Month: December 2020

Categories
Health

She’s a Chess Champion Who Can Barely See the Board

She’s a Chess Champion Who Can Barely See the Board

Have you heard this story before? Girl has a difficult start in life, discovers chess. She becomes an American champion. She is learning Russian. And now she has to find a way to come to Russia to play chess because she can’t afford it.

No, I’m not talking about Beth Harmon, the fictional heroine of the Netflix mega-hit “The Queen’s Gambit”. Meet Jessica Lauser, the reigning three-time US blind chess champion. You can call her Chessica – the nickname her math teacher gave her in eighth grade.

The 40-year-old Lauser was born 16 weeks early. Like many babies born this prematurely, she needed oxygen, which damaged her eyes, a condition known as premature retinopathy. One eye is completely blind; in the other she has 20/480 eyesight. Your field of vision is limited and the chess pieces appear blurry and distorted. She can tell when a space on the board is occupied, but she cannot always tell which piece it is.

If she’s playing a sighted player in a tournament, she’ll explain all of that. The biggest problem is the touch-move rule in chess, which says that you have to move a piece when you touch it.

“When I need to identify a piece during a game, I lightly touch the top and say ‘identify’, not grabbing the piece, just brushing it,” she says. Aside from that, Michael Aigner, who was recently her teammate at the first online Olympics for people with disabilities, says: “Nobody can say Jessica is blind.” Blind chess players often use a tactile set, a special board with pens that they use can feel the characters without knocking them over. She doesn’t. But she needs to remember where the pieces are (unlike Beth Harmon, she has no photographic memory, but she has strong pattern recognition skills) so it is sometimes useful to be able to identify them by touching them.

Chess has long been Luser’s refuge. She learned the game at the age of 7 when she moved from Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind to a mainstream school. At that age she said, “It was just a game like Monopoly or Parcheesi.” But in seventh grade, when she started a new school in California, she had started to take the game more seriously.

“When I went to class on the first day, the first thing I saw in the back of the room were waist-high cupboards with chess sets,” says Lauser. “I knew the kids would call me ‘four eyes’ and I said, ‘Hey, if you hit them, they’ll shut up.'”

Lauser, who now lives in Kansas City, Missouri and works for the Internal Revenue Service, has lived in a surprising number of places as her blindness has made it difficult to find steady jobs. She was homeless last year. It’s a very painful subject for her. “What frustrates me most is that I can’t get a fair shot in life because of my birth,” she says. She cannot earn more than $ 2,110 per month to maintain her Social Security disability insurance entitlement.

“The limit is hard and fast,” she says. “It has kept me in constant poverty all my adult life, even though I have always worked. That’s why I play chess because it helps me cope with all the things that I can’t change, especially. “

She later added, “I don’t want pity, I want opportunity. I just wanna be the same “

She improved her game of chess on the streets: Market Street in San Francisco, Santana Row in San Jose, Dupont Circle in Washington. Her favorite place was the student union at San Francisco State University, where she got her bachelor’s degree at the age of 36.

“I would set up multiple sets at the same time and compete against all comers,” she says. She attracted a lot, not so much because she was blind or a woman, but because the struggle of one person against many is always fascinating. The shops nearby noticed her sales increased while she was there as people stopped to watch. “The coordinator of the building said to me, ‘I hope this won’t offend you, but we want to adopt you!'”

Because she has played so much on the street, she plays very quickly and uses openings that are often not considered healthy for tournament chess. In blitz or five-minute chess, she placed a category below the master because of her highest rating. Getting a championship title is still her goal, even though she knows the odds are against her: not many players have achieved this in their 40s. “I’m not giving up my dream,” she says.

In October Lauser won their third consecutive US blind championship – a tournament that was played in person despite the pandemic. It had been postponed from July. Prior to the pandemic, Virginia Alverson, president of the U.S. Blind Chess Association, had hoped to attract 20 participants. (There are usually about 10 players out of about 100 members.) But with the pandemic, they had to settle for three: Alverson, her roommate, Pauline Downing, and Lauser. “We felt that if Jessica was ready to travel from Kansas City to New Hampshire to defend her title, we should have some kind of tournament,” says Alverson. “It says a lot about Jessica that she wanted to come. Jessica likes to play chess. And to be honest, I wanted to see Jessica. “

This year’s Olympics for the Disabled, held on Thanksgiving weekend, was a much better known event. Originally planned for Siberia in August, it went online and attracted 60 teams from 44 countries. The US team, led by Aigner on the first board, took tenth place. Lauser started slowly, but won an important game against a player from Brazil in the final round. And she was arguably the most important player because every team had to field a player. Without them, there would have been no US team.

“In the middle of the tournament, after she lost the first three rounds, we played blitz chess for about an hour, just for fun,” says Aigner. “She played all of her moves against me and I got into trouble in a few games. When she finally won on round four, my reaction was thank god someone else can see how good you are. She played the style she played against me in the Blitz and of course she won. “

Currently (subject to change) the next Olympiad is planned for Russia in 2022. Lauser would like to leave, but isn’t sure how to do it. That year, before the event in Siberia was canceled, the international chess federation FIDE offered to pay for accommodation plus 1,500 euros for travel – or around 1,800 US dollars. “Whether that would bring people to Russia and back is controversial,” says Chris Bird, FIDE event manager for the US Chess Federation. Until the pandemic is over, the association does not support teams for international events financially.

