Cherry blossoms in bloom
CHERRY blossoms are in full bloom at several city parks, attracting scores of shutterbugs and flower lovers.
More than 50 percent of certain cherry tree varieties at Chenshan Botanical Garden in Songjiang District bloomed late last week, nearly one week earlier than usual. This week is best time to view the trees, the park operator said yesterday.
Kawazu-zakura cherry blossom trees, traditionally one of the earliest to bloom and the most common variety of cherry blossoms in Shanghai, have flowered at the garden.
At Shanghai Botanical Garden in Xuhui District, some cherry trees have also blossomed.
SPENDING the weeklong Spring Festival holiday visiting relatives, setting off firecrackers, eating local specialties and lazing in the warm sunshine, Frenchman Balthazar Boyer was able to feel the familiar festive ambiance of Wuhan.
“It was a very pleasant week off. This Spring Festival was completely different to the last one,” said Boyer, 39.
Unlike last year, when he and his family spent the holiday anxiously in quarantine at home, they were delighted to celebrate together with family and friends this year, embracing normality in the megacity that was once hard-hit by COVID-19.
Boyer, the general manager of a French company’s China office, has lived in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei
Province, for nearly 20 years. He settled in the city after acquiring his master’s degree in law from Wuhan University and marrying a local woman.
Two weeks after Boyer and his wife returned to Wuhan from a family visit in France in January of last year, the city announced suspensions of public transportation as well as outbound flights and trains to fight the epidemic.
Although the French government organized several evacuations for its nationals in Wuhan, Boyer and his wife chose to stay.
“Why would we leave? Wuhan is our home,” said Boyer, adding that he was confident in the Chinese government’s response.
That year, the family spent the Lunar New Year holiday at home, watching the news every day to keep themselves updated.
“Balthazar’s birthday coincided with last year’s Spring Festival holiday, but we were in no mood for a celebration,” said Boyer’s wife, Hu Fan.
No worries
The couple’s anxieties and concerns gradually eased as they learned that medics nationwide were rushing to assist Wuhan, temporary hospitals were being built and infections were dropping. Their worries were also eased as their community organized group purchases to provide substantial daily necessities.
“I received so many kinds of foods besides what was needed for our daily meals — I could even try to cook different cuisines,” said Hu.
As Wuhan gradually regained its vitality, their lives also returned to normal. When Boyer resumed work, he required all his employees to maintain social distancing and wear masks at work.
Although shadowed by the pandemic in 2020, his optoelectronics business was just as profitable as it was in 2019.
Boyer and Hu geared up to celebrate the Spring Festival this year on February 12.
“We thoroughly cleaned our house ahead of the festival, hoping to sweep away all the bad luck of last year and welcome the good luck of the Year of the Ox,” said Hu.
MACY’S is looking ahead to a year of recovery and rebuilding from the coronavirus pandemic as the iconic department store chain offered annual forecasts that beat Wall Street forecasts.
Driving that optimism is Macy’s push to accelerate online sales, while focusing on physical stores at top-tier malls and modernizing its supplier network to speed up deliveries.
As a result, Macy’s believes annual sales will reach US$20.75 billion this fiscal year, exceeding the roughly US$17 billion that Wall Street had projected.
Macy’s also expects adjusted earnings per share in the range of 40 US cents to 90 US cents for the year, much better than the US$2.92 loss that analysts forecast, according to FactSet.
The company said on Tuesday it expects digital sales to reach US$10 billion within the next three years and that the online side will become even more profitable. Still, it store defended its physical store business, noting that online sales are two to three times higher in markets with Macy’s stores.
The forecast came as Macy’s posted a fourth-quarter profit drop of 52 percent. Sales slid nearly 19 percent. In the context of a year spent under the weight of a pandemic, that was seen as a pretty good ending to 2020 for the besieged department store.
Macy’s faced challenges even before the pandemic forced the chain and its peers to close temporarily last spring to reduce the spread of the virus. The retailer was wrestling with increasing competition from online players like Amazon and discounters like Target and Walmart. But the pandemic accelerated shoppers’ shift to online spending and increased the dominance of big box stores, which were allowed to stay open because they were deemed essential.
Macy’s and other department stores are being threatened on multiple levels. Target, for example, signed a deal with beauty chain Ulta late last year to put Ulta shops in 100 stores in the next few months.
Macy’s has been fighting back, while taking some bolder moves. The company has been paring back inventory, while continuing to close some stores. It also launched curbside pickup and is expanding its off-price concept BackStage, which outperformed a key sales metric in Macy’s stores by more than three times.
Apub that closed its doors during lockdown is now serving a menagerie of very different clientele after transforming into Ireland’s first wildlife hospital.
The bar of the Tara Na Ri pub in County Meath to the northwest of Dublin is now deserted, the blinds pulled down, the Guinness taps dry and the till empty. But the pub’s outbuildings are a hive of activity.
Three swans nest on straw in former stables, a skittish fox settles in a new enclosure and a wide-eyed buzzard is being nursed back to health.
“We were very much accustomed to just one singular way of living,” said James McCarthy, whose family have owned the pub for more than a decade.
“When that’s taken away you’re just left with a void. It takes some time before it starts getting replaced with other things that you never would have thought were possible.”
