Month: May 2021

Categories
World News

Covid Desperation Is Spreading Throughout India

Covid Desperation Is Spreading Across India

NEW DELHI – Dozens of bodies washed up on the banks of the Ganges this week, most likely the remains of people who have died of Covid-19.

States in southern India have threatened to stop sharing medical oxygen and they have great protection from holding onto what they have as their hospitals soar with the sick and infections.

And at a hospital in Andhra Pradesh, a rural state in southeastern India, angry relatives raged in the intensive care unit after suddenly running out of life-saving oxygen – the latest example of the same tragedy repeated when patients died while gasping for breath.

The desperation that has plagued New Delhi, India’s capital, in recent weeks is now spreading across the country, hitting states and rural areas with far fewer resources. Positivity rates are rising in these states, and public health experts say the rising numbers are most likely well below the real picture in places where diseases and deaths caused by Covid-19 are harder to track.

It seems that the crisis is entering a new phase. Cases in New Delhi and Mumbai could flatten. But many other places are being overwhelmed by runaway outbreaks. The World Health Organization is now saying that a new variant of the virus discovered in India, B.1.167, may be particularly transmissible, which only increases the feeling of alarm.

Every day the Indian media delivers a huge dose of turmoil and sadness. On Tuesday, televised images of distraught relatives beating angrily on the chests of loved ones who died after the oxygen was depleted, and headlines such as “Bodies of Suspicious Covid-19 Victims Found Floating” and “As Deaths Go Up.” 10 Fold, Worrying “Characters from Smaller States. “

This has always been the burning question: if New Delhi, home to the country’s elite and numerous hospitals, couldn’t handle the surge in coronavirus cases due to a devastating new wave, what would happen in poorer rural areas?

The answer is coming in now.

On Monday evening, Sri Venkateswara Ramnarain Ruia’s government general hospital in Andhra Pradesh ran out of medical oxygen. More than 60 patients were in critical condition and had oxygen masks on their faces. Doctors desperately called to suppliers for help.

But the oxygen ran out and killed 11 people. Distraught family members got so angry, hospital officials said, that they stormed into the intensive care unit, turned tables and smashed equipment. Television images showed women clutching their heads, overwhelmed with grief. Doctors and nurses fled until police officers arrived.

India is suffering from a worrying shortage of medical oxygen and at least 20 other hospitals have run out. Almost 200 patients have died from it, according to an Indian news site that has been following the string of fatal incidents.

At the same time, the national vaccination campaign stutters. The roughly two million doses administered daily for the past few days are lower than the highs a few weeks ago, when the country gave more than three million doses on a few days. Lots of people can’t find dates to get the shot. Some vaccination centers are completely exhausted, officials say.

All of this leads to the harshest criticism that Narendra Modi, India’s powerful prime minister, has faced since he took office seven years ago. He has been widely accused of declaring premature victory over coronavirus and encouraging his country to drop his guard.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party remains by far India’s most powerful political organization. But the solid wall that the party has maintained during this crisis may show some cracks.

Several party setters in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and one controlled by Mr. Modi’s party, have started complaining about the state government’s response.

“There is no break in the corona and we helplessly watch our own people die,” wrote Lokendra Pratap Singh, a lawmaker for Mr. Modi’s party, in a letter that quickly went viral.

Nationwide, the picture remains bleak, although the situation in India’s two largest cities appears to be improving.

The capital New Delhi reported 12,481 new infections on Tuesday, less than half of the infections reported on April 30. The positivity rate among those tested for the coronavirus has steadily declined in the city, from a worrying high to 19 percent from 36 percent a few weeks ago.

Something similar happened in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, and people are now wondering if the worst is over. The positivity rate in Mumbai has dropped from around 25 percent to around 7 percent.

Hospitals in Delhi that closed their doors last month due to a shortage of life-saving supplies and killed people on the streets are again accepting patients. But the situation for those who get sick is still extremely precarious. On Tuesday afternoon, a cell phone app for New Delhi, a metropolis of 20 million people, showed only 62 free beds in the intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients across the city.

Understand India’s Covid Crisis

Some of the worst-hit states are now in the south, particularly Karnataka, home of India’s Bangalore technology center. An oxygen express train, part of the Modi government’s effort to carry liquid oxygen to Covid-19 hotspots, chugged into Bangalore Tuesday morning.

But the state needs more.

By this week, the southern states had agreed to share the oxygen supply. Now some are arguing to end the collaboration. Neighboring Kerala says it cannot send oxygen because it needs all of its supplies for its own growing needs. Tamil Nadu, also in the south, says the same thing and cannot provide for its poorer neighbor Andhra Pradesh, where the eleven people died on Monday evening at the oxygen limit.

“I can hardly imagine what is going on in rural India,” said Rijo M. John, a health economist in Kerala, where the positivity rate rose from around 8 percent in early April to nearly 27 percent on Tuesday.

Mr John said that rural areas do not have many Covid tests and that many people “may die from not receiving treatment at all”.

One particularly troubling omen came in a river village in Bihar, a rural state in northern India. In the village of Chausa, residents felt deeply uncomfortable after discovering dozens of bodies mysteriously washed up on the banks of the Ganges.

Nobody knows who these people were or how their bodies got there. The villagers found her on Monday evening. Stunned spectators crowded around the remains, many in brightly colored clothes, floating in the shallow water. Images of the bloated bodies have made the rounds in the Indian media and unsettled countless people.

Officials said about 30 bodies were found. Witnesses put the number at over 100.

Every now and then, the villagers said, they see a single corpse floating in the river. It is part of a custom whereby some families send the corpses of loved ones into the Ganges, the holiest river in Hinduism weighed down with stones. But Chausa officials and residents suspect the unprecedented number of bodies they found this week belonged to victims of Covid-19.

“I’ve never seen so many bodies before,” said Arun Kumar Srivastava, a government doctor in Chausa.

When Covid-19 devastated this area, Dr. Srivastava, he saw more and more people carrying corpses, sometimes on their shoulders. “Absolutely,” he said. “More deaths happen.”

Krishna Dutt Mishra, an ambulance driver in Chausa, said many poor people dumped bodies in the river because cremation prices rose from rupees 2,000, about $ 27, to rupees 15,000 since the second wave of Covid. about $ 200, which is an insurmountable amount for most families.

This has become a problem across India. Covid-19 deaths have overwhelmed the grounds for cremation, and some unscrupulous cremation workers are now charging five or even ten times the normal price of the final rites.

“I drove the entire distance from Buxar to Chausa,” said Mishra, referring to another town a little further east. “I’ve never seen a few bodies, let alone so many, lined up along this stretch of the river.”

Hari Kumar and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Health

Uber and Lyft will supply free rides to vaccination websites

Uber and Lyft will offer free rides to vaccination sites

A Lyft logo is featured on a Lyft driver car next to an Uber sticker in Pittsburgh.

Gene J. Puskar | AP

Uber and Lyft will offer free rides to vaccination sites through July 4th as part of a new partnership at the White House, the Biden government said on Tuesday.

“By helping Americans get to a vaccination site for free, Lyft and Uber are removing a potential barrier and bringing America closer to the president’s goal of reaching 70% of the US adult population with at least one shot by July 4th “White said House in a press release.

