TheChek News Flow

Trade body highlights threat to jobs and investment of withdrawal from aviation safety regime

Britain’s aerospace industry has warned that the government is putting jobs and investment at risk after the transport secretary revealed that the UK intends to leave Europe’s aviation safety agency at the end of this year to develop its own regulatory system.

“We have been clear that continued participation in EASA [European Union Aviation Safety regime] is the best option to maintain the competitiveness of our £36bn aerospace industry,” said Paul Everitt, chief executive of ADS, the aerospace industry trade body, in a statement late on Friday night. “UK influence in EASA . . . helps make our industry attractive to the investment it needs to be home to the development of a new generation of advanced aircraft technology.

“Government had promised it would consider harmonisation where it is in the UK interest . . . We are disappointed that it has not taken a more ambitious approach. It is essential that it works with us to deliver a regime that does not put jobs at risk.”

The industry’s warning followed comments by Grant Shapps in an interview on Friday with trade publications Aviation Daily and ATW in Washington. In the clearest statement yet of the government’s position on membership of the EU safety regulator, Mr Shapps said: “We will leave EASA. Over a period of time we’ll be wanting to develop our own [aircraft] certifications.”

Mr Shapps said the UK intended to be “particularly forward-leaning in technology and automation”. He cited urban air transport as an area where the country’s aviation regulator — the Civil Aviation Authority — could develop new types of safety certifications.

“We’ll make sure our legislative framework is in a great place to enable those kinds of organisations to excel in the UK market,” he said.

The right to diverge from European regulatory regimes has become a mantra for the UK government as it negotiates the terms of its future trade relationship with the EU. The UK refuses to accept any role for the European Court of Justice, which means EASA membership is unacceptable without a compromise as the court has ultimate jurisdiction over the agency’s rulings. 

Companies across the UK aerospace sector will be dismayed by the transport secretary’s comments. Rolls-Royce and Airbus, two of the UK’s biggest aerospace exporters, have repeatedly emphasised the need for continued membership of EASA to help keep down costs. 

The UK aerospace industry, which has a highly-regulated global supply chain, relies on membership of EASA to maintain common safety and certification standards that are also acceptable to the US safety agency, the Federal Aviation Administration. EASA also has reciprocal agreements with authorities in Brazil and Canada, and soon Japan and China.

In January Tony Wood, the new president of ADS, voiced the industry’s deepening frustration at the UK government’s failure to accept the implications of divergence from EASA. He called on the government to clarify the alternative.

The industry has estimated that it would take a decade and cost between £30m and £40m a year to create a UK safety authority with all the expertise of EASA, against a current contribution to the European agency of £1m to £4m annually. 

While aircraft components are exempt from tariffs under World Trade Organization rules, the aerospace industry has long argued that divergence from European regulations would add cost and complexity to UK manufacturing and jeopardise export success. In 2018 the UK exported about £34bn in aerospace products. 

The Department for Transport could not be reached for comment. 

Sales down as ‘cake face’ falls out of fashion and product fatigue sets in

When beauty blogger-turned-entrepreneur Huda Kattan was shooting an advertising campaign for her new skincare line, she chided staff for airbrushing her to perfection.

“You took away my zits, put them back!” she recounted in a recent Instagram video. “I want photos to be as real as possible.”

Few have had their finger on the pulse of the US beauty market like Ms Kattan, who over the past seven years has built a make-up business — Huda Beauty — valued at more than $1bn by championing a heavily made-up look she dubbed “cake face”. That the 36-year-old has now moved into skincare reflects concerns about how the once-booming US beauty market — the world’s largest — has gone into reverse.

High-end make-up sales fell 7 per cent to $7.6bn last year, contracting for the first time in a decade, according to NPD Group. The market research firm tracks department stores and speciality retailers such as Sephora and Ulta Beauty but not mass-market outlets such as Target. In contrast, US skincare sales rose by 5 per cent to $5.9bn, outpacing make-up for the third year in a row. 