This is a familiar story for Lauser. She has also qualified for the World Blinds Championship six times but has never been able to participate.

In the short term, Lauser hopes to keep her Kansas City job as well as her current apartment from which she can hear the trains rumble past on their way to and from Union Station. In the long term, she says: “My dream situation would be to earn enough money to make a living, not struggle with debt and maybe one day have a home. To be able to speak Russian every day, to be able to compete, to be able to help others. Maybe live in Russia, teach English and play chess. “

Categories
Politics

Jon Ossoff Received Some Breaks in Politics. And He Made a Few of His Personal.

Jon Ossoff Got Some Breaks in Politics. And He Made a Few of His Own.

Jon Ossoff was 16 years old when he wrote a letter to John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights pioneer, that led to a spot as a volunteer in Mr. Lewis’s office.

When Mr. Ossoff was 19 and a rising sophomore at Georgetown, he went to work for Hank Johnson as the primary speechwriter and press aide for Mr. Johnson’s 2006 congressional campaign.

And Mr. Ossoff was 26 when, without any journalism experience other than an internship, he was made chief executive of a small documentary film company based in England.

Mr. Ossoff has always been adept at making his own breaks. He has consistently outperformed his professional résumé, impressing lawmakers many years his senior with his intellect and drive. And he has capitalized on his own well-off upbringing and a series of well-timed introductions and personal endorsements to rise through Democratic politics in Georgia.

Now 33, Mr. Ossoff is pursuing his most ambitious goal yet: to capture a seat in the United States Senate against an incumbent Republican, David Perdue, in a traditionally conservative state. If successful, he would become the youngest senator in 40 years.

Mr. Ossoff first emerged on the national stage in 2017, when his bid for a House seat in a special election provided Democrats the first opportunity to express resistance to President Trump. Though he lost a close race in a well-off district in suburban Atlanta, the energy surrounding his candidacy enabled him to shatter fund-raising records and build the political network that has put him within reach of the Senate.

That energy has hardly abated. Federal filings made public last week showed Mr. Ossoff to be the best-funded Senate candidate in history after pulling in $106.7 million from mid-October to mid-December — almost $40 million more than Mr. Perdue’s tally. The stunning totals reflect the stakes: If Mr. Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock win their runoff races on Jan. 5, Democrats will gain control of the Senate.

Still, Mr. Ossoff has little record to run on, or against. Other than campaigning for positions in Congress, he has spent the years since leaving Mr. Johnson’s office running Insight TWI, an investigative documentary company of eight staff members that has headquarters in London — doing so mostly from Atlanta.

He has mounted a campaign based less on his own experience and accomplishments and more on the idea that his election will help foster a political change in Georgia — the kind voters signaled they wanted when they backed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the presidential election. He has also consistently cited Mr. Perdue’s financial dealings to label him “a crook” who cashed in on the pandemic, an allegation Mr. Perdue denies.

At campaign events, Mr. Perdue, 71, often fails to even mention Mr. Ossoff as an opponent. Instead, he and Kelly Loeffler, the other Republican Senate candidate, direct most of their attacks at Mr. Warnock, whom they view as a more substantive target. Mr. Perdue skipped a debate against Mr. Ossoff early this month, leaving the Democrat onstage by himself making his pitch to voters, but he has unleashed an onslaught of negative ads against Mr. Ossoff, portraying him as a hostage of the radical left.

None of this has dented Mr. Ossoff’s confidence. As he heads into the final days of the race, he has emphasized his connections to Mr. Lewis. And far from apologizing for his youth, he has cast himself as the inheritor of the legacy of young people who have taken leadership roles in progressive political organizations in the South.

“John Lewis was 23, 24 years old when he was leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” Mr. Ossoff said during an interview last week. “I was so inspired by the fact that young people in that movement had made a difference. And I don’t think that young people should simply wait their turn but should engage fully in the life of our communities, and our country, and our world, and try to make a difference.”

When Mr. Ossoff began his first campaign for Congress in 2017, he initially ran his campaign headquarters out of the basement of his parents’ Atlanta home. When he was in Washington, he stayed at a Capitol Hill townhouse owned by his father.

At the time, Mr. Ossoff described himself as a former “senior national security staffer,” which was something of an embellishment considering that he had been a midlevel committee staff member for Mr. Johnson.

The Republican case against him boiled down to his not living in the district he sought to represent and an assertion that he would be a pawn of Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader.

“Other than being born to rich parents, Jon Ossoff has never accomplished a single thing in his life,” said Corry Bliss, who ran a Republican super PAC that spent millions attacking Mr. Ossoff in the 2017 race.

But Mr. Ossoff received a critical endorsement from Mr. Lewis, and he proved to be an adept fund-raiser who quickly built connections with key constituencies. Progressives rallied to him as a way to express their outrage at the Trump administration. In the runoff, Mr. Ossoff got 48 percent of the vote, losing to Karen Handel.

In the 2020 Senate race, Mr. Ossoff is running as a mainstream Democrat, expressing sympathy for but not aligning himself with the party’s most liberal figures. He has stayed on message, hammering Mr. Perdue over his finances, and perhaps more important, he has not made any major mistakes on the campaign trail or in interviews.

There has been very little reliable public polling of the two Georgia Senate runoff elections, but few doubt that Mr. Ossoff is facing an uphill climb. Georgia has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2000 and hasn’t elected any Democrat to statewide office since 2006. And Republicans have traditionally had an advantage in Georgia runoffs because the Democratic electorate includes people who vote more infrequently.