Both companies had already partnered with other companies to expand transport access to Covid vaccination sites. Tuesday’s announcement, however, builds on these commitments and introduces a formal government partnership.

The White House said the initiative would start within the next two weeks.

Uber didn’t immediately announce what the rides would look like on its app, but Lyft said a “ride code” will be available through its website or app by May 24th. Although the White House advertised the rides as free, Lyft said it would cover $ 15 one way each way. Lyft said in a statement that the amount should cover “most, if not all” of the fare based on previous trips to vaccination sites he has observed.

Users can get a code on Lyft’s website or app to get to a nearby vaccination site after providing some details. The codes can be used for standard rides as well as for scooters or bicycles offered through Lyft during standard pharmacy opening hours of 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“The vaccine is key to getting us all moving again and we are proud to be doing our part to move the country forward,” said Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer in a statement. “We have always believed that transportation has the power to make people’s lives better, and this initiative makes that truer than ever. When more Americans get vaccinated, it will help the Lyft community of drivers and drivers, and we are the Biden -Administration grateful for prioritizing access. “

“Vaccines are our best hope to beat this pandemic, and soon everyone in America can take a free Uber to get their shot,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We are honored to deepen our previous global commitments and to work with the White House and Lyft to offer free rides to vaccination sites in the United States. This is a proud moment for me, for Uber, and for our country.”

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WATCH: Uber, Lyft Pledge Millions to Tackle Driver Shortage

Categories
Business

Wind Challenge Exhibits Democratic Tensions Over Power

Wind Project Shows Democratic Tensions Over Energy

In January, New York State legislature Patricia Fahy celebrated a new development project for the Port of Albany: the country’s first assembly plant for the construction of offshore wind towers. “I rode my bike,” said Ms. Fahy, who represents the area.

It wasn’t long, however, before she got into a political bond.

A powerful union told her that most of the equipment for New York’s large offshore windmill investment was not built by American workers but was overseas. However, when Ms. Fahy proposed legislation to encourage developers to use locally made parts, she encountered opposition from environmentalists and representatives of the wind industry. “They said,” Oh God, don’t cause us any problems, “she recalled.

Since the election of President Biden, Democratic leaders have touted the win-win appeal of the fossil fuel transition, saying it could help avert an impending climate crisis while putting millions into work. “We haven’t used the most important word for coping with the climate crisis for too long: jobs, jobs, jobs,” said Biden in an address to Congress last month.

But there is a tension between the goals of industrial workers and those of environmentalists – groups that Democrats see as politically critical. The more the focus is on domestic production, the more expensive renewable energy will be, at least initially, and the longer it may take to meet the renewable energy targets.

This tension could be felt as the White House finalizes its climate change agenda.

“It’s a classic compromise,” said Anne Reynolds, who heads the New York Clean Energy Alliance, a coalition of environmental and industrial groups. “It would be better if we produced more solar modules in the USA. However, other countries have invested public money for a decade. So it’s cheaper to build them there. “

There is some data to support the claim that climate targets can create jobs. Consulting firm Wood Mackenzie expects tens of thousands of new jobs a year later this decade, just in offshore wind, an industry that hardly exists in the United States today.

And unions – even those whose members are most at risk of switching to green energy, such as miners – are increasingly accepting this logic. In recent years, many unions have teamed up with renewable energy advocates to form groups with names like the BlueGreen Alliance that are pushing for ambitious jobs and climate laws, similar to the $ 2.3 trillion proposal that Mr Biden proposed to the American Employment plan calls.

However, much of the supply chain for renewable energy and other clean technologies is overseas. Nearly 70 percent of the value of a typical solar module assembled in the United States comes from companies in China or Chinese companies across Southeast Asia. This emerges from a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the energy research group BloombergNEF.

Electric vehicle batteries, their most valuable component, follow a similar pattern, the report said. And there is virtually no domestic supply chain dedicated to offshore wind turbines, an industry that Mr Biden hopes will grow from around half a dozen turbines in the water to thousands in the next decade. Most of this supply chain is located in Europe.

Many proponents of a greener economy say that importing equipment is not a problem but an asset – and that insisting on domestic production could raise the price of renewable energy and slow the transition from fossil fuels.

“It’s valuable to have flexible global supply chains that allow us to move forward quickly,” said Craig Cornelius, who once led the energy division’s solar program and is now the executive director of Clearway Energy Group, which develops solar and wind projects.

Those who value speed and procurement argue that as manufacturing becomes increasingly automated, most of the tasks in the renewable energy space will be building solar and wind power plants, rather than making equipment.

However, working groups fear that construction and installation work is poorly paid and temporary. They say that only manufacturing traditionally offers higher wages and benefits and can maintain the workforce for years.

Manufacturing partisans also point out that this often leads to jobs in new industries. Researchers have shown that the migration of consumer electronics to Asia in the 1960s and 1970s helped these countries become hubs for future technologies like advanced batteries.

As a result, union leaders are urging the administration to impose strict conditions on the subsidies for environmentally friendly equipment. “We will require that the domestic content of this material be really high,” said Thomas M. Conway, president of the United Steelworkers Union and close ally of Biden.

The experience in New York shows how delicate these debates can be when certain jobs and projects are at stake.

Late last year, the Communications Workers of America began considering ways to revive employment at a General Electric factory that represents the union in Schenectady, NY, near Albany. The factory has laid off thousands of employees over the past few decades.

Around the same time, the state was about to approve bids for two large offshore wind projects. The eventual winner, a Norwegian developer, Equinor, promised to bring a wind tower assembly plant to New York and modernize a port in Brooklyn.

“All of a sudden, I’m focusing on the fact that it’s wind making,” said Bob Master, the communications officer who turned to Ms. Fahy, the state legislature. “GE makes turbines – there could be a New York supply chain. Let us try it.”

In early February, the union tabled a bill urging developers like Equinor to buy their wind equipment “as much as possible” from manufacturers in New York State – not just towers but other components like blades and nacelles house the mechanical entrails of one Turbine. Ms. Fahy, a member of the congregation, and Senator Neil Breslin, a Democratic compatriot from the Albany area, were signed on as sponsors.

Environmentalists and industry officials were quick to voice concerns that the move could deter developers from coming into the state.

“So far, Equinor has exceeded anything other companies have done,” said Lisa Dix, who until recently led the Sierra Club’s renewable energy campaign in New York. “Given what we have, why do we need stricter requirements for companies?”

Ms. Dix and other clean energy advocates had worked with unions to persuade the state that offshore wind construction jobs should offer union wages and representation. New York’s clean energy bid evaluation system was already awarding points to developers who promised local economic benefits.

Ms. Reynolds, the leader of the New York Environmental and Industrial Coalition, feared that exceeding the existing regulation could make renewable energy costs unsustainable.

“If it got bigger and more noticeable on utility bills, the general expectation is that political support for New York’s clean energy programs would wane,” she said.

The communications staff tried to provide reassurance, which was not entirely successful. “I said to them, ‘We are trade unionists: we ask for anything, the boss doesn’t offer us anything, and then we make a deal,'” said Mr. Master. “‘But I think there is no reason why turbines should come from France, unlike Schenectady.'”

