Risk...

Aid...

Fatigue...

Rent...

Before the coronavirus crisis, three of New York City’s largest commercial tenants  Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley  had tens of thousands of workers in towers across Manhattan. Now, as the city wrestles with when and how to reopen, executives at all three firms have decided that it is highly unlikely that all their workers will ever return to those buildings.

The research firm Nielsen has arrived at a similar conclusion. Even after the crisis has passed, its 3,000 workers in the city will no longer need to be in the office full-time and can instead work from home most of the week.

The real estate company Halstead has 32 branches across the city and region. But its chief executive, who now conducts business over video calls, is mulling reducing its footprint.

But now, as the pandemic eases its grip, companies are considering not just how to safely bring back employees, but whether all of them need to come back at all. 

They were forced by the crisis to figure out how to function productively with workers operating from home — and realized unexpectedly that it was not all bad.

Reverse..

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) late Wednesday denounced the state Supreme Court's decision to side with Republican legislators and strike down the extension of his stay-at-home order, saying the ruling would throw the state into "chaos" and lead to a spike in coronavirus cases. 

 Evers said, shortly after the decision was released. "We worked really hard to stay at home and do all the right things around social distancing and so on and so forth."

Wisconsin's public health department has reported more than 10,900 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 421 deaths from it. 

Evers had begun to lift certain restrictions put in place at the outset of the outbreak. Earlier this week, he announced retail shopping in standalone locations or strip malls could open allowing for five customers at time. Just a thought.

Wisconsin's unemployment rate in March was 3.4 percent, 1.0 percent lower than the national rate of 4.4 percent.

Area: 65,498 mi²

Population: 5.822 million.

Goats...

Apparently no longer content to shelter-in-place, roughly 200 goats busted out of their enclosure and briefly ran loose through a San Jose neighborhood Tuesday evening.

The goats came from an enclosure on a hill in the Silver Creek neighborhood, said Roelands. They are brought in once a year for a few days to clear the hillside brush.

We got to do the same. Just a thought.

Fog...

Constant worry about the virus has become an uninvited guest into our quarantine—and it’s really only being amplified by the fact that we can’t connect with others outside of video chat, we’re grappling with the fear being laid off or making ends meet after being laid off, and our routines at large have been upended.

Anxiety takes a lot of mental juice, and in the time of COVID-19, our brains are running on fumes. Research from 2018 found a direct link between anxiety and fatigue, while older research from 2011 found a lack of focus in “high-anxiety individuals“—and this research happened during time periods when the collective wasn’t facing a pandemic.

“When people are at home and they feel restricted, that can make someone low-energy and even depressed. That’s what we’ve been seeing in some of our patients—especially people with a history of depression or anxiety.” 

End-all

Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease expert, during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, arguing that Fauci shouldn't be the "end-all" decision-maker when it comes to the US's coronavirus response.

Paul said there likely wouldn't be a surge in coronavirus cases as states loosen social-distancing guidelines and reopen businesses. He added that he hoped that those "who are predicting doom and gloom" would "admit that they were wrong if there isn't a surge."

Paul, who contracted the coronavirus last month, insisted that "outside of New England," the country had seen a "relatively benign course for this virus" — even though New York, which is not in New England, has long been the epicenter of the nation's outbreak.

"As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end-all," Paul said. "I don't think you're the one person that gets to make the decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge."

Toy...

South Korean police  said they had taken a 24-year-old man into custody in connection with the Nth Room, an online sextortion ring that has shocked the nation and driven renewed calls for tougher laws to deal with digital sex crimes.

Three other people, including alleged ringleader Cho Ju-bin, have already been named, and more than 100 people apprehended.

The Nth Room ran on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, and the perpetrators used private information - sometimes collected illegally from local government offices - to blackmail many women and children into performing sexually explicit acts on camera, with thousands of users paying cryptocurrency to watch.

Sleepy Eye...

Presidentdent Trump is calling for “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd’s firing after the show apologized for his taking a clip of remarks made by Attorney General William Barr out of context.

“Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd should be FIRED by ‘Concast’ (NBC) for this fraud. He knew exactly what he was doing. Public Airwaves = Fake News!” 

 Todd could be heard asking one of his panelists to respond to a comment from Barr when he was asked in a CBS interview how history would be written about his handling of the Michael Flynn case.

“Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history,” the attorney general said in the shortened clip.

Todd went on to denounce that comment, saying he was struck “by the cynicism of the answer” and claiming that Barr was admitting that “yeah, this is a political job.”

A full transcript of the interview, however, showed that Barr did not simply make a comment about winners and losers. But Todd deliberately twisted the answer.