In the last Georgia Senate runoff, three weeks after the November 2008 election, voter turnout sank to 2.1 million from 3.7 million.

Georgia Democrats say much of that calculus has changed in 2020, as Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 race for governor, has built a permanent progressive campaign infrastructure in the state. Already, more than two million Georgians have voted in the 2020 Senate runoffs.

“There is no more conventional wisdom, period,” said Jason Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter who was Georgia Democrats’ candidate for governor in 2014. “This election is different, this moment in history is different, and whatever anybody thinks they know, they don’t.”

The son of a publishing executive and a management consultant, Mr. Ossoff attended the prestigious Paideia School in Atlanta. In 2003, he read Mr. Lewis’s biography and talked his way into a volunteer position in the congressman’s office the next summer.

Michaeleen Crowell, who worked as Mr. Lewis’s legislative director and overlapped with Mr. Ossoff, said the congressman had received hundreds of letters from ambitious young people and that a parade of interns had come through his office. Mr. Ossoff, she said, made a special connection with the civil rights leader.

“You remind me of another time in my own life,” Mr. Lewis said to Mr. Ossoff in an Ossoff campaign video posted to Facebook in April, before Mr. Lewis’s death in July. “When I was 17 years old growing up in rural Alabama, I wrote a letter to Dr. King, and he wrote me back and sent me a round-trip Greyhound bus ticket and invited me to come to Montgomery and meet with him. And it changed my life.”

In the spring of 2006, Ms. Crowell helped arrange Mr. Ossoff’s transfer to work for the campaign of Hank Johnson, who was running a primary campaign against Representative Cynthia McKinney.

“He came to me asking if I could connect him,” she said of Mr. Ossoff. “I knew the folks who were running Hank’s campaign. So I said: ‘I know this young kid. He’s a go-getter.’”

Mr. Ossoff had just finished his freshman year at Georgetown University and had never worked on a campaign before. But in an initial three-hour meeting, he pitched Mr. Johnson, a local politician with a small law office, on using the internet to communicate with Democratic primary voters as well as donors, reporters and bloggers elsewhere.

“He wanted to use blogs and this new thing that I’d never heard of, Facebook, and so I gave him license to do that,” Mr. Johnson said. “It immediately put my campaign on the map. It got my campaign national attention.”

Mr. Ossoff quickly became one of Mr. Johnson’s most trusted aides. Mr. Johnson dispatched him to talk with Daraka Satcher, who would go on to become the congressman’s first chief of staff.

The two met at Bullfeathers, a venerable watering hole steps from the Capitol. Mr. Satcher said he had seen “this kid standing outside” who smiled and opened the door for him.

“I was offended, because he was clearly this kid, and I was like, ‘Do they really send a kid to vet me out?’” recalled Mr. Satcher, who then was in his early 30s.

Nonetheless, they sat down at a table for about an hour and a half and talked. “I’ll tell you, by the end of that lunch I was so impressed with him and his knowledge about policy and politics and his insight that it made me want to help the campaign even more,” he recounted. “I went from being offended to overly impressed,” Mr. Satcher said.

Mr. Johnson went on to beat Ms. McKinney and won accolades for his tech-savvy campaign. National Journal wrote that Mr. Johnson’s campaign had “the most unique blog strategy” and quoted Mr. Ossoff saying that blogs were “effective in reaching out to the people who make the news, the people who determine what’s hot and what’s not.”

When Mr. Johnson went to Washington the next January, Mr. Ossoff split time between his Georgetown studies and a job as a legislative correspondent in Mr. Johnson’s Capitol office, a highly unusual arrangement for an undergraduate.

Like many other young congressional staffers, most of Mr. Ossoff’s time was spent writing news releases and floor speeches that would be viewed only by the most die-hard of C-SPAN viewers. But in Mr. Johnson’s sixth month in office, Mr. Ossoff had achieved what would become his most concrete accomplishment: He proposed and wrote a House resolution that Mr. Johnson sponsored calling for peace talks to solve a conflict in northern Uganda.

“He was concerned about children being manipulated and used in an atrocious way,” Mr. Johnson said. “I knew nothing about the conflict before he brought it to my attention, and once he did, I thought it was a great idea.”

While he was at Georgetown, Mr. Ossoff sang in the campus a cappella group. Later he earned a pilot’s license in his off hours.

In 2003, Mr. Ossoff attended a small dinner party with his mother in southwestern France. At an outdoor table in a plum orchard, on a lovely summer evening, Mr. Ossoff was seated across the table from Ron McCullagh, a former BBC journalist who in 1991 had founded Insight News Television.

The company had produced award-winning documentaries such as “Cry Freetown,” about Sierra Leone’s civil war, and “Exodus,” which examined the efforts by thousands of Africans to make their way to Europe in search of better lives. Both films won Emmy Awards, among other prizes.

Mr. McCullagh and the teenage Jonathan Ossoff, as he called himself then, spoke for several hours, leading to a lasting friendship and a professional relationship.

“I was completely blown away by his brightness, by his intelligence and by his knowledge,” Mr. McCullagh recalled, adding how he had been struck by Mr. Ossoff’s “curiosity.”