The final language, a compromise negotiated with the state’s Building Crafts Council and passed by lawmakers in April, allows the state to award additional points in the tender process to developers who commit to creating manufacturing jobs in the state, a slight refinement of the stream approach. (It also effectively requires that workers who build, operate, or maintain wind and solar systems either receive union wages or can benefit from union representation.)

While the law included a “Buy American” requirement for iron and steel, the state energy research and development agency known as NYSERDA may waive the requirement.

Agency executive director Doreen Harris said she was generally pleased that the existing approach had remained intact and predicted that the state will have blade and nacelle factories within a few years.

Some analysts agreed, arguing that most offshore wind devices are so bulky – often several hundred feet long – that it becomes impractical to ship across the Atlantic.

“There is a point where importing all goods and services does not make economic sense,” said Jeff Tingley, offshore wind supply chain expert at consultancy Xodus.

However, this does not always reflect the experience of the UK, which earlier this year had installed more offshore wind turbines than any other country but produced only a small portion of the equipment.

“Even if the UK is the largest market, the logistical cost has not been high enough to warrant new factories,” said Alun Roberts, offshore wind expert at UK-based consultancy BVG Associates.

According to a 2017 report, the country produced significantly less than 30 percent of its offshore wind turbines, and Mr Roberts said the percentage has likely increased slightly since then. The country currently makes blades, but not gondolas.

All of this leaves the Biden administration with a difficult choice: If they really want to move production to the US, it might require an aggressive nudge. A senior White House official said the government is looking into ways some of the wind and solar panels in the US should be made when it comes to federal funds.

However, some current and former democratic business leaders are skeptical of the idea, as are clean energy advocates.

“I am currently concerned about the federal government’s local offshore wind content requirements,” said Kathleen Theoharides, the Massachusetts secretary for energy and the environment. “I don’t think adding something to the tariff payer that could potentially increase the cost of clean energy is necessarily the right strategy.”

Master said the recent New York legislation was a victory given the difficulty of getting stronger policies in place at the state level on domestic content, but acknowledged that it fell short of his union’s goals. Both he and Ms. Fahy vowed to keep pushing to bring more offshore wind manufacturing jobs to New York.

“I could be the queen of lost causes, but we want to get some energy for it,” said Ms. Fahy. “We need that here. I’m not just saying New York. This is a national conversation. “

Categories
Politics

Former Trump lawyer owned shell firm

Hometown International, NJ deli owner, worth millions in stock

Your Hometown Deli in Paulsboro, N.J.

Google Earth

Shell companies sure make strange bedfellows.

A New York real estate tax lawyer — who did work for former President Donald Trump decades ago — in 2011 purchased a shell company whose creators later became key investors in a mystery $100 million company that owns just a small New Jersey deli, records show.

The shell company — Europa Acquisition I Inc. — was one of eight shell entities set up in 2010 by Peter Reichard and Peter Coker Sr., the North Carolina-based investors in deli owner Hometown International.

After Reichard and Coker sold them, most of those shell companies — including the one later purchased by Trump’s former real estate tax lawyer Allan Schwartz — ended up having their registrations revoked by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to keep current in their disclosure filings, records show.

More about the $100 million NJ deli

Your Hometown Deli in Paulsboro, N.J., is no mere neighborhood delicatessen. Despite racking up less than $40,000 in sales over the past two years, the deli’s parent company has a $100 million valuation on the over-the-counter stock market.

CNBC has done some digging into the deli and the mysterious firms and investors linked to it. Here are some recent stories:

The shell companies were named in numerical sequence, starting with Europa Acquisition I and ending with Europa Acquisition VIII.

Schwartz, the former Trump lawyer, told CNBC in a phone interview that he knew nothing about Coker Sr. and Reichard, Hometown International, or its deli in Paulsboro, New Jersey, which has minuscule sales. Coker Sr. and Reichard sold the Europa shell months before Schwartz bought it from other entities.

Schwartz, 73, is the latest person with an eyebrow-raising history to pop up in financial records linked to the deli company investors or to entities they were involved in.

Schwartz laughed Monday when a reporter told him details about Hometown International, including its market valuation of $100 million despite owning a South Jersey deli that had sales of less than $37,000 for the past two years.

“I know nothing about it,” Schwartz chuckled after being told that key investors in Hometown International had created a shell company he once owned.

‘Buyer beware’

Schwartz is in good company.

A lot of people have laughed or made jokes about Hometown International since last month, when hedge fund manager David Einhorn first highlighted the deli owner’s preposterous market capitalization, and used it as a warning to retail investors.

“The pastrami must be amazing,” Einhorn racked in an oft-quoted line from that letter.

In recent weeks, CNBC has detailed criminal and regulatory sanctions imposed on people and entities linked to Coker Sr. and Reichard, reported on the investments by Duke and Vanderbilt universities in Hometown International, and revealed details about the opaque nature of a group of Macao-based investors in that company.

Articles also have explored the incongruous professional backgrounds of Hometown’s two executive officers — both of whom are public high school administrators — and the existence of a related shell company. That shell company E-Waste, like the deli owner, has a sky-high stock market capitalization that is not justified by any meaningful business operations.

Those articles led to the termination of consulting agreements in which Hometown International and E-Waste had paid thousands of dollars per month in fees to a firm controlled by Reichard and Coker Sr.

Another firm controlled by the two men, Europa Capital Investments, remains a major investor in Hometown International, as does Coker Sr. as an individual. Coker Sr.’s son, Hong Kong-based Peter Coker Jr., is the deli company’s chairman.

Peter Reichard, a top Perdue aide, takes the oath before his apearance in Wake County Court, Wednesday, December 14, 2011 in Raleigh, N.C.

John Rottet | The News & Observer | AP

A crooked pedigree

Records reviewed in recent days by CNBC show that a now-disbarred lawyer — who last year pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges related to a shell company factory scheme — also was involved in the creation of the Europa Acquisition shells for Coker Sr. and Reichard. That same lawyer three years later played a similar role in the creation of Hometown International and later securities filings for that company.

SEC records show that the accounting firm involved during the registration of the Europa Acquisition shell companies was an earlier incarnation of a Florida-based firm that handled accounting work for Hometown International.

The Florida firm itself was censured last year by an accounting oversight board last year for lack of oversight in work for a company that is not connected to either the deli owner or to the Europa shell companies.

CNBC last week obtained from the Raleigh, North Carolina, Police Department a record of Coker Sr.’s arrest on April 30, 2010, on a charge of soliciting a prostitute, who herself was arrested that day.

That arrest came nearly 18 years after Coker Sr. was reportedly arrested in Allentown, Pennsylvania — where he had been a high school basketball star — on prostitution and other charges. The Morning Call newspaper at the time reported that the then-49-year-old Coker was nabbed by police after allegedly exposing himself to three girls, one as young as 10 years old, and trying to proposition them.

Peter Lee Coker mugshot from the Raleigh/Wake City-County Bureau of Identification (CCBI).

Source: Raleigh/Wake City-County Bureau of Identification

“Yes,” Coker Sr. said when he answered his phone Monday and told that a reporter was calling.

“Thanks, but no,” he said when told that CNBC was preparing to publish another article about him. He then hung up after a reporter asked if he would listen to details of that article.

Coker, 78, previously was accused in lawsuits of hiding assets from a bank that he owed nearly $900,000, and also sued for business-related fraud. He has denied those allegations at the time of the lawsuits.