McCarthy has turned the outbuildings over to the government-backed agency Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland and instead of pulling pints, now serves customers with takeaway coffees. The WRI facility, which opened recently, is the first animal hospital in Ireland capable of caring for animals of any species, size or medical needs.
“We’re bracing ourselves for ‘orphan season’ which is our busiest time of year,” said animal manager Dan Donoher, calming a flustered pigeon. “We’ll get lots of baby birds, baby foxes and they’ll keep us busy for the next six months.”
Pubs play a vital role in Irish society and the closure of the Tara Na Ri in March 2020 was a heavy blow for the community. The inn stands near a hill called the Tara with ancient burial mounds. Its name means Tara of the Kings. But WRI education officer Aoife McPartlin said the pub’s regulars had pitched in with enthusiasm.
“We embraced them, they embraced us,” she said of the volunteers who helped renovate the outbuildings.
“And as a result we can now open,” McPartlin said.
Ireland is currently in its third coronavirus lockdown, and more than 4,000 people have died from the infection.
The Republic navigated two previous waves of the virus with relatively low numbers of cases and deaths, but the situation turned dire after curbs were relaxed before Christmas.
In early January Ireland had
the highest rate of infection per capita in the world and 45 percent of total mortalities from the pandemic have occurred since the start of 2021. Prime minister Micheal Martin described it as a “tsunami of infection.”
Since the start of the new year schools, non-essential shops, pubs, restaurants, gyms and cinemas have all been closed. Citizens have been told to stay at home apart from daily exercise in a limited area.
But McPartlin said there has been an unexpected upside — since people have been spending far more time walking in the countryside, there has been a huge increase in the number of injured and abandoned animals found and given help.
“I think nature has saved a lot of people through the pandemic,” she said. “They’re just generally more aware of wildlife and they know they exist — and we co-exist.”
PHARMACEUTICAL giant AstraZeneca said on Tuesday its EU supply chains would only be able to deliver half of an expected supply of COVID-19 vaccines to the bloc in the second quarter — but that it would look to make up the shortfall from elsewhere.
A spokesperson for the British drugs group said the company was “working to increase productivity in its EU supply chain” and would use its “global capability in order to achieve delivery of 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter.”
“Approximately half of the expected volume is due to come from the EU supply chain” while the remainder would come from its international supply network, he added.
The announcement follows controversy over deliveries of the AstraZeneca/ Oxford University jab to the European Union in the first quarter, which has caused tension between the bloc and the pharmaceutical company.
Ahead of the EU’s approval of the vaccine at the end of January, the BritishSwedish company sparked fury among European leaders by announcing that it would miss its target of supplying the EU with 400 million doses, due to a shortfall at the firm’s European plants.
The disagreement also caused diplomatic tensions with Britain, which definitively left the EU after 40 years of membership following a transmission period at the end of 2020 — with Brussels implicitly accusing AstraZeneca of giving preferential treatment to Britain at the expense of the EU.
The UK government has vaccinated millions of Britons with the AstraZeneca jab since late last year.
But the company only began shipping it to the EU in early February, after the bloc’s drug regulator took its time over recommending its use.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has suffered a number of other setbacks. It was temporarily excluded from South Africa’s immunization campaign because of concern it was less effective toward new virus variants there; and Germany’s vaccine commission recommended it only for people aged 18 to 64 years old.
But more recently, World Health Organization experts recommended it for use on people aged over 65 and in settings where new strains of the virus are circulating.
The shot forms the bulk of doses being rolled out around the world, especially in poorer countries.
FOUR board members of US state of Texas’ power grid operator announced their resignation on Tuesday after millions of residents were left without power during days of unprecedentedly frigid temperatures.
The board chair of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Sally Talberg, vice chairman Peter Cramton, finance and audit committee chair Terry Bulger and human resources and governance committee chief Raymond Hepper, all of whom live out of state, resigned effective yesterday.
“We have noted recent concerns about out-of-state board leadership at ERCOT. To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning from the board effective after our urgent board teleconference meeting adjourns on Wednesday, February 24, 2021,” they said in a letter to the board.
A notice from the Public Utility Commission of Texas said that Craig Ivey, who also lives out of state, had withdrawn his application to fill a vacant board seat.
Texas was particularly hard hit as a frigid air mass paralyzed parts of the southern and central United States early last week, claiming more than 70 lives. Millions were left temporarily without power and water lines were frozen.
ERCOT, which operates much of the state’s power grid, underestimated the surge in demand caused by the unusually cold weather and used planned outages to avert an uncontrolled blackout.
The state’s governor Greg Abbott issued a damning statement acknowledging the resignations and saying the group had “failed to do its job.”
“ERCOT leadership made assurances that Texas’ power infrastructure was prepared for the winter storm, but those assurances proved to be devastatingly false,” he said in a statement posted on Twitter.
“The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and
I welcome these resignations.”
Abbott has ordered an investigation into the grid operator, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also said it will probe the factors behind the power outages.
ERCOT reported last Friday that utility operations had returned to normal, but tens of thousands were still without power into the weekend as crews struggled to repair downed lines.
President Joe Biden issued a majordisaster declaration on Saturday for much of Texas, providing badly needed financial and administrative aid, and he plans to visit the state tomorrow.