“He told me about his thoughts on Chinese and American relationships, the importance of the China Sea” and the “strategic importance for the world of freedom of trade in that part of the world,” Mr. McCullagh recounted. “And the detail, knowledge he had of the situation was just very impressive. It was a very memorable dinner, and from that point on, we became friends.”

Mr. Ossoff ended up doing an internship at Insight News in July 2008. Five years later, Mr. McCullagh made a bold personnel move: He decided to hire Mr. Ossoff — then 26, with virtually no journalism experience — as chief executive of the organization and changed its name to Insight TWI — The World Investigates.

“It was a risk, but a calculated risk,” Mr. McCullagh said. “I wanted someone to take us forward. We needed some new thinking, and we got it.”

Mr. Ossoff invested $250,000 in Insight TWI months after he had joined, “to expand the business after Jon took over, when Jon came to Ron with some ideas,” according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Ossoff’s campaign. She said that Mr. Ossoff’s investment had not been related to his appointment as chief executive. Mr. McCullagh also invested the same amount at the time.

Mr. Ossoff’s campaign promotes him as an “investigative journalist,” though he does not act as an investigative reporter. As chief executive, he vets story ideas, helps prepare interview questions and attends to film production, editing and security arrangements for his staff. Mr. Ossoff also supervises the commissioning of documentaries with news media organizations like the BBC and Al Jazeera English.

According to his Senate campaign, Mr. Ossoff has been the executive producer of more than two dozen Insight TWI films on such subjects as soccer corruption in Ghana and child trafficking and sexual exploitation along the border of Bolivia and Argentina.

In Mr. Ossoff’s most recent personal financial report, filed in July, he valued Insight TWI at between $1 million and $5 million. According to records filed in November in Britain, he owns 75 percent or more of the organization’s shares.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian journalist who has worked with Insight TWI, said Mr. Ossoff had expanded the organization’s mission of having local reporters in Africa and other regions develop their own stories.

“The strategy was that we didn’t want parachute journalism,” Mr. Anas said. “Jon believed in having local journalists in places like Africa telling their stories and not having white men coming in.”

Diarmuid Jeffreys, manager of investigative programs for Al Jazeera English, called Mr. Ossoff a “tough negotiator” when it came to getting Insight TWI’s work commissioned.

“He doesn’t like to be pushed around,” Mr. Jeffreys said. “He will walk away if he doesn’t think a project is commercially viable or if he doesn’t think he can deliver it properly. He won’t just take any gig.”

Over the years, Insight TWI has prided itself on awards it has earned. Over a 14-year stretch beginning in 1999, according to its website, the company logged 47 awards or instances in which its documentaries were finalists, “shortlisted” or nominated for prizes. The awards include two Emmys, a Peabody and one British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award.

But there had been a drop-off in awards before Mr. Ossoff’s tenure at the helm, and in the eight years under his leadership, that has not changed; the company has received just two journalism prizes in that time.

“We have not prioritized applications for awards,” Mr. Ossoff said. “You can spend a lot of time applying for awards, and that time might be better spent developing journalism.”

Sheelagh McNeill, Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Categories
Business

Extra Than 190,000 Ceiling Followers Are Recalled After Blades Detach

More Than 190,000 Ceiling Fans Are Recalled After Blades Detach

More than 190,000 ceiling fans sold at The Home Depot have been recalled after it was discovered that their blades could come loose when turned, causing personal injury and property damage.

Hampton Bay’s 54-inch Mara Indoor / Outdoor Fans were sold in stores and online from April to October this year, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. About 182,000 of the fans were sold in the United States and about 8,800 in Canada, it said.

There were 47 reports of blades peeling off fans. Two of these episodes involved the severed blades hitting people, and there were four reports that the blades caused property damage. It was unclear whether the people hit by the blades had been injured.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission said the recall affected matte white, matte black, black and polished nickel fans. It advised consumers to stop using the fans immediately, adding that they should contact the fan distributor, King of Fans, for a free replacement if they experience “blade movement or uneven gaps between the fans Notice the blades and the fan body ”.

The problem has been traced back to an “isolated manufacturing defect,” King of Fans said in a statement to consumers last week. King of Fans said the issue did not affect all Mara 54-inch fans and provided a link to a video that will teach consumers how to determine if their product is defective.

“We are proud of the quality of our products and the safety of our customers is our priority,” they say.

The Home Depot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Categories
Business

Betty Campbell-Adams, Bronx Evangelist of Carrot Cake, Dies at 65

Betty Campbell-Adams, Bronx Evangelist of Carrot Cake, Dies at 65

Today, Lloyd’s Carrot Cake produces 1,500 cakes a day (including red velvet, German chocolate, and pineapple coconut) and uses 2,500 pounds of carrots and 2,000 pounds of cream cheese for icing every week.

In addition to her son, Mrs. Campbell-Adams has a daughter, Lilka Adams; a sister, Glenda Campbell Roberts; a brother, Erwin; a half-brother, Carl Campbell; and a half-sister, Brenda Campbell Gibbs.

When the pandemic hit New York in the spring and her restaurant customers began to close, Ms. Campbell-Adams became concerned about the fate of the bakery. However, to her astonishment, she became busier than ever.

When Van Cortlandt Park was crowded with New Yorkers out for the open air during the summer, she was always selling cakes. The brand’s Thanksgiving sales were its strongest in years. And as Christmas drew near, Mrs. Campbell-Adams baked nights and weekends in preparation for the holiday frenzy.