The 64-year-old Reichard, who was sued along with Coker Sr. in 2019 in a now-settled case regarding alleged business fraud involving a specialty foods retailer in North Carolina, did not return repeated requests for comment. His lawyer in the lawsuit had denied the plaintiff’s claims of wrongdoing at the time the case was filed.

In late 2011, Reichard was convicted in North Carolina court of a criminal scheme that illegally contributed thousands of dollars to the successful campaign of Bev Perdue, a Democrat, for governor of that state in 2008. The scheme involved the use of bogus consulting contracts with Tryon Capital, a firm controlled by Reichard and Coker Sr. The elder Coker was not charged in that case.

Tryon Capital is the same firm that until last month was being paid $15,000 a month by Hometown International for a consulting agreement, and $2,500 per month by E-Waste for a similar agreement.

In financial filings, Hometown International and E-Waste have indicated that they are marketing themselves as candidates for reverse mergers or other financial maneuvers, which would have them effectively taken over by a private company that wants to become publicly traded in the United States.

Shell game

Investments by outside entities in the past year, including ones linked to Duke and Vanderbilt that were placed by a Hong Kong-based investment firm, in both companies were meant to bolster that effort.

But the investments do not explain the bizarre steep rise of share prices of both Hometown International and E-Waste in the past year, particularly since E-Waste has no actual business.

Both stocks are thinly traded, at best, each day. They also, despite having millions of common stock shares outstanding, have relatively few shareholders, the largest of which are entities involved in the plan to have the companies merge with other firms.

If that plan is successful, shareholders are expected to receive a return on their investment that bears little, if any, resemblance to the current share prices of either company.

All of those facts raise the question of why anyone would pay so much now to buy shares of the companies on the open market.

Adding to the oddness is the fact that the CEO of the deli owner, 62-year-old Paul Morina, is the principal of Paulsboro High School, and the head coach of the school’s renowned wrestling team. The only other executive is Christine Lindemuth, 46, an administrator and a teacher at the same high school, which is close to the deli.

Paulsboro coach Paul Morina cheers on George Worthy as he takes on Bergen Catholic s Wade Unger in the 152-pound bout during a wrestling match at The Palestra in Philadelphia,

Joe Warner | USAToday

E-Waste’s only executive, 66-year-old New Jersey resident John Rollo, is a Grammy-winning music recording engineer who last year worked as a patient transporter at a New Jersey hospital.

The eight Europa Acquisition shell companies themselves were set up by Reichard and Coker Sr. as so-called blank check companies to become vehicles for transactions like those being sought by Hometown International and E-Waste according to SEC filings.

Several of the shells actually ended up being used for that purpose, in transactions that ended with them being controlled by China-based companies.

Those filings show that Europa Acquisition I was incorporated in Nevada in June 2010, and a month later filed a registration of securities with the SEC, as did four other Europa shells.

The three highest-numbered Europa shells were registered with the SEC in December 2010.

In 2020, Gregg Jaclin, the lawyer named on the Europa Acquisition company filings, pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges related to his creation of shell companies to sell to individuals “who use those shell companies as publicly traded vehicles for market manipulation schemes,” court records show.

None of the companies involved in that scheme were the Europa Acquisition shells.

Nor were they Hometown International, whose first SEC filings lists Jaclin as a lawyer for that corporation.

Jaclin, who was disbarred as a lawyer and sanctioned by the SEC for his actions, did not return requests for comment.

The Schwartz story

The July 2010 registration filing for Europa Acquisition I said that Reichard, who served as its president and director, held 60,000 shares of the company, while Coker Sr. held the remaining 40,000 shares.

That share split between the business partners was mirrored in other initial filings by Europa shells.

Less than three months later, Reichard and Coker sold all of their shares for $15,000 to two companies, Beige Holdings and Marlin Financial Group, filings show.

One of Schwartz’s sons, Gregory, then was appointed as president of Europa Acquisition I, filings state.

Then, in January 2011, Allan Schwartz himself paid $18,750 for 90%, or 90,000 shares, of the company, while Beige Holdings retained 10,000 shares.

“I had no doubt that I bought a quiet, clean shell company,” Allan Schwartz said in a phone interview.

Schwartz said that he purchased Europa Acquisition I — his first and only shell company — “with the hope that we could do something with it,” along the lines of a merger with a small company and possibly an additional issuance of stock.

But, he noted, “it never did anything,” after several years of Schwartz paying thousands of dollars annually to maintain the existence of the company, which at some point he had renamed Wintahenderson International.

“At a certain point, I said that’s the end of it,” recalled Schwartz. “We just let the company go out of business.”

Wintahenderson last filed a required quarterly report with the SEC in 2017, according to the regulator’s online database.

Last September, the SEC revoked Wintahenderson’s registration for failing to file required periodic reports. The SEC had taken similar action for the same reason against most of the other Europa Acquisition shells years earlier.

Working for Trump

Schwartz currently is senior counsel and senior managing partner at the Manhattan firm of Podell, Schwartz, Schecter & Banfield, which represents property owners seeking to reduce their property taxes.

Schwartz’s current firm, which is a leader in real-estate tax work, merged in 1997 with his prior firm, Schwartz & Weiss.

“At one point in time our firm did represent Trump, but that’s going back 27 years or more,” Schwartz said.

“I don’t think I represented Trump for more than two, three years,” Schwartz said. “I think I met him once in his office at Trump Tower … 99% of the time I was dealing with someone in his office.”

At some point, Schwartz said, Trump “switched real estate tax attorneys.”

“Sometimes clients choose to go with another firm,” Schwartz said. “Maybe he wasn’t happy, and he changes lawyers.”

Schwartz said that decades ago a former New York City tax assessor and city Tax Commission hearing officer named Thomas McArdle may have done some work for his law firm after becoming a consultant.

But Schwartz said that he had “zero recollection” of McArdle performing any work in connection with Trump’s properties for Schwartz’s firm

In 2002, The New York Times reported that McArdle was a key figure in a federal indictment filed against 18 other then-current and former city tax assessors, who were charged in a decades-long scheme with accepting millions of dollars of bribes in exchange for lowering property taxes for commercial property owners.

Prosecutors said at the time that the scheme had cost New York City $160 million in lost tax revenue during the prior four years alone.

McArdle, who died in 2013, was never charged in that case but was identified in news reports as a cooperating witness in the investigation.

In a 2002 Times article, Schwartz’s then-lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, acknowledged that Schwartz had worked for Trump in the past, but added that “it did not involve Mr. McArdle, to our knowledge.”

”McArdle was an industrywide consultant who was used by the most prominent and well-respected law firms and real estate firms in the city,” Brafman said at the time. Brafman also said Schwartz was “not aware of any wrongdoing by McArdle” or anyone else.

The Times reported at the time that Trump told the newspaper that “he stopped using Mr. Schwartz in the early 1990s because he seemed ineffectual.”

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump, did not return a request for comment from CNBC.

Echoes of scandals past

Schwartz on Monday told CNBC that he was aware nearly two decades ago that “there was a scandal” around McArdle. But he also said that he was not personally aware of any wrongdoing by McArdle in connection with his work for Schwartz’s firm.