This dynamic is already having repercussions for everyone, from the sector’s biggest players L’Oréal, Estée Lauder and Coty to newer independent brands such as Anastasia Beverly Hills and ColourPop Cosmetics. Ulta Beauty, a US chain of beauty stores, lost almost a third of its market value in a single day last August after it issued a profit warning and predicted continued weak demand for make-up.

Industry executives said that a shake-out is looming that will cull so-called “indie” brands and challenge established companies. Players are scrambling to adapt to an environment where the latest face mask is more coveted than a new eyeshadow palette. 

“In the boom years everyone was winning in make-up, but now you’re likely to see a gap open between the winners and losers,” said Chris de Lapuente, chief executive of LVMH-owned Sephora. “We’re going to see which of the new independent brands have long-term sustainability and which end up being fads.”

Sephora is unlikely to add as many new make-up brands as in the past, said Mr de Lapuente: “If the category isn’t growing, then we will have to be more discerning than before.”

While Sephora is pressing on with plans to open up to 100 stores in the US this year, skincare and haircare products — rather than make-up — will get more of the prominent display space near the front of stores. 

As the US stutters, cosmetics sales have been growing at a double-digit rate in much of Asia in recent years, while Europe has been flat to slightly up.

Several reasons explain the US make-up slowdown. Industry executives and analysts said they range from aesthetic considerations to the typical cyclical swing between skincare and make-up. Many think fatigue has set in among women who simply bought too many products.

One thing is clear: the foundation-heavy look is no longer in vogue. The “contouring” technique, which involves applying several shades of product to parts of the face to subtly enhance certain features, has been replaced by a more natural look. Brought to the market by influencers such as Kim Kardashian, contouring spawned a cottage industry of make-up tutorials on YouTube and Instagram, which underpinned sales during the boom.

The change was reflected in the rise of the “VSCO girl”, a teenage fashion trend that went viral last year. Named after the photo-editing app VSCO, and known for a relaxed and natural look, VSCO girls favour lip gloss and facial sprays — a marked contrast to the high-maintenance Kardashian aesthetic. 

Piper Jaffray’s annual survey of teens showed that last year spending on cosmetics fell to 19-year lows, down by a fifth to reach $106 spent per person each year. A growing number of wealthier teens indicate they are not wearing make-up at all — up from 12 per cent to 20 per cent in the past five years.

Women are increasingly shifting their spending from make-up to skincare products such as face masks and serums, or opting for hybrid products such as tinted moisturisers that blur the lines between the categories. That dynamic has helped the big companies such as L’Oréal and Estée Lauder — which also have strong skincare offerings — weather the downturn in make-up. But it has left many independent cosmetics brands rushing to launch skincare lines, like Kylie Jenner’s brand did last year.

L’Oréal chief executive Jean-Paul Agon said in an interview that the return of a more natural look was forcing some of the indie brands it had acquired in recent years to adapt. L’Oréal’s NYX and Urban Decay were emblematic of a certain “very spectacular, visible and a bit heavy” look that was now out of favour, he added. 

“The brands just need to evolve,” said Mr Agon. “Our teams in the US are working to launch new products that correspond more closely to what consumers want now.” 

The drag from these brands caused L’Oréal’s North American sales to decline 0.8 per cent last year on a like-for-like basis, ending more than a decade of consecutive yearly growth. Meanwhile in February Estée Lauder booked $777m of impairment charges related to weaker performance of its make-up brands in the US, where sales fell by 5 per cent to $4.7bn in the year to June 30.

Brands that advocate a more natural look are thriving. Direct-to-consumer player Glossier has become among the most successful since it launched a decade ago by popularising a “skin first, make-up second philosophy”.

Ali Weiss, head of marketing at New York-based Glossier, said it created its Futuredew oil-serum hybrid product to respond to women’s desires for a barely there clean look. It is “all about healthy hydration, glow and dew,” she said.