On a cold evening that month, she was finishing the bakery when she learned that a bulk cake pickup was delayed. Instead of risking a late delivery, she drove the cakes herself to a pick-up stop in Mount Vernon. Shortly after arriving and entering a parking lot, she felt uncomfortable. Her jeep turned, then stopped abruptly. She was found in the car the next morning.

During a vigil outside the Riverdale Bakery, the mourners lit candles and offered memories the following night. People soon began asking their family about the future of Lloyd’s Carrot Cake.

“My dad always said, ‘You just have to get her to try it,” said Brandon Lloyd Adams. “But my mom got her to try it. Her legacy is the fact that this cake has gotten all over the place World is spreading. Now the torch will be given to my sister and me and it is our time. “

When she passed, my sister and I said to each other, ‘What are we doing tomorrow? Close the door? ‘”, He added. “But then I heard my mother say in the back of my mind, ‘You can’t turn her away. ‘She would say,’ Well we’re closed, but what do you need? ‘

Categories
Health

What to Know of Covid-19 Antibody Medication: Price, Availability and Extra

What to Know of Covid-19 Antibody Drugs: Cost, Availability and More

Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high-risk Covid-19 patients out of the hospital.

Although President Trump, who received Regeneron treatment in October and lauded it as a “cure,” received a boost in advertising, the drugs have not been widely distributed since they were approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration last month.

Now federal and state health authorities are calling on patients and doctors to seek treatments.

Here’s what you need to know.

The two treatments by Eli Lilly and Regeneron are the first drugs specifically designed for Covid-19 and approved by the FDA. They are made from artificially synthesized copies of the antibodies that humans naturally produce when their immune systems fight off an infection. Eli Lilly’s drug consists of an antibody. Regeneron’s is a cocktail of two.

Early data showed that it can prevent hospitalization in people at high risk of serious complications from the disease. Clinical studies continue. The treatments are believed to help turn the virus off shortly after infection.

Treatments can be given to anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, is at high risk of developing a severe form of the disease, and occurs within 10 days of symptoms first appearing.

This includes people who are at least 65 years old and those who are obese or have diseases such as diabetes.

The treatments are not approved for people who have already been hospitalized or need oxygen, as studies in these groups have not shown the drugs to work well.

Under agreements each company has made with the federal government, the doses are free, although some patients may have to pay for the administration of the drug, which must be infused by a healthcare provider, depending on insurance coverage.

Monoclonal antibody treatments are difficult and time consuming to manufacture, which has limited the number of doses made by drug manufacturers.

The federal government has bought 950,000 cans from Eli Lilly and 300,000 cans from Regeneron. Pharmaceutical companies have already dispensed hundreds of thousands of these doses, with the rest expected in late January.

Nobody knows, but many of the cans that have been distributed so far have remained unused and are sitting in hospital refrigerators.

While the federal government has nearly 532,000 doses of the two drugs available and nearly 291,000 doses have been shipped, neither the government nor the drug companies have complete data on how many of these doses have been given to patients.

The subset of hospitals that report data to the government on the number of doses administered has, on average, used only 20 percent of their supply, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The drugs are used unevenly across the country. Some hospitals cannot get enough doses. Others haven’t even used much of what they got so far.

Several factors have contributed to the underutilization: Hospitals are overwhelmed by the virus flood and are focusing on the first vaccines. And they need to be housed in their crowded facilities where the treatments can be infused over a period of hours without spreading the virus to others.

Some patients have been reluctant to engage in treatments, be it because they are unwilling to go to a clinic while feeling sick, lack of transportation, or because they perceive the drugs as connected people only for patients who are felt to be good. And the scarcity of treatments adds to their underuse as some hospitals withhold supplies for fear of leakage.

There is no single hotline or website that patients can use to find a provider who offers the treatments.

Many health systems have put in place ways to identify and contact eligible patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus at test sites or in doctor’s offices. However, these referral systems vary from municipality to municipality.

Eli Lilly’s support line for treatment is 1-855-545-5921. A Regeneron spokeswoman recommended that patients or doctors contact the state health department.

Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s chief scientist, said he advises friends and family members to call the company’s hotline. “If you are persistent and you qualify, you will get it,” he said.

Categories
Entertainment

John Fletcher, a.ok.a. Ecstasy of the Group Whodini, Dies at 56

John Fletcher, a.k.a. Ecstasy of the Group Whodini, Dies at 56

John Fletcher, who, as the ecstasy of the foundational hip-hop group Whodini, drove some of the genre’s early pop hits, wear an extravagant zorroesque hat all the time, died in Atlanta on Wednesday. He was 56 years old.

His daughter Jonnelle Fletcher confirmed the death in a statement. She said the cause was not yet clear.

In the mid-1980s Whodini – originally composed of Mr. Fletcher (whose hip-hop name was sometimes called Ecstacy) and Jalil Hutchins, to whom DJ Grandmaster Dee (née Drew Carter) later joined – released a series of Essentials hits, including “Friends”, “Freaks Come Out at Night” and “One Love”. Whodini presented himself as a street-savvy cultured man with a pop ear, and Mr. Fletcher was the group’s oversized character and the liveliest rapper.

“I can’t sing,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “But one day I heard someone rap and said to myself,” I can do that. “I rap on the pitch. I try to be unique. I have my own style.”