In March 2020, an article by ProPublica and WNYC radio reported that five former city tax assessors and city employees, as well as a former Trump Organization employee, had said that the Trump Organization paid bribes, using middlemen to city tax assessors to lower its property tax bills for several Manhattan buildings in the 1980s and 1990s.

The city employees interviewed for that article were among those 18 who all pleaded guilty in the scheme said to involve McArdle.

CNBC has reached out for comment to the Trump Organization.

Last year, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, denied the allegations. “To be clear, at no time did the Trump Organization or any of its employees or principals ever pay anyone for the purpose of unlawfully obtaining a lower tax valuation,” he told ProPublica and WNYC for their article.

“This was corroborated by multiple investigations which found no evidence of any wrongdoing by the company or any of its principals. … If anything, the Trump Organization was a victim of the scandal,” Garten said.

Trump and his company currently are the subjects of a criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

Vance’s office among other things is eyeing allegations that the Trump Organization manipulated the valuation of certain real estate properties to lower their tax bill and insurance costs, and to receive more favorable terms from lenders.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is conducting a civil investigation of the Trump Organization that is focused on those same allegations. The claims were first raised during testimony to Congress in 2019 by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who is cooperating with Vance’s investigation.

Trump, a Republican, has denied any wrongdoing and also has claimed that both investigations are “witch hunts” by Vance and James, both of whom are Democrats.

Among the Trump properties being eyed in both probes is 40 Wall Street, a skyscraper in lower Manhattan.

Schwartz said that he represented the owners of 40 Wall Street before it was sold to Trump. He also said that he never represented Trump in connection with that building.

The lawyer said that no one from either Vance’s or James’ office has contacted him to ask about his work for Trump.

Schwartz said he has no reason to believe that Trump or his company misstated the incomes of their properties in their appeals of city assessment rulings, which if successful led to a reduction in tax liabilities.

He noted that property owners “must submit certified statements of income and expenses on their tax commission forms.”

“That’s the basis on which real estate attorneys argue” for lower assessments, he said.

“Do I think he submitted phony statements?” Schwartz added. “I would suspect no, but I have no idea. I don’t know, nor would I have any reason to suspect that he did.”

Schwartz was bemused and spoke matter-of-factly about his link to Trump.

“I can’t dispute the facts, but it’s funny that there are so many facts that are related to each other,” Schwartz said. “Everything that you discussed is in the public record.”

He added: “Of all the characters you’ve mentioned, the only one I can tell you that I knew was Trump, for a short period of time. And McArdle.”

In addition to having worked for Trump, Schwartz at one point had an office in the Villard Houses in Manhattan, a historic landmark owned by the Sultan of Brunei, on land leased from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

Schwartz’s office there was one floor below the office of the mysterious money manager Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex criminal who killed himself in 2019 while in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial on federal child sex trafficking charges.

Epstein was a former friend of Trump’s, as well as of another former president, Bill Clinton.

“Never met him,” Schwartz said of Epstein. “I never saw him in the building.”

Categories
Health

Want a Pandemic Reset? Strive This 10-Day Problem

Need a Pandemic Reset? Try This 10-Day Challenge

While some people developed healthy new habits during the pandemic lockdown, if you’ve spent your pandemic days just getting through it, it’s not too late. The good news is that the end of the pandemic is likely a more propitious time for significant change than if you had the heightened fear of lockdowns.

“Covid-19 has been a terrible time for many of us,” said Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale who teaches a popular online course called The Science of Well-Being. “There is a lot of evidence of what is known as post-traumatic growth – that we can come out stronger and with a little more meaning in our lives after negative events. I think we can all use this terrible time of the pandemic to achieve post-traumatic growth in our own lives. “

One of the biggest barriers to change has always been the fact that we tend to establish routines that are difficult to break. But the pandemic has destroyed many people’s routines and prepared us for a reset, said Dr. Santos.

“We’ve all changed our routines so much,” she said. “I think many of us realized during the pandemic that some of the things we did before Covid-19 weren’t the kind of things that made our lives flourish. I think many of us have realized that if we are to be happier, aspects of our work and family life, and even our relationships, may have to change. “

One reason new beginnings can be so effective is because people think about the passage of time in chapters or episodes rather than a continuum, said Dr. Milkman. As a result, we tend to look at the past in terms of unique periods, such as: For example, our high school years, college years, years we lived in a particular city or worked in a particular job. In the future, we will likely look back on the pandemic year as a similarly unique chapter in our lives.

“We have chapter breaks like life is a novel – that’s how we mark the time,” said Dr. Milkman. “This has an impact on the psychology of the new beginning, because these moments, which open a new chapter, give us the feeling of a new beginning. It is easier to attribute mistakes to the “old me”. You feel like you can do more now because we are in a new chapter. “

While the beginning of a new chapter is a good time to change, the pages will turn quickly. Now that we are getting out of the confines of pandemic life, social scientists say it is an ideal time to reflect on what you have learned over the past year. What new habits would you like to keep and what parts of your prepandemic life would you like to change?

Categories
Business

Virgin Galactic inventory drops after doable delay to spaceflight exams

Virgin Galactic stock drops after possible delay to spaceflight tests

The Virgin Galactic spaceship outside of Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Virgo Galactic

Virgin Galactic’s stock fell Tuesday on high trading volume, with the company’s next space flight test – and its broader path to launching commercial flights – potentially further delayed.

The space tourism company gave an overview of the progress in repeating the space test, which was canceled in-flight in December. While the company says it has now completed repairs to an issue with its VSS Unity spacecraft, an unexpected potential maintenance issue was identified with the VMS Eve carrier aircraft after test flights last week.

Virgin Galactic said the issue in question is scheduled for maintenance in October, but the company is currently analyzing whether maintenance needs to be done now – which would likely further delay the space test schedule. The company planned to rerun the spaceflight in May but now says the timing is “currently under evaluation”.

“We’ll be back in the market next week with an update on the flight schedule for our next flight,” said Mike Moses, president of space missions and security for Virgin Galactic, during the company’s conference call.

Virgin Galactic’s stock fell as much as 20% in trading from its previous closing price of $ 17.95 per share before recovering some of the losses to trade 9%. The stock, which was halted by the NYSE for five minutes due to volatility shortly after opening, exceeded its daily average volume within the first half hour of trading on Tuesday.

The lows of the decline took Virgin Galactic stock below $ 15 per share – its lowest level in nearly a year – and continued to add to the stock losses since hitting a high of over $ 60 per share in February.

Virgin Galactic has four test flights left before development of its SpaceShipTwo system is complete.

Meanwhile, stock losses have accelerated after delays in the first of these four space flights, as well as after sales of shares by Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya, founder Richard Branson and Cathie Wood’s new space ETF. The stock also fell after Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin announced plans to launch the first crew flight of its space tourism rocket on July 20. UBS cautioned against removing Virgin Galactic’s first mover advantage.

The start of Virgin Galactic’s commercial service, which is expected to begin in 2020 when the company completed its SPAC merger, has been postponed to early 2022.

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Categories
Business

Second Life for Delivery Containers: Promoting Bao Buns and Baked Items

Second Life for Shipping Containers: Selling Bao Buns and Baked Goods

Craig Baker posted photos of orange, turquoise, and pink shipping containers on Instagram to promote publicity for his food hall in downtown Indianapolis. They may seem strange to promote a grocery store and culinary incubator, but the steel boxes piqued the curiosity of the locals.

