in 1959, the US Department of Commerce said Friday. The US savings rate, however, soared to …

Dear Adults: You are in the room, right? This isn’t all just going to be “take my ball and go home” day, is it? Name calling? Intractability? There is going to be a moment in which a leader or three rises above the familiar roles, the rhetoric, the threats, isn’t there? It should start with …

Bebe Rexha’s parents are recovering after they both contracted COVID-19. “They got sick with the coronavirus and were very ill for three weeks, and I got very nervous,” the 30-year-old singer told Extra. Rexha, who lives in Los Angeles, desperately wanted to drive across the country to be with her New York City-based parents but …

FreakNik Fest will go on as planned despite the coronavirus pandemic. The second annual music festival is set to take place at Morris Brown College in Atlanta from Sept. 18-20 with a lineup that includes Jermaine Dupri, Too Short, Juvenile, 2 Live Crew, Paul Wall and Da Brat. FreakNik Fest will be Atlanta’s first major …

Tyson Foods plans to temporarily close an Iowa pork plant where nearly a quarter of the workers have caught the novel coronavirus. The meat-processing giant announced the move Thursday after Iowa officials said 555 of the Storm Lake facility’s 2,517 employees had tested positive for the potentially deadly virus. That’s about 22 percent of the …

Swiss drugmaker Novartis will start producing a genetic coronavirus vaccine this month under a deal with Massachusetts researchers. AveXis, Novartis’s gene-therapy arm, agreed to manufacture the vaccine being developed by Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Massachusetts General Hospital. Production will start in time for clinical trials that are scheduled to begin in the second half …

I promise that this isn’t one of those schmaltzy “Look on the bright side”/”There is a silver lining to all this” articles. Coronavirus has no bright side, and there is no silver lining. But over the past couple of days, I have become a bit more grateful for the technologies and technology-based services that are …

The current U.S. budget deficit could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and a hurried effort by the Donald Trump administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America. The shutdown has left the country on the cusp of a self-inflicted economic collapse not seen …

While disappointing, the results are not particularly surprising. Millions of people are turning to masks in an effort to protect themselves from COVID-19, but new evidence suggests those efforts could be for naught. Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month found that both surgical and cloth masks proved ineffective in preventing the …

The nation’s biggest mattress maker is in danger of becoming a coronavirus casualty this summer — and it’s the company’s private-equity owners that have made it vulnerable. Serta Simmons — a 150-year-old manufacturer that controls nearly 40 percent of the US mattress market — is facing a liquidity crunch as its retailers struggle with state-ordered …