John Beamon Fletcher Jr. was born June 7, 1964 in Brooklyn to John and Mary Fletcher and grew up on the Wyckoff Gardens projects in Boerum Hill. He first worked with Mr. Hutchins, who was from nearby Gowanus, when Mr. Hutchins was trying to record a theme song for the newly influential radio DJ Mr. Magic.

This collaboration received a lot of local attention and Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Hutchins were soon signed by Jive Records, which they named Whodini. They quickly recorded “Magic’s Wand” by Thomas Dolby and “The Haunted House of Rock,” a Halloween song.

“Ecstasy really was one of the first rap stars,” wrote Barry Weiss, the executive director who signed it, on Instagram. “Not just a brilliant voice and word smith, but also a woman and sex symbol for ladies when they were very rare in the early days of rap. Whodini has helped lead a female audience to a traditional male art form. “

Most of the group’s earliest material was recorded in London when Mr. Fletcher was just graduating from high school. The self-titled debut album in 1983 was produced by Conny Plank, who also played the bands Kraftwerk and Neu! Whodini toured Europe as well before achieving real success in the US.

“We didn’t go to university or college, but that was our education just to see the world,” Fletcher said in a 2018 interview with YouTube channel HipHop40.

For his follow-up album “Escape” (1984) Whodini began working with producer Larry Smith, who amplified his sound and gave it a little appealing scratch. (Mr. Smith was also responsible for Run-DMC’s breakout albums.) “Escape” contained the songs that would become Whodini’s landmark hits, particularly “Friends” and “Five Minutes of Funk” (released as the downside on the same 12 inch album) single) and “Freaks Come Out Night”.

A skeptical song about deception, “Friends,” was a blast on its own and had robust afterlife as sample material, particularly in Nas and Lauryn Hill’s “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).”

“Five Minutes of Funk” – which became even more popular as the theme music for the long-running hip-hop video show “Video Music Box” – used a clever countdown motif that was woven through the lyrics. “When creating this song,” Fletcher told HipHop40, “we imagined the projects booming out of the windows as we walked through the song on a summer day.”

As hip-hop gained worldwide attention, Whodini was always at the center of the action. The group was led by aspiring impresario Russell Simmons and appeared on the first Fresh Fest tour, hip-hop’s premier arena package.

But when Run-DMC took hip-hop to more edgy terrain, Whodini stayed committed to smoothness. “We were the rap group that bridged the gap between the bands and the rappers,” Fletcher told HipHop40, adding that he and Mr. Hutchins were aware that hip-hop was still struggling to gain acceptance Obtaining radio programmers wrote songs accordingly: “We wanted to curse, but we couldn’t curse.”

Mr. Fletcher was also a major innovator in introducing melody to rapping. “Ecstasy was the lead vocalist on most of the Whodini songs because anything we could play could rap right in key,” Hutchins said in an interview with hip-hop website The Foundation.

“Escape” went platinum, and Whodini’s next two albums “Back in Black” (1986) and “Open Sesame” (1987) both went gold. On “One Love” (from “Back in Black”), which had streaks of sound that would soon merge as the new Jack Swing, Mr. Fletcher was pensive, almost somber:

The words “love” and “like” both have four letters
But they are two different things overall
Because in my day I liked a lot of women
But just like the wind, they all blew away

Havelock Nelson and Michael A. Gonzales described Whodini in their book “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture” (1991) as “a beautifully preserved building in the middle of the Brooklyn ghetto sky, where the sympathetic Characters float gently through a turbulent sea of ​​hardcore attitude and crush-groove madness. “

This was not least due to the style of the group. Whodini dressed with flair: leather jackets, sometimes without a shirt; flowing pants or short shorts; Slipper. Most importantly, Mr. Fletcher’s flat leather hats, which became his trademark, inspired by a wool gaucho he saw in a store on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn that he had remade in leather. Soon he had several.

“He had it in red; she had in white; two in black, one with an African headdress, ”Hutchins said in a 2013 interview with Alabama website AL.com. “He had several, but the original was his favorite.”

Whodini was also one of the first hip hop groups to use dancers in their stage shows. A young Jermaine Dupri got one of his earliest breaks as a dancer for the group. He later repaid the favor and signed Whodini to his label So So Def, on which 1996 the last album “Six” was released. Whodini was also a frequent occurrence in the 2000s.

Mr. Fletcher’s survivors include his daughter Jonnelle and his partner Deltonia Cannon; five other children, Johnmon, Monet, Bianca, Sahara and Tiana; three brothers, Joseph, David and Douglas; a sister, Harriet Fletcher; and five grandchildren. Another sister, Mary Eyvette Fletcher, died before him.

Categories
Politics

Trump indicators aid and funding invoice

Trump signs relief and funding bill

U.S. President Donald Trump leaves the White House in Washington, DC on December 12, 2020.

Aandrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

President Donald Trump signed a massive coronavirus support and government funding package on Sunday days after he panicked Washington by suggesting he could veto the bill.

He declined to approve the legislation for days after receipt after exceeding a Saturday deadline to prevent an estimated 14 million people from temporarily losing unemployment insurance. The move extends the extended unemployment benefits into March, but millions of people are expected to lose a week in benefits due to the delay in Trump signing the bill.

The government would have closed Tuesday during a deadly pandemic if Trump hadn’t approved the legislation.