“They’re very similar to Legos, aren’t they?” Mr Baker, an entrepreneur and chef, said about the shipping containers at the AMP, a craft market and former supply garage where vendors sell PB&J sandwiches, Ethiopian cold brew coffee, and chocolate-covered strawberries covered with edible glitter.

“We’re building our own little village in a huge garage,” he said of the 40,000-square-foot space, which also includes a full-service restaurant, open-air bar, prep kitchen, and stage. “People want to see what you’ve built.”

Shipping containers have been heralded as a trend in home decor where they are used for modular homes, but they are also convincing commercial planners who have used them to liven up the bars, cafes and restaurants within developments anchored by food halls. In industrial areas or port cities, the containers give projects a sense of community, which is vital in a pandemic when retailers and restaurants close their doors.

However, the shipping containers also pose challenges for developers, including indoor customization and safety for guests and staff during a pandemic.

Most food halls rely on shipping containers to populate the stalls, but some also use them as canvas for art installations or as common areas. As the grocery halls proliferate, builders are adopting a pioneering design to stand out from the packaging and avoid a sterile cafeteria.

“Grocery halls are a dozen these days; Lots of them do exactly the same thing, ”said David Weitz, co-founder of Carpe Real Estate Partners, who this month opened Oasis, a food and entertainment center built on the site of a former marine engine repair company in Miami’s artistic Wynwood neighborhood. Six yellow, pink, and lavender shipping containers are used to sell bao rolls and gyros, while 16 more make up a 75-foot tall central tower bar painted in the same colors by Spanish artist Antonyo Marest.

The Oasis is one of a dozen grocery halls that use shipping containers and one of several to open this year along with AMP in Indianapolis and BLVD MRKT near Los Angeles. The United States has 242 food halls, a jump from 222 at the start of the pandemic, and cities have relied on their creative concepts and communal dining spaces to revitalize dormant neighborhoods. At least 190 more are in the works, according to a report by Cushman & Wakefield.

The trend started in 2013 with Downtown Container Park, a project conceived by Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO who passed away last November. The development, which was central to the revitalization of downtown Las Vegas worth $ 350 million, inspired other developers like Barney Santos, who after seven years of planning, will open BLVD MRKT in the predominantly Latin American neighborhood of Montebello this summer.

“I remember seeing the container park and feeling so inspired by the design,” said Santos of the development in Las Vegas. “I wanted to recreate that experience in my neighborhood to do something that no one would expect.”

Developers like Mr Santos said using shipping containers is more of a design choice than a cost-saving one. Used shipping containers cost $ 2,000 to $ 3,000, but builders can expect to pay five times that amount to add windows, doors, support structures, and kitchen and other equipment to pass local health inspections. This makes the cost comparable to installing normal food stands.

In business today

Updated

May 11, 2021 at 8:17 p.m. ET

For business owners, opening a grocery stand in a shipping container means they can add flourishing accents to personalize their space. In many indoor dining rooms, the stalls often look the same apart from a few differences in the signage. “The creativity that opens up is the strangest,” said Baker, the AMP’s project manager. “You give them a canvas and say, ‘Look, this is your place. What do you do with it? ‘”

That coincided with Joanna Wilson, the owner of an AMP dessert shop, Punkin’s Pies. Ms. Wilson picked colors that matched her brand, adding black and white floors and awnings to the pink shipping container, as well as a sparkling chandelier that shines like her glittering strawberries.

The semi-enclosed space also allows her to stow most of her kitchen equipment. “I try to make it look dainty and neat,” said Ms. Wilson. “I don’t like showing off my fridge, microwave, and kitchen area.”

The design choice makes sense in large port cities like Long Beach, California, where developer Howard CDM built SteelCraft, one of the earlier incarnations of a shipping container restaurant.

“There are shipping containers everywhere,” said Kimberly Gros, founder of SteelCraft, which operates two other Southern California locations at Garden Grove and Bellflower, said Kimberly Gros. “So we thought we were going to create a structure that is different and that is really connected to us.”

The reuse of materials appeals to many consumers from both an ecological and an aesthetic point of view. “I think if you take an item and undermine your original intent and create a whole new use for that item, it’s always interesting,” said Erik Rutter, co-founder of Carpe Real Estate Partners.

In interiors like the AMP, light tones enliven an otherwise gray room and at the same time preserve an industrial feel. “The color palette for the containers is really popping,” said Mr. Baker.

However, there are some limitations to the use of shipping containers in food-centric destinations. Some developers recommend sticking to outdoor applications to avoid complex retrofitting. In an outside environment, furnace ventilation can be done directly from the furnace hood through the roof, which is the most common setting. However, with a food hall at the base of a 50-story building, the process becomes more complicated because the ventilation has to be increased by 50 stories, Carpe’s Weitz said.

Most developers have sticked to outdoor use, but some food halls in the Midwest, such as AMP, Detroit Shipping Company, and Parlor Food Hall in Kansas City, Missouri, have placed them indoors. Design experts say the key is sticking to indoor bakeries and other light cooking applications rather than a store that requires a deep fryer, for example. Because of this, the AMP used shipping containers for companies with limited cooking requirements and conventional stands for those who needed more, said John Albrecht, director of the DKGR architectural firm that designed the AMP.

Dealing with the pandemic is also more of a challenge for indoor food halls, where diners often battle for coveted seats. Most have pushed take-out and delivery services and reconfigured their seating to allow social distancing, said Phil Colicchio, co-head of the Cushman & Wakefield food and beverage advisory group.

But perhaps the biggest fight for developing containers to be guided by ships is to stay more open. “The concern is that the more you walk this path, the more similar the rooms are,” said Trip Schneck, also co-head of the Cushman & Wakefield food and beverage group.

Expect shipping containers to continue to develop, especially as cities identify more industrial areas in need of revitalization. But it won’t be long before architects identify the next big thing, said Martin D. Howard, president of Howard CDM.

“Brilliant thinkers and creative minds will find other ways to make it interesting for people to come out and eat and drink and have a good time,” he said.

Categories
Health

FDA clears use in children ages 12 to 15

Daily U.S. data on April 20

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Pfizer and BioNTech’s motion to allow their Covid-19 vaccine to be given to children ages 12-15 in an emergency so states can vaccinate middle school students before the fall.

The U.S. agency, which grants the use of the shot in teenagers, will also accelerate the country’s efforts to fight infection, say public health officials and infectious disease experts.

The two-dose vaccine is already approved for use in people aged 16 and over. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Advisory Board scheduled a meeting on Wednesday to review the recordings for children. If approved by the CDC as expected, it could be distributed to teens as early as this week.

Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said the decision “moves us closer to a return to a sense of normalcy and an end to the pandemic”. She assured parents that the agency “did a rigorous and thorough review of all available data” before approving it for teenage use.

The companies announced in late March that the vaccine was 100% effective in a clinical study involving more than 2,000 adolescents. They also said the vaccine produced a “robust” antibody response in the children that outperformed that in a previous study in older teenagers and young adults. The side effects were generally consistent with those seen in adults, they added.

Vaccinating children is seen as critical to ending the pandemic. The nation is unlikely to achieve herd immunity – if enough people in a given community have antibodies to a given disease – until children can be vaccinated, health officials and experts say.

