Month: May 2021

Categories
Health

Norwegian Cruise CEO says U.S. ships are unlikely to sail this summer season

Norwegian Cruise CEO says U.S. ships are unlikely to sail this summer

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will allow cruise lines to resume operations this summer, but Frank Del Rio, CEO of the Norwegian cruise line, says it will be unlikely given the agency’s high demands.

“I seriously doubt we can deploy a ship from a US port in July. August is also in jeopardy, all due to the incoherent guidelines of the CDC,” said Frank Del Rio, CEO of Norwegian Cruise Line, on the closing of CNBC bell. “What we received yesterday was anything but a clear path to restart.”

The company announced that international cruises will resume from Greece, Spain, Italy, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica from July.

The CDC issued technical guidelines for the cruise industry last week, announcing that it would allow the industry to resume operations by midsummer.

Del Rio claimed the requirements of the cruise industry are stricter than any other industry.

“The unfair treatment that the industry has endured for over a year continues. It has to stop, it is unfair, it is un-American and it is certainly contrary to the goals set by the president [Joe] Biden, “said Del Rio.

The CDC issued guidelines to start simulated voyages and apply for conditional Covid-19 sailing certificates with restricted passenger travel.

“We have never seen this demand in the company’s history,” said Del Rio. “Not only do we have significantly more bookings for 2022 at this point, but they are also available at higher prices.”

The company said the time it takes to prepare its ships will delay the restart of cruises.

“We will vaccinate 100% of everyone on board our ship. We are frankly amazed at why the CDC continues to place high demands on our industry,” said Del Rio.

The company’s stock closed 6.8% on Tuesday after Norwegian posted less-than-expected quarterly losses before the bell and missed sales expectations. Shares rose less than 1% as trading expanded.

Categories
Business

Insurers brace for lawsuits as staff return to the workplace

Insurers brace for lawsuits as workers return to the office

As U.S. corporations bring workers back to the office, major insurers like Chubb, AIG, and Travelers brace themselves for an onslaught of claims related to labor and labor lawsuits.

According to Jackson Lewis, a law firm and employment law firm tracking these numbers, litigation and complaints related to Covid have steadily increased during the pandemic, with California and New Jersey receiving the most filings.

Experts say it is likely to increase as the courts wade through a backlog of cases and government agencies deal with pent-up claims.

“Employment practice liability insurers are very much aware of the additional claims activity that has not yet occurred,” said Kelly Thoerig, a US director of liability insurance for Marsh McLennan consultancy.

Employers are walking a tightrope when it comes to organizing a return to work that carries liability and risk, she said.

Three important things employers need to consider to protect themselves from litigation:

Who will return to work?

Management needs to assess whether they are discriminating against protected classes of employees when deciding who to bring back to the office first.

“Who did you let go of? Who did you send home?” she said, going through a list of critical questions. “Who comes first to be allowed to come back? Or who do you have to come back?”

Ensuring a safe job

When employees come back, companies need to make sure it’s a safe environment. This raises additional questions about whether workers should wear masks or whether a company should need Covd-19 vaccination.

While it is legal for employers to prescribe vaccines for workers, it may not be advisable, Thoerig said. This is partly due to “downstream liability when a person has a serious reaction to the vaccine or has complications because of the vaccine,” she said.

On the other hand, some employees or customers may require companies to have vaccines.

“This presents different but very real business and legal concerns to employers: are they doing enough to protect their employees and customers?” Said Frank Alvarez, co-director of the Jackson Lewis Disability, Vacation and Health Management practice. “Are they addressing privacy concerns, employee medical choices, and the balancing issues of employee relationships between those who are vaccinated and those who are not?”

Thoerig said she urged her customers to use incentives to persuade resistant employees to get the vaccine.

For example, Wynn Resorts is calling for weekly Covid-19 tests with negative results for its employees who have not been vaccinated. This gives an employee an incentive to get a chance.

Requests for accommodation

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data shows a surge in disability discrimination claims filed with the agency dealing with the pandemic.

Insurer Travelers suspects that housing conflicts are driving the increase. For example, when an employee asks about the possibility of being able to continue working from home because they have an illness that puts them at increased risk if they contract Covid-19. If the request is denied, the representative can request accommodation.

This situation can also occur if a staff member states that she cannot take the vaccine because of an allergy. If the employer says it anyway, she can say that her employer discriminated against her because of it.

“The idea that certain people or groups of people or even individual employees are preferred or disadvantaged over others should immediately give cause for concern,” said Thoerig.

Since employees are being called back to the office in greater numbers, they could also have a strong argument, said Thoerig.

“We’ve been effectively doing our work from our home office, from our basement, for the past 12-14 months. And why isn’t this a decent place to stay when I’ve been as productive as I was from home?” She said.

Thoerig has advised customers to be as flexible as possible when applying for accommodation.

“Employers are trying very hard to reconcile all of these considerations,” said Alvarez. “The business world has never faced a situation where the law is so uncoordinated and gives so little indication of potential legal risks.”

Categories
World News

Village Caught in Czech-Russia Spy Case Simply Needs Issues to Cease Blowing Up

Village Caught in Czech-Russia Spy Case Just Wants Things to Stop Blowing Up

VLACHOVICE-VRBETICE, Czech Republic – For almost a century, residents have been amazed at the strange comings and goings in a closed-off camp surrounded by barbed wire and dotted with signs on the edge of their village.

The armies of Czechoslