While the S&P boasted its steepest August percentage gain in more than three decades it ended Monday slightly lower and the Dow also lost ground as investors took a pause although the Nasdaq closed higher thanks to high-flying stocks including Apple Inc.The Federal Reserve’s commitment to tolerate inflation and keep interest rates low, positive developments in vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and a rally in tech-focused stocks have helped the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit record highs in August.But while some states continued to ease restrictions Monday, investors noted that across the United States, total coronavirus cases topped 6 million Sunday as many states in the Midwest reported increasing infections, according to a Reuters tally.”It’s a momentum trade. People are flooding to the technology companies they think will do well regardless of the pandemic,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer, Independent Advisor Alliance.’Pandemic is here to stay'”The U.S. just passed 6 million cases, a further reminder that the pandemic is here to stay until we do something about it. Clearly it has an impact on all businesses, but some are more pandemic resistant,” he said.The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 223.82 points, or 0.78%, to close at 28,430.05, the S&P 500 lost 7.7 points, or 0.22%, to 3,500.31 and the Nasdaq Composite added 79.82 points, or 0.68%, to 11,775.46.Technology, then health care and utilities stocks were the biggest percentage gainers among the 11 major SP sectors while energy was the biggest percentage decliner.Investors show cautionWith the S&P reaching 3.8% above its pre-crisis record during the session, Mona Mahajan, senior U.S. investment strategist at Allianz Global Investors in New York, said investors were showing some caution by favoring technology as they looked warily at U.S. and overseas COVID-19 numbers.”After such a strong summer run, we’re reverting back to the old pandemic playbook. So we see tech outperforming,” she said. “Really that’s a defensive move as people think about stay-at-home more as we’re heading toward that fall season.”The Nasdaq, meanwhile, ended the day almost 20% above its pre-crisis record closing high. Its top two boosts for Monday were from Apple Inc and Tesla Inc after their stock splits.While the splits did not provide a fundamental reason to buy the stocks, Mahajan noted that the lower prices may be making the momentum stocks more attractive to some retail investors.For the month the S&P showed a gain of 7.01%, its biggest advance for August since 1986 when it rose 7.1% that month.Three main indexes on riseThe three main indexes showed their fifth straight monthly rise following March lows, even as economic data pointed to an uneven recovery from the steep downturn.For the S&P, this was its longest winning streak on a monthly basis since a six-month run from April to September 2018.And the benchmark’s 35.6% gain since April marked the strongest five-month run for the S&P since 1938, according to data from Bespoke Investment Group.
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When the New York Police Department fired an officer last year for putting Eric Garner in a deadly chokehold, the officer’s union argued that there was little, if any, precedent within the department’s internal disciplinary system for such a penalty. Now, the nation’s largest police department is spelling out potential ramifications for officer misconduct, unveiling on Monday a draft of a discipline matrix that will guide punishment decisions similarly to how sentencing guidelines are used in criminal cases. It will be adopted after a 30-day public comment period. “We wanted to make it very, very clear that if you do certain things there are certain consequences,” said Assistant Chief Matthew Pontillo, who helped develop the disciplinary policies with the help from department officials and outside agencies. Mayor Bill de Blasio called it a “big step forward for transparency and accountability.” Fred Davie, chair of the city’s police watchdog agency, said he was “encouraged by some of the clear standards laid out in this new set of rules.” Police reform advocates weren’t as enthused, arguing the NYPD still has too much power policing its own and that it rarely enforces top penalties, with just 12 officers fired for misconduct since the mid-1980s. Union disagrees with proposalThe head of the city’s largest police union blasted the guidelines for different reasons, painting them as a way for elected officials “to manipulate NYPD discipline to further their radical political goals.” “Apparently mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines are unfair to criminals but perfectly fine for cops,” said Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, suggesting the guidelines would be subject to change “based on headlines and poll numbers, rather than any objective sense of justice or fairness.” The NYPD is shifting to formal disciplinary guidelines at a time when law enforcement agencies around the world are being pressed to be more transparent about discipline in the wake of protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, who will still have the final say on discipline, said it was important to have a “road map” so the public and officers know what to expect. Development of the matrix was well under way when city council passed a law in June mandating its use. The law also requires that the public be informed how often Shea deviates from it. Around the same time, state lawmakers sought to shed more light by repealing a decades-old law that had kept police disciplinary files secret. Police unions suing to block their release  are appealing after a judge ruled last week that they should be made public. A 48-page draft report lists presumptive penalties for dozens of forms of misconduct, including termination for using deadly physical force without justification, engaging in hate speech and making a false statement. Among the other items covered in the matrix: If an officer forgets to turn on his or her body camera while responding to an incident, he or she can be suspended or docked three days, but if it’s done intentionally, it’s a 20-day punishment. Accessing confidential information can be punished with a 10-day suspension or loss of vacation days, while leaking confidential information to the news media can be punished with a 20-day suspension or loss of vacation days. Chokeholds resulting in death and the intentional use of a chokehold are also grounds for firing. The NYPD has long banned chokeholds, and lawmakers recently passed laws explicitly outlawing the tactic. One was named for Garner, who died in 2014 after then-Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold. Plan two years in the makingIn developing a discipline matrix, the NYPD is fulfilling one of the last remaining recommendations from a panel of criminal justice experts that examined the disciplinary process on its behalf two years ago. While the experts found that the disciplinary process generally worked well, they said a set of guidelines would help eliminate perceptions of favoritism or bias in officer punishment. They also called for stiffer penalties for officers making false statements and committing domestic violence. The department revised its domestic violence punishment guidelines last year, Pontillo said. An officer can be fired for an incident that results in serious physical injuries, violates a restraining order or is part of a pattern of abuse. Pontillo’s group spend more than a year shaping the new guidelines. They looked at five years of case outcomes to get a sense of penalties that had been applied and studied how other police departments — including Los Angeles, Denver and New Orleans — built their guidelines. Misconduct complaints are investigated by the watchdog Civilian Complaint Review Board and the NYPD’s internal affairs bureau. If departmental charges are filed, an officer can either agree to a penalty or take the case to trial before an administrative judge. The judge sends any punishment recommendations to First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Tucker, who passes his recommendation to Shea. 
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With mass protests in Belarus showing no signs of letup following contested presidential elections August 9, the country’s longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko is turning to Russia for his political survival. But behind the Kremlin’s response lies a mix of geopolitical and domestic concerns, as Charles Maynes reports from Moscow.
Camera: Ricardo Marquina, Agencies   Produced by: Ricardo Marquina 
 
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Black Lives Matter comes to rural America and how restaurants are surviving amidst the pandemic.  
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High-profile COVID-19 vaccines developed in Russia and China share a potential shortcoming: They are based on a common cold virus that many people have been exposed to, potentially limiting their effectiveness, some experts say. CanSino Biologics’ vaccine, approved for military use in China, is a modified form of adenovirus type 5, or Ad5. The company is in talks to get emergency approval in several countries before completing large-scale trials, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. A vaccine developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, approved in Russia earlier this month despite limited testing, is based on Ad5 and a second less common adenovirus. A scientist works inside a laboratory of the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology during the testing of a coronavirus vaccine, in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2020. (Russian Direct Investment Fund/Handout via Reuters)”The Ad5 concerns me just because a lot of people have immunity,” said Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “I’m not sure what their strategy is … maybe it won’t have 70% efficacy. It might have 40% efficacy, and that’s better than nothing, until something else comes along.” Vaccines are seen as essential to ending the pandemic that has claimed over 845,000 lives worldwide. Gamaleya has said its two-virus approach will address Ad5 immunity issues. Both developers have years of experience and approved Ebola vaccines based on Ad5. Neither CanSino nor Gamaleya responded to requests for comment. Researchers have experimented with Ad5-based vaccines against a variety of infections for decades, but none are widely used. They employ harmless viruses as “vectors” to ferry genes from the target virus — in this case the novel coronavirus — into human cells, prompting an immune response to fight the actual virus. But many people already have antibodies against Ad5, which could cause the immune system to attack the vector instead of responding to the coronavirus, making these vaccines less effective. FILE – Screen grab taken from video issued by Britain’s Oxford University, showing a person being injected as part of the first human trials in the UK to test a potential coronavirus vaccine, untaken by Oxford University in England, Apr. 23, 2020.Several researchers have chosen alternative adenoviruses or delivery mechanisms. Oxford University and AstraZeneca based their COVID-19 vaccine on a chimpanzee adenovirus, avoiding the Ad5 issue. Johnson & Johnson’s candidate uses Ad26, a comparatively rare strain. Dr. Zhou Xing, from Canada’s McMaster University, worked with CanSino on its first Ad5-based vaccine, for tuberculosis, in 2011. His team is developing an inhaled Ad5 COVID-19 vaccine, theorizing it could circumvent pre-existing immunity issues. “The Oxford vaccine candidate has quite an advantage” over the injected CanSino vaccine, he said. Xing also worries that high doses of the Ad5 vector in the CanSino vaccine could induce fever, fueling vaccine skepticism. “I think they will get good immunity in people that don’t have antibodies to the vaccine, but a lot of people do,” said Dr. Hildegund Ertl, director of the Wistar Institute Vaccine Center in Philadelphia. In China and the United States, about 40% of people have high levels of antibodies from prior Ad5 exposure. In Africa, it could be has high as 80%, experts said. HIV risk  Some scientists also worry an Ad5-based vaccine could increase chances of contracting HIV. In a 2004 trial of a Merck & Co Ad5-based HIV vaccine, people with pre-existing immunity became more, not less, susceptible to the virus that causes AIDS. FILE – Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 30, 2020.Researchers, including top U.S. infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a 2015 paper, said the side effect was likely unique to HIV vaccines. But they cautioned that HIV incidence should be monitored during and after trials of all Ad5-based vaccines in at-risk populations. 
“I would be worried about the use of those vaccines in any country or any population that was at risk of HIV, and I put our country as one of them,” said Dr. Larry Corey, co-leader of the U.S. Coronavirus Vaccine Prevention Network, who was a lead researcher on the Merck trial. Gamaleya’s vaccine will be administered in two doses: The first based on Ad26, similar to J&J’s candidate, and the second on Ad5. Alexander Gintsburg, Gamaleya’s director, has said the two-vector approach addresses the immunity issue. Ertl said it might work well enough in individuals who have been exposed to one of the two adenoviruses. Many experts expressed skepticism about the Russian vaccine after the government declared its intention to give it to high-risk groups in October without data from large pivotal trials. “Demonstrating safety and efficacy of a vaccine is very important,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a Harvard vaccine researcher who helped design J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine. Often, he noted, large-scale trials “do not give the result that is expected or required.”  
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Asian markets are slumping at the beginning of the trading week, while European markets are mainly posting slight gains.The KOSPI index in South Korea was 1.1% lower, while Taiwan’s TSEC finished down one percent. Australia’s S&P/ASX and Shanghai’s Composite index were both down 0.2%.In late afternoon trading, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong is down 0.6%, and Mumbai’s Sensex is 1% lower.However, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index closed out the day 1.1% higher.Over in Europe, London’s FTSE index is down 0.6%, the CAC-40 in Paris is up 0.8%, and Frankfurt’s DAX index is 0.6 higher.In commodities trading, gold is selling at $1,964.40 an ounce, down 0.5%. U.S. crude is selling at $43.27 per barrel, up 0.7%, while Brent crude is basically unchanged at $45.08 per barrel.All three major U.S. indices are trending positively in futures trading. 
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