Larissa Jensen, a beauty analyst at NPD Group, predicted that future make-up sales would be driven by so-called “clean beauty” products that emphasise natural ingredients paired with more sustainable packaging and manufacturing. “We think this will be big,” she said. 

Others think the depressed demand for make-up reflects a more profound shift, and that the “less is more” spirit is here to stay. In videos posted on YouTube, influencers such as Jeffree Star recount their “anti-hauls” that explain what they did not buy, and discuss “editing” their massive make-up collections. Others post to Instagram about “project pans” in which people choose products from their make-up collection and chart their progress to the bottom of the vial or bottle. 

On online chat platform Reddit, members of a group dubbed MakeupRehab post about their experience doing “no-buy” challenges in which they aim to go months or years without adding to their collections.

One blogger wrote about overcoming a Sephora “addiction” that was costing her $4,000 a year. Eventually, the desire to buy faded, she said. “I realised today . . . Each dollar I spend, each minute I take consuming make-up media is one taken from somewhere else.”

Some of the hardest-hit places in the country say they can’t get enough coronavirus tests, though the federal government has ramped up shipments

States on the front lines of the coronavirus fight are complaining about the availability of test kits, exposing strains in the nation’s battle to contain the epidemic.

New York City’s deputy mayor for health, Raul Perea-Henze, struck an urgent tone in a letter Friday to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying the test kits provided to the city don’t meet its needs.

“Slow federal action on this matter has impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic,” he wrote.

As of noon Friday, 94 people had been tested in New York City, according to the city’s health website. Nearly 2,800 are in quarantine, officials said, and the city needs to be able to test hundreds a day.

A representative of the CDC didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The CDC is now shipping hundreds of test kits. Some public health labs and private lab companies have also rolled out their own test kits. Large commercial lab companies including LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics Inc. are launching coronavirus testing services.

That has increased the capacity to test samples to thousands of people a day, a marked improvement from the relative few the CDC was able to evaluate at its Atlanta laboratories while it tried to work out the kinks in a test it had developed.

Yet the improvement isn’t enough, public-health experts and government officials say, especially after the CDC recently broadened the criteria for testing to anyone who shows signs or symptoms, had traveled to a country with an outbreak or come into contact with a confirmed case.

Public health officials in King County, Wash., have called testing capacity inadequate in the state, where most of the U.S. coronavirus deaths have taken place.

“We’ve been waiting for an increase of testing capacity in our community. It has been a tremendous strain for public health to have to triage those tests,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine at a Friday briefing.

Officials in Washington state were hopeful for more testing capacity soon, though not necessarily from the federal government.

But even as New York City said it didn’t have enough, New York state officials said the state has enough test kits for the moment.

The state Department of Health said it had about 3,000 test kits available, which it considered to be an “ample supply,” a spokesman said. Roughly 300 tests have been conducted at the state’s Wadsworth lab since Sunday, the spokesman said. He added that the state could conduct tests on samples from New York City.

The state can test about 500 samples a day, said Gov. Andrew Cuomo at a briefing Friday, and it hopes to increase its capacity to 1,000 samples a day. The bottleneck was laboratory capacity and not test kits, Mr. Cuomo said.

About 4,000 people in New York state are in quarantine and being monitored for symptoms of the virus, state officials said Friday. The number of people in the state with the infection rose to 44 on Friday, officials said. The number was 22 on Thursday.

The goal in the U.S. is to get to a point where people with symptoms can be tested quickly, but that has proven to be a big challenge.

“We are not at that point now,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said at a briefing Friday on Capitol Hill. “We don’t have the bandwidth to do that now.”

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn said Friday at a press conference that as of Thursday the CDC had shipped out supplies for about 900,000 tests and another 200,000 are expected to be shipped Saturday. Testing requires more than one specimen per patient, so the number of people who could be tested with those supplies is fewer.