According to the government, children make up around 20% of the total US population. According to experts, between 70% and 85% of the US population must be vaccinated against Covid to achieve herd immunity and some adults may refuse to get the shots. Although now more experts say herd immunity becomes less likely as variants spread.

The Chief Medical Officer of the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said in April that the US could start vaccinating older children against Covid-19 from the fall, while elementary school-age children may get their shots early next year.

The vaccine is given in two doses three weeks apart, according to the FDA, with the same regimen according to the FDA for people aged 16 and over.

FDA approval for children under the age of 12 could come in the second half of this year. In a presentation to coincide with the company’s earnings release on May 4th, Pfizer expects to file for approval of its toddler vaccine in September and toddler vaccine in November. The filing process for full FDA approval for people aged 16 and over has already begun, the company announced on Friday.

In late March, Pfizer and BioNTech started a clinical trial testing their vaccine in healthy 6-month-old to 11-year-old children. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, whose vaccines are approved for people aged 18 and over, are also testing their recordings in younger age groups.

The FDA’s announcement also comes in the context of President Joe Biden’s push to reopen schools for personal learning. Biden’s government has already announced that it will invest $ 10 billion in Covid testing for schools to accelerate returns to face-to-face courses across the country.

Vaccinating children can also give the green light to after-school activities such as sports, arts, and other personal activities.

While parents feel relieved that their children can be vaccinated, some health experts have questioned whether doses should be kept for children who are considered less at risk for serious illness while leaving vulnerable people around the world unprotected.

Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health and emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, said there need be no either-or choice between vaccinating children and distributing shots to the rest of the world. The US can do both, he said. But he’s frustrated that the US has stopped focusing on getting the rest of the world vaccinated.

“If I were to ask you whether a 12 year old with no medical problems or a 57 year old healthcare worker who cares for Covid patients every day should be vaccinated, the answer is very clear, right?” he said. “Why does this calculation change when it comes to a health worker from another country?”

Categories
World News

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new startup Nothing takes intention at Apple

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei's new startup Nothing takes aim at Apple

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei speaks on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Steve Jennings | Getty Images for TechCrunch

LONDON – Carl Pei, co-founder of the Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus, is restarting.

The Chinese-born Swedish entrepreneur founded a new consumer tech company called Nothing late last year. The company is expected to launch its first product in June, a pair of wireless earbuds called the Ear 1.

While the specs for Nothing’s headphones are not yet known, Pei suggests that they will be minimalist in terms of features. Instead of “20 different levels” of noise cancellation, Pei says, people only need a maximum of two or three settings. Nothing’s products will also have a “retro-futuristic” design, Pei said, adding that the company has spent a lot of time perfecting its design philosophy.

“We want to bring this element of human warmth back into our products,” Pei told CNBC in an interview.

“Products aren’t just cold electronics,” he added. “They are designed by people and used intelligently by people. It seems like product companies (today) are run by big companies.”

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new start-up, Nothing, announced the name of its upcoming wireless earbuds on Tuesday: Ear 1.

Nothing

Pei and his former colleague Pete Lau founded OnePlus in 2013. OnePlus, majority-owned by China’s Oppo, a subsidiary of Guangzhou-based BBK Electronics, has become known for making cheap Android phones with decent specifications. Pei left the company in October to start his new hardware company.

Pei hopes his new London-based company, Nothing, will shape the consumer tech industry in the same way that Apple’s iMac G3 rocked the PC market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Today is like the personal computer industry in the 80s and 90s where everyone was making gray boxes,” he said.

The 31-year-old tech entrepreneur said he was once Apple’s “biggest fan,” but “overall innovation has only slowed down a lot” in recent years.

Apple’s iPhone was a game changer that ushered in a move to touchscreen-based cell phones and apps that have grown into multi-billion dollar companies. However, some believe that the modern smartphone industry is stagnating, introducing minor updates every year, albeit at higher prices. Large companies are trying to freshen up smartphones with super-fast 5G WiFi and even collapsible displays.

“There is a general feeling, ‘Why should I update my technology?’ because each new generation is similar to the previous one, “added Pei. “In the past people were so optimistic about technology. But now people are indifferent. And there has to be a way to break the cycle.”

Apple declined to comment when contacted by CNBC. Apple has made a number of improvements to the iPhone over the years, including 5G and its powerful new A14 Bionic chip. Other recent product launches include new high-end iPads, colorful iMacs, and lost item trackers called AirTags.

Pei’s second act

Pei was born in Beijing and grew up in Sweden. He recalls that his uncle, who worked for Nokia, gave him old cell phones to play around with. Pei dropped out of college in 2011 to work in the Chinese smartphone industry. Now the entrepreneur is starting from scratch and targeting consumer tech giants like Apple and Samsung.

Pei’s new venture has been puzzling over the past few months, but he tried to generate a hype on Twitter with cryptic posts and raised $ 1.24 million from loyal crowdfunding investors in March.

Pei says he’s frustrated having to download different apps for each of his smart devices. Instead, he wants to build a technological ecosystem, all supported by the same software, and take a sheet out of Apple’s playbook.

“We see a future where technology is everywhere and nowhere,” said Pei. “The first step for us is to create an ecosystem of smart devices that seamlessly connect to each other.”

Uphill battle

However, it won’t be easy. Hardware is a notoriously tricky market.

“The first rule of hardware is that it’s known to be difficult – it’s complex and capital-intensive,” Tom Hulme, general partner at Alphabet’s Venture Capital Arm GV, an investor in nothing, told CNBC.

“If you make a mistake, it can have a devastating impact on the company,” Pei said. “A lot of investors shy away from it and there could therefore be less competition.”

Total sales of true wireless headphones – buds without wires – were 233 million units in 2020, with Apple’s AirPods accounting for nearly a third of the market, according to Counterpoint Research. Counterpoint predicts the market will grow 33% to 310 million units this year and expects Apple’s market share to decrease in competition with new entrants.

Nothing has attracted an impressive number of investors, including Alphabet’s GV, iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTube star Casey Neistat. The company is aiming to raise funds again later this year or early 2022.

“We have enough runway for a couple of years,” he told CNBC. “But I think we want to increase, maybe by the end of the year or the beginning of next year, when our first products are on the market or when our future products gradually become more definitive.”

Categories
Entertainment

Solely Join: Craving for the Intimacy of a Danced, Onstage World

Only Connect: Yearning for the Intimacy of a Danced, Onstage World

When the music starts we start dancing. It’s the beginning of April and for the first time in 13 months I’m rehearsing with a partner in the New York ballet studios. Ashley Bouder and I meet while we are dancing side by side. After more than a year of dancing alone, we are not used to this kind of closeness.

We’re working on the first moments of George Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” to record music on my iPhone while our repertoire director Zooms walks in with her adorable daughter bouncing on her lap. Ashley and I have been tested for Covid twice and we both wear masks. It’s a far cry from work as we know it, but we’re back in studios that we know, dancing steps we’ve danced for years, and we’re holding hands.

The excerpt we are preparing for a film by Sofia Coppola for the company’s virtual spring gala takes just 2 minutes and 11 seconds. But this is the longest time I’ve danced with anyone else in a long time, and after doing it on that first rehearsal, I got upset.

