What you Need to Know on Thursday, March 17. Updates from Ukraine, President Biden refers to Putin as a ‘war criminal’ for the first time, Walmart has ambitious hiring targets for Q1, and Netflix takes steps to crack down on password sharing.  

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Need2Know: ‘War Criminal’, Netflix Password Sharing & Walmart Hiring Spree

with the ongoing situation in Ukraine as rescue efforts underway in Mariupol Ukraine, that's where a theater that served as a shelter for more than 1000 women and Children was bombed. Now there are several positive reports saying that bomb shelter within the theater was held up and there are survivors inside of it. But that the fate of hundreds of those Ukrainians still at this hour remains unclear that satellite images showed the world. The words Children spelled out in Russian on either side of the building. Now, Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky delivered a scathing address to german lawmakers earlier this morning and he's urging them to do more to help Ukraine. He's warning that sanctions are quote obviously not enough to stop the war and that europe would not survive or preserve its values if Ukrainian allies didn't step up in their support. Hanna well meanwhile baker President biden calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a quote war criminal. The escalation in re torque is the harshest expression from a U. S. Official since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Now, previously, President biden had avoided slapping such labels on Putin citing ongoing investigations into atrocities on the ground. In Ukraine that some called war crimes, biden made the comments when speakers when speaking to reporters at an event on Wednesday. Yeah. And that meanwhile let's talk about Covid, the world Health organization now reporting that global covid deaths While they're trending down. That's some pretty good news. The number of new COVID deaths fell 17% last week. That's even as the number of cases are rising now the biggest increase in cases were seen in the Western Pacific and in Africa while the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas saw infections dropped by more than 20%. Now, the World Health Organization is saying that those numbers should be interpreted cautiously as some countries have drastically reduced the number of tests that they're administering. They're saying it's no longer worth the investment for them Hanna And help is wanted at the nation's biggest retailer, Walmart plans to hire more than 50,000 workers and he moved into new businesses. The retail giant is planning to hire 50,000 workers by the end of next month. It's somewhat unusual timing since many retailers drop off on hiring this time of year, after the holiday shopping season is of course over. So while many of the open roles are in stores, walmart also has openings in new business areas like health wellness and advertising walmart's move comes in the middle of a tight labor market with job openings hovering around record highs. All right, so let's talk about some big news involving your netflix account. Netflix says they're going to launch a test to let the primary account holder pay an extra fee. If somebody's watching netflix outside of that household, This comes as the streaming services. Grappling with illicit password sharing. About a third of all netflix users are sharing their password with at least one other person that's according to research firm Majid. Now netflix's policy going to be tested with some customers prompting those people to sign up for a separate account if they're not watching with the actual subscriber. Now the message will read. If you don't live with the owner of this account you need to own the account to keep watching. It's unclear whether this trial will lead to a strict crackdown on password sharing within the platform. This is so interesting because for the longest time netflix was totally okay if you were sharing your netflix account with somebody else. They were just happy. Yes. Yeah they were just happy you were watching netflix. They didn't care who was watching it. And then interesting. So many family members share this account with so many different people. I think I watch my parents netflix account but then I share my hulu account with them. But now this is gonna be cracking down on this because now with netflix every quarter subscriber numbers are so important for them. But they started to top out it's not to the point of who doesn't have a netflix account anymore in this country but now they're gonna find them one way or another. So yeah people are not happy with this. So I was reading some tweets about this. Somebody said netflix will use a lot of customers if they if they do this password sharing crackdown that they plan to do. How do you expect families to handle password sharing in the case of divorces, their Children, college students. they put the netflix password in the divorce settlement, basically I have my own netflix account that my entire family uses. So joke's on them and this goes through. But this will be interesting if this actually makes people either pay that extra $2 or you know, or do people, how do families sort of get around this? Because everybody's been doing this for decades. This isn't like, this is like a new phenomenon. This has been going on for a very long time. And netflix weirdly enough, has struggled as of late with their numbers and you know, you think everyone has one. So that's why they struggle because everyone already has a subscription. Like right, unless you're a new person. Well, so the other larger question is when with subscriber fatigue because we talk all the time about how many subscriptions people have. Discovery plus, hulu Disney plus all of this. Netflix is one of the more expensive subscriptions that are out there next to HBO max. Those are basically the two most expensive ones. So if people basically aren't able to share these accounts anymore, do you see more people cut their netflix account because they're like, look if I'm gonna have to pay for an actual streaming subscription service maybe like the content on HBO max better than I do netflix and I'll get rid of netflix as a result because I don't want to pay all these extra fees as a result. No, I think there's no way people get rid of them. No, I don't mean like I wouldn't, there's just too many interesting shows to be watching on netflix.