“We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward,” acknowledged Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the administration’s response to the outbreak, during a visit to a 3M Co. facility in Minnesota on Thursday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Friday the federal government has provided Washington and California, states with some of the highest number of cases, with all the tests they requested. The CDC has shipped tests capable of testing as many as 75,000 people to public-health labs, and as many as four million tests could be ready by next week.

“The production and shipping of tests that we’ve talked about all week is completely on schedule,” Mr. Azar said at the White House.

Before this week, few public-health laboratories were able to conduct tests. The CDC halted shipments of a test it had developed, because the test was malfunctioning. And the FDA hadn’t given laboratories authority to develop, validate and use their own tests.

Tests have come online since then because the CDC dropped a malfunctioning component and the FDA streamlined its authorization process.

Public-health labs have received hundreds of CDC test kits in the past few days, and thousands more are expected, said Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents about 150 state and local public-health labs.

Each kit can perform tests on specimens for hundreds of patients. About 69 public-health labs in the U.S. had on-site testing capacity as of Friday, with more expected over the weekend, up from eight a week ago, Mr. Becker said. He expects the labs will soon have capacity for testing about 10,000 people a day across the U.S.

Countries across Asia and Europe report rising numbers of cases

The coronavirus epidemic continued to escalate globally into the weekend, with Florida reporting the first two deaths on the U.S. East Coast and a number of countries across Asia experiencing their largest one-day jumps in new infections.

Japan logged 60 new cases on Friday, raising its tally to 408. Malaysia also reported its largest one-day increase with 28 new cases on Friday, lifting the Southeast Asian nation’s total to 83. The neighboring city-state of Singapore, meanwhile, said it discovered 13 new cases, also its biggest single-day increase, for a total of 130.

South Korea, the country worst hit by the coronavirus apart from China, said it found 483 new infections on Friday, bringing its total to 6,767 cases.

Italy remained the worst-hit country in Europe, reporting Friday evening that it logged 620 new coronavirus cases and 49 fatalities over the preceding 24-hour period. Its death toll of 197 is the highest outside of China.

The two people who died in Florida had recently traveled abroad, according to the state’s Department of Health. Their deaths raised the number of fatalities in the U.S. to 16. Overall cases in the U.S. have shot past 300 to 338, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The growth in infections around the world has worried China, where the epidemic first emerged late last year, about cases imported from abroad. The country’s National Health Commission logged 24 new imported cases on Friday, raising the total to 60. It counted 16 imported cases on Thursday and two such cases on Wednesday.

Municipal authorities in Beijing and other Chinese cities have in recent weeks stepped up health screenings of travelers arriving from abroad, even quarantining people who came from countries badly hit by the coronavirus—such as South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan.

Overall, China continued to report success in slowing the domestic spread of Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, which has sickened more than 100,000 people across the world—including more than 80,000 in China.

Chinese authorities logged 99 new cases on Friday, the lowest one-day figure since the country’s health commission started disclosing nationwide data on new infections in late January. The commission counted 28 deaths on Friday, raising China’s death toll to 3,070.

In a sign of Beijing’s growing confidence in overcoming the epidemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping sought to refocus the Communist Party’s attention on his signature campaign to eradicate extreme poverty, which was meant to conclude by the end of this year.

Addressing officials across China on a Friday teleconference, Mr. Xi insisted that the poverty-alleviation target must be reached on time, and ordered all levels of government to double their efforts.

“The epidemic, like a natural disaster, will affect the progress in reducing poverty,” Mr. Xi said. “We must take effective measures to reduce the epidemic’s impact to a minimum.”

The fast spread of the new virus has suppressed business activity and trade, rattling markets.

China on Saturday said its exports and imports tumbled in the first two months of the year. Official data showed exports plunged 17.2% in January and February compared with a year earlier, while imports dropped 4.0%. The poor showing followed official reports last week of a deep drop in the country’s manufacturing and service sectors.

Even as China struggles to ramp up production, it faces new pressures as the coronavirus epidemic spreads around the globe, depressing demand for Chinese-made goods. Exporters surveyed by China’s Ministry of Commerce said many foreign customers have suspended purchases or canceled orders.