With every breath I take, I suck my mask to my mouth, which makes it even harder to recover. “I smile!” Says Ashley and makes sure the repertoire manager Glenn Keenan and I know that she’s happily dancing behind her mask again. I giggle breathlessly. I’m glad we’re back too, but disappointed with how impersonal it is to dance in a mask. I expected going back to this work would be emotional and precious, but with the short snippet of the snippet we’re dancing and the fact of our masks, it feels strange, almost like we’re dancing side by side, but not together.

After the outbreak of the pandemic last year, my life and that of my colleagues, like everyone else, have radically changed. We were used to gathering in sweaty groups in windowless rooms, where we kept hugging and touching each other for choreographic and emotional reasons. Last year we danced alone in small studios that we made ourselves.

Using my portable dance mat, I took ballet lessons from the five New York apartments I’ve lived in since March. out of my sister’s garage, driveway, and deck in Maine; and from my parents’ living room in Philadelphia. In the fall, I was allowed to return to the City Ballet studios in Lincoln Center to dance alone. More recently, I’ve danced with small groups of masked colleagues in our studios to keep my distance and mostly to stick to ballet exercises. But with the exception of an idyllic bubble residence in Martha’s Vineyard with 18 other dancers in October, it’s been some time since I’ve actually danced with my colleagues.

In a way, that time outside of the studio and the stage felt necessary. Groups of us in the company meet regularly for Slack and Zoom to develop strategies on how we can strengthen and transform our community in order to prepare for a hopefully changed cultural landscape. And I had time to properly rehabilitate my ankle, which I injured in the fall of 2019, and think about what is most valuable to me about my job and my dancing.

During this break, I have often longed for the space (and the strength) to do a coupé-jeté manége, or longingly thought of the fulfilling exhaustion that overwhelms me when the curtain falls on a particularly challenging ballet. But when I really imagine that I can dance again, two moments always come to mind. The first comes in the opening section of Justin Peck’s “Rodeo”. Dancers perform in a number of small groups and hurry to take the stage for short, playful vignettes of each other. When it is my turn, I run at full speed towards the center and pull myself in front, a few meters away from two other dancers. There is a pause in the music where we all turn a blind eye. A smile creeps into our faces as the music introduces us to our dance.

The second moment is in Jerome Robbins’ Grand Waltz “Dances at a Gathering”. Really, I just think of a dancer’s face. I picture Indiana Woodward who sometimes reminds me of my younger sister and grins at me. We go on stage with a pony flanked by four other dancers, and she smiles so hard I think she might burst with excitement and explode into something unstoppable.

These moments of connection are only possible in the context of a dance. My colleagues and I find this unspoken recognition of each other and our shared passion in the intimacy and physical closeness of a danced world on stage. And it is these relationships and closeness that have been established on stage and in motion that have been impossible on our video screens and in our socially distant dancing.

In ballet we are told where to stand, what to do, and how often to do it. However, this doesn’t change how the connection makes sense when I reach for my partner’s hand – when I offer my hand as I was taught and it is taken as my partner was told. The prescribed nature of ballet takes none of the intimacy I experience over and over again in these repeated gestures and choreographies. Intimacy is heightened by familiarity, but also by the fact that my partner and I are cutting out our own space in these dances at the same time.

The everyday act of taking a partner’s hand before dancing a combination of steps that requires trust and spontaneity can feel like essential recognition of our personal investment in each other and in the work we share. This type of physical contact has been a comfort to me for a long time, and before the pandemic was so often my way of showing care.

“Duo Concertant”, which Ashley and I have danced together again and again since 2015, is full of these moments and rewards her choreographic ingenuity and humanity. Balanchine made “Duo” for the Stravinsky Festival in 1972 – a week-long homage to the composer who had been Balanchine’s long-time friend and favorite collaborator. Their connection and Balanchine’s devotion and closeness to Stravinsky are evident in “Duo”. It’s a closed job. Intimate, a natural ballet from the Covid era.

Dancing this ballet means living in a world that you have created yourself. There are only four performers on stage: two dancers and two musicians. The two pairs of performers challenge and complement each other, the music expands the dance and vice versa. In a concertante there is often the pairing and counterpoint of two musical lines: tension and duality. In “Duo” the piano and violin play opposite each other and together in a conversation that crosses the dramatic and lively terrain of the piece.

This score resulted from further close cooperation. Stravinsky composed it to play on tour with the violinist Samuel Dushkin and adapted it to Dushkin’s hands, to his abilities. And apparently Dushkin weighed in too – his riffs for Stravinsky’s composition and arrangements were worked into the last piece.

Many pairings, many intimacies are built into this music, this work: Balanchine and Stravinsky, Stravinsky and Dushkin, the violin and the piano, the music and the dance and of course the two dancers. The ballet feels like a joke and like there is nothing else my partner and I could possibly do to this music together on stage.

When the curtain opens on “Duo Concertant”, Ashley and I stand behind the piano and look at the pianist and the violinist. We stand and listen for the first four minutes of the dance. After this charged opening, I take Ashley’s hand and we go to the other side of the stage and start dancing. Only now, after we’ve listened, are we ready to dance. Only now, after listening, is the audience ready to see.

The violinist intones six somewhat wistful notes, then the piano begins a rhythmic stroll and Ashley and I move up and down – I’m up when she’s down. “Like a metronome,” says Glenn. Then we add in our arms like we’re trying things out, like we’re building something, like we’re building ourselves up to something. We jumble at imaginary sounds, play for each other, then she does a series of poses and I tap my arm in a circle like a clock and count to the dance that frees us from that measured, constant clip.

What follows is a dance of pushing and pulling, forwards and backwards, from side to side. We stamp and do it and fling our legs and arms in quick, casual leaps and lunges. We annoy each other and forward and just before the movement ends we pause, catch our eyes, I offer my elbow and we rush to the musicians just in time to hear them play the final notes.

The dance continues on stage – but this is where Ashley and I will stop filming. Manageable, if a bit teasing. As we prepare for the day of shooting and our time in the studio progresses, our dancing feels more and more like the dancing that I missed. Our breathing is soon no longer so desperate, our body relaxes, we find the rhythm again to try new things, to be in a studio together.

On Friday we are in costume for a dress rehearsal before filming on Tuesday. Our section is turned left behind the stage – almost on stage, but not entirely; We’re back to work, but not quite. Ashley and I piled on the warm-ups unused to the thin leotards and tights we wore every night – costumes meant to be exposed and naked. There are people watching – Sofia Coppola and her team, and a handful of familiar and reassuring faces from the City Ballet’s artistic and administrative staff. It’s a fraction of a fraction of the audience we’re used to, but more eyes than a year before. Ashley and I are both nervous.

“All right!” someone calls. “Let’s see.”

We take off our costumes and take our place. After a few false starts with the recording, it starts. I can feel our dancing pulse with a little more than what we gave at rehearsals. Ashley’s body is tense with exertion and excitement, and our movements have a kind of swing and power that is lacking in our time in the studio. We wear masks, we are backstage and the audience is small, but as the dance unfolds Ashley and I find something for us in this shared experience.

“That was fun!” Says Ashley, putting her hand lightly on my shoulder when we’re done. “I could tell you were smiling.”

Russell Janzen is a dancer with the New York City Ballet.