The president called the law a “shame” on Tuesday evening – after Congress approved it after talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Trump claimed he opposed the bill because it included $ 600 instead of $ 2,000 in direct payments to most Americans and because the $ 1.4 trillion portion of government spending included foreign aid. The President’s White House has taken these funds into its budget.

After Trump expressed support for larger checks, the Democrats adopted his stance. The democratically held house plans to vote on Monday on a measure to increase payments to $ 2,000.

In a statement on Sunday evening, Trump said the Senate would also “initiate the process for a vote that increases the checks to $ 2,000.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell mentioned no plans to include the legislation if the House passes it in a separate statement hailing the bill. Most of the Kentucky Republican Caucus has opposed major direct payments.

The president also said he would send Congress a “formal resignation” requesting that what he calls “wasteful items” be removed from the bill. Legislators are not allowed to cancel the previously approved money as the legislation passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming support from both parties.

The White House had signaled for weeks that Trump would sign the pandemic relief bill passed by the divided Congress. His threat to defy the legislation shocked Capitol Hill and made Americans struggle to adjust their plans.

For example, the airlines had moved to bring back employees with $ 15 billion in wage support included on the bill.

Many economists and lawmakers have called the $ 900 billion coronavirus aid package inadequate. Still, it will send a dose of the help it needs as the virus overwhelms the health system and economy.

The measure provides for a weekly unemployment supplement of USD 300 per week until mid-March. It temporarily expands programs that allow freelancers and gig workers to get unemployment benefits and increases the number of weeks unemployed Americans can get help.

It sends $ 600 direct payments to most people and adds $ 600 for each child. The legislation provides for another round of small business support, the majority of which comes from $ 284 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans.

Almost $ 30 billion will be spent distributing Covid-19 vaccines to ensure Americans can get free shots. The move also provides more than $ 20 billion in Covid-19 testing and contact tracing measures.

Together with the extension of the eviction moratorium, $ 25 billion will be spent on rental support. The airline’s payroll is part of a transportation relief of more than $ 45 billion.

The package also provides $ 82 billion for K-12 and higher education.

Democrats have announced that after President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20, they will be quick to push for another relief bill that will be characterized by direct payments and state and local government aid. Your ability to pass a bill will depend in part on whether Republicans retain control of the Senate in two runoff elections on January 5th in Georgia.

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Categories
World News

U.S. inventory futures rise as Wall Avenue set to enter final week of 2020

U.S. stock futures rise as Wall Street set to enter last week of 2020

Traders work on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

NYSE

The stock futures rose slightly in night trading on the Sunday before the last trading week of 2020.

The futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 149 points. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures were also trading in slightly positive territory.

President Donald Trump signed a $ 900 billion law on Covid-19 that prevented the government from closing and expanded unemployment benefits to millions of Americans. The signing came days after Trump proposed vetoing the legislation and calling for $ 2,000 in direct payments to Americans instead of $ 600.

“I’m signing this bill to restore unemployment benefits, stop evictions, provide rental support, add money for PPP, get our airline employees back to work, add significantly more money to distribute vaccines, and much more,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday evening.

Wall Street has had a quiet week of holidays with major averages posting flat returns. The S&P 500 fell 0.2% last week as some investors took off year-end chips. The 30-share Dow gained 0.1% over the same period.

Profit taking could rise in the last week of the year, which has seen surprisingly high returns so far. The S&P 500 is up 14.6% year-to-date, while the Dow is up 5.8%. The Nasdaq is up 42.7% this year as investors preferred high-growth technology names amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Sunday that the country could see a surge in new Covid-19 infections after Christmas and New Years. Two vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna started the distribution process this month. To date, over a million people have been vaccinated in the United States.

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Categories
Business

Trump Indicators Pandemic Aid Invoice After Unemployment Assist Lapses

Unemployment Aid Set to Lapse Saturday as Trump’s Plans for Relief Bill Remain Unclear

House Democrats plan on Monday to vote on laws that will allow direct payments of $ 2,000. Spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi said Mr. Trump should “immediately urge Congressional Republicans to end their disability” and support the measure. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said he would pass the bill in the Senate, but such a maneuver would require Republican support.

However, during the negotiations, Senate Republicans have refused to increase payments, citing deficit concerns. In a statement welcoming the president’s signature, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, did not mention the $ 2,000 payments or the president’s allegations about next steps for the chamber he controls.

“I applaud President Trump’s decision to get hundreds of billions of dollars of crucial Covid-19 aid out the door into the hands of American families as soon as possible,” McConnell said, without mentioning the delay caused by Mr. Trump .

While legislation provides for expanded and expanded unemployment benefits, the delay in Mr Trump’s signing phased out two critical programs this weekend, guaranteeing a delay in benefits for millions of Americans who had relied on income. Legislation provides for a weekly federal benefit of $ 300 – roughly half the original benefit set out in the March Stimulus Act – for 11 weeks and extends the two programs.

Given that state employment offices are waiting for federal guidelines on how to implement the new legislation, it is unclear how quickly these programs could resume and whether the benefits would be retroactive to accommodate the delay. Because unemployment benefits are processed on a weekly basis and the legislation is not signed before the week starts, workers in most states are likely to lose a week of extended program benefits and a week of $ 300 supplementary benefit.

Updated

Apr. 27, 2020, 6:19 am ET

“You might get it on the back end, but there are bills tomorrow,” said Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, a not-for-profit workers’ rights group. “It’s just so frustrating that he couldn’t have found out yesterday. A day late is a disaster for millions. “

A Democratic adviser said Sunday most states would need guidance from the Department of Labor to see if they could pay benefits for the week of December 27.