A tenant of a Chicago glass tower by Mies van der Rohe visits Tel Aviv, a city packed with thousands of examples of the minimalist Bauhaus style

IT WAS a curious confluence of events that transformed me into a fangirl of the Bauhaus, the German design school that architect Walter Gropius founded in 1919.

The first was a 2001 trip to Walden Pond with my now husband. At his beseeching, it included a tour of the Gropius House in Lincoln, Mass., which required visitors to wear surgical booties. Shortly thereafter, I had delivered to my Manhattan office six slavishly rendered miniature ceramics of buildings designed by members of the Bauhaus. I displayed them lovingly on my desk. Then, in 2003, Unesco designated about half of Tel Aviv’s so-called White City—a planned section where some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings stand—a World Heritage site. It was as if the gods of architecture were coaxing me to Israel.

But life got in the way. By the time I stood in Tel Aviv, a high-tech, vibrant city of 435,000, it was December, 2019, the very end of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s founding and it all had come to mean even more to me. In the intervening years, I’d moved with my family into a Chicago apartment building designed in 1961 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus school.

That first morning, sunglasses in hand, I fully expected to be blinded by the light reflected off the white minimalist buildings that make up much of Tel Aviv. Experts estimate 120,000 to 150,000 Jews fleeing Europe settled in this desert city along the Mediterranean between 1931 and 1948, when the state of Israel was established. According to Nitza Szmuk, architect, restoration expert, and professor emeritus at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, “They needed quick and cheap construction for the new immigrants, and the pure architecture and lines of the Bauhaus fit the place and the idea of a new, modern life in a new, modern country.”

About a half dozen architects who had studied with Gropius cooked up thousands of concrete buildings that were functional and free of adornment. The balconies, small in German iterations, were expanded here to take advantage of breezes, while windows were minimized to combat heat. Despite introducing the occasional curve, architects strove for linear uniformity and egalitarianism. The structures were painted a practical, inexpensive white.

Walking from our little hotel off Dizengoff Square, I didn’t need those sunglasses. Telephone wires blocked dingy balconies; concrete corners crumbled; cracks had been hastily filled with putty that would make Walter Gropius shudder.

I perked up once I was in the square that’s become the city’s social heart. Yaacov Agam’s circa-1986 kinetic fountain played elegantly against the Bauhaus buildings that ring the square. They include a pristinely restored 1938 movie house, now the Cinema Hotel and the restrained apartment complex 94-96 Dizengoff, both designed by Ukranian-born Yehuda Megidovitz. At the nearby Bauhaus Center, its founder, Micha Gross, told us that with the centennial of the school, he’s seen interest in the White City increase astronomically, at least among visitors. “Tel Avivians start to recognize the beauty of the Bauhaus buildings only once they are renovated,” the Swiss immigrant said. “Fortunately, at this moment, all over the town, buildings are getting fixed and the general consciousness is improving.”

Our peregrinations continued: You can actually sleep in the Poli House Hotel, though Egyptian-Canadian designer Karim Rashid’s new bright, look-at-me furnishings conflict with the Bauhaus spirit. The horseshoe-shaped Jacobson’s Building, with its ribbons of balconies, looks like a gorgeously marooned cruise ship.

Once back home, I eyed a re-creation of Mies’s cantilever chair, S 533 F, one of many rereleases that celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. Commissioned by the German firm Thonet, its gravity-defying tubular steel would add some much-needed curves to the right angles of my Lincoln Park apartment. And the geometric fabrics by Bauhaus member Gunta Stölzl and her student, Anni Albers, recently released by New York textiles company Designtex, would complement my circa-1955 glass-and-steel coffee table. My husband usually resists color in our austere apartment (we don’t even have plants), but soon he will come home to see our ash gray sofa newly re-upholostered with Stölzl’s sunny, graphic fabric. And he’ll have only Gropius to blame.