Wildfires Burns 1.4 Million Acres

08/26/2020

1.1M

The number of laid-off workers seeking U.S unemployment benefits rose to 1.1 million in the week ended Aug. 15 — an increase of 135,000 from the previous weeks revised level, the U.S. Department of Labor reported. Economists polled by Dow Jones expected a total of 923,000. The previous week’s initial claims were also revised up from 963,000 to 971,000 — marked the first time in 21 weeks that initial claims totaled below 1 million. Meanwhile, the number of Americans receiving jobless benefits for at least two straight weeks, decreased to 14.8 million in the week ended Aug. 8, the lowest since early April. The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending August 8 were in Nevada rose by 4,028, while the largest decreases were in New York (21,366), California (19,534), and Florida (16,702).

3,500

Amazon Inc. unveiled plans to add 3,500 new hires — to bring jobs to half-dozen U.S cities. The company said it is expanding its physical offices in six U.S. cities and adding thousands of corporate jobs in those areas, including 2,000 jobs in New York — spending more than $1.4 billion to expand. The new jobs are “corporate and tech” per the company’s description — expected to hire for a variety of roles, from data scientists, cloud-infrastructure architects, product managers, software engineers, and user-experience designers — will work on areas like AWS, Alexa, Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech, and Amazon Fresh. The list of cities includes New York, San Diego, Denver, Phoenix, Detroit, and Dallas, accounting for around 900,000 square feet of office space in all.

5M

Schools across the United States are planning to begin the school year remote or hybrid learning models, but back to online learning this fall has trouble. The country now facing a shortage of laptops and other equipment needed for online learning due to intense demand and manufacturing delays — a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops due to supply chain disruptions and sanctions on China, according to an Associated Press investigation. To resolve this issue, school districts are pleading with the Trump administration, saying that online learning without laptops will amount to no learning for some of the country’s most vulnerable students.

25%

According to the National Association of Realtors, existing homes sales in the U.S surge nearly 25% in July — the largest monthly gain since the Realtors started monitoring the data in 1968 and also the highest sales pace since December 2006. June’s 21% rise was also a record until the latest numbers. Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist said that the housing market is booming with higher home sales — as remote working flexibility made current homeowners to look for superior homes and this may lead to a higher-level demand even in 2021. The report also shows that the national median home price in July was USD 304,100 — breaching $300,000 for the first time ever, and an increase of 8.5% from July of last year.

0.6%

According to Johns Hopkins University, cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States have risen by 0.6% as compared with the same time Sunday to 5.72 million — an increase was less than the average daily rise of 0.8% over the past week. In New York, the governor’s office reports that virus-related hospitalizations have dropped to 472 and intensive care patients to 110 — both marked the lowest number of hospitalizations since mid-March. New York State marked 16th straight day of positive-test results under 1%, the officers reported. California reports most cases in the last week — 6,777 new confirmed cases on Saturday, marking the highest number in a week but still less than the seven-day average of 7,822. To see the confirmed cases by country/region and sovereignty, see this map and dashboards of COVID-19 from Worldometer.

1.4M

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California reported that more than 7,000 wildfires burning 1.4 million acres have burned across California– making this year fire season is 25 times worse than 2019’s. At this stage last year, we had 42 wildfires that burned about 56,000 acres across the state, said the governor. Nearly 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed by the fires and seven people have died, according to a statewide fire summary. Responding to the emergency, Trump released federal aid to supplement recovery efforts in areas affected by the wildfires — which include crisis counseling, housing, and other social services.

107

Meanwhile, we have a new Guinness World Record. Idaho men named David Rush shared a video, breaking the Guinness World Record for eating 107 blueberries in the 1-minute time period. The total was enough to beat the previous record — which was set in 2019 by British man Luke Roberts, who ate 96 berries in 60 seconds. Rush has broken more than 150 Guinness records for juggling, balancing, and many more with a mission to promote STEM education, said the blueberry record required speed and precision as the rules required him to use only one hand to pick up only one blueberry at a time.