Categories
Health

Coronavirus Variant Is Certainly Extra Transmissible, New Research Suggests

Coronavirus Variant Is Indeed More Transmissible, New Study Suggests

A team of British scientists published a worrying study on Wednesday of the new variant of coronavirus sweeping the UK. They warned that the variant was so contagious that new control measures, including closing schools and universities, may be required. Even that might not be enough, they said, saying, “It may be necessary to speed up the introduction of vaccines significantly.”

Nicholas Davies, lead author of the study, said the model should also serve as a warning to other countries where the variant may have already spread.

“The preliminary results are pretty convincing that faster vaccination is going to be a really important matter for any country dealing with this or similar variants,” said Dr. Davies, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in an interview.

The study, published by the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has not yet been reviewed by a scientific journal. The study compares a number of models as predictors of data on infection, hospital stays, and other variables. Other researchers are testing the variant in laboratory experiments to see if it is biologically different.

The study found no evidence that the variant was more deadly than others. However, the researchers estimated that it was 56 percent more contagious. On Monday the British government released an initial estimate of 70 percent.

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said it provided a compelling explanation of the variant’s past and possible future.

“The overall message is solid and in line with what we’ve seen from other sources of information,” he said in an interview. “Is that important? Yes. Is there any evidence of increased transmission? Yes. Will that have an impact in the next few months? Yes. These are all pretty solid. “

The variant, which British researchers became aware of earlier this month, has spread rapidly in London and eastern England. It contains 23 mutations, some of which can be more contagious.

Dr. Davies and colleagues found more evidence that the variant actually spreads faster than others. For example, they ruled out the possibility that it was becoming more common in some regions of the UK because people in those places were more moving and more likely to come into contact with one another. Data recorded by Google showing the movements of individual cell phone users over time showed no such difference.

The researchers built various mathematical models and tested each one as an explanation for the spread of the variant. They analyzed which model of spread best predicted the number of actually confirmed new cases, as well as hospitalizations and deaths.

The researchers concluded that the variant can, on average, spread to more people than other variants. Dr. Davies warned that their estimate of 56 percent more contagious is still crude as they are still collecting data on the recent spread of the variant. “I think if we get more of that corner we will be safer,” he said.

Despite the data he and his colleagues have so far, he is confident that the new variant must be taken very seriously. “I think that given all the evidence, it is a strong case,” he said.

Updated

Apr. 27, 2020, 6:19 am ET

Dr. Davies and his colleagues then predicted what the new variant would do over the next six months and built models that took different constraints into account. Without a broader roll-out of vaccines, they warned, “Cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths in 2021 could exceed those in 2020.”

Closing schools through February could buy the UK some time, the researchers noted, but lifting those additional restrictions would then result in a significant recovery in cases.

Dr. Davies and his colleagues also considered the protection vaccines offer. Vaccine experts are confident that coronavirus vaccines can block the new variant, although this needs to be confirmed by laboratory experiments that are currently being carried out.

To study the effects of the current vaccination rate, the researchers created a model that vaccinated 200,000 people each week. This pace was too slow to have much of an impact on the outbreak. “That kind of pace wouldn’t really help loosen control measures,” said Dr. Davies.

When they increased the vaccinations to 2 million a week, they saw a decrease in the peak load for intensive care units. Whether the UK can increase vaccinations by a factor of 10 is unknown.

As of Tuesday, the variant had not been identified in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Given the low proportion of US infections sequenced, the variant could already be in the US without being detected,” they warned.

The United States is vaccinating its citizens more slowly than expected. This could potentially become a problem if the variant spreads in the UK to the US.

“You need to be able to remove any obstacles to transmission as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Hanage.

Dr. Davies warned that the model he and his colleagues analyzed, like any model, was based on a number of assumptions, some of which could prove to be incorrect. For example, the rate at which infected people die from Covid-19 may continue to decline as doctors improve care for hospital patients. There are still uncertainties as to whether and by how much the new variant is more contagious in children.

They also didn’t consider other tools to stop the spread of the variant, such as an aggressive program to test people and isolate those infected. “That’s a limitation of the paper,” said Dr. Davies. Researchers are now starting to analyze new possibilities like this.

Nevertheless, Dr. Davies and his colleagues in the conclusion of their study: “There is an urgent need to examine which new approaches may be necessary in order to sufficiently reduce the ongoing transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”

Commenting on the new estimates, Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, who was not involved in the study, said: “Unfortunately, this is another turn in the plot.”

“While we were all excited about the vaccine,” he added, “there is a potential for a change in the epidemiological context that will make our next few months much more complex and dangerous to navigate.” Evidence is mounting that the variant is more transmissible, and this implies that even greater efforts are likely to be needed to keep its spread under control. “

Dr. Hanage warned that the model had some flaws. The researchers assumed that anyone under the age of 20 had a 50 percent chance of spreading the disease. Although this might be true for younger children, Dr. Hanage, it’s not for teenagers. “That’s the weakest part of their model,” he said.

Nevertheless, the study offers an important insight into the possible future of the country. “It’s not a forecast, it’s not a prediction, it doesn’t mean this is going to happen,” he said. “They say that if you don’t take it seriously, it can happen very easily.”

Benjamin Mueller contributed to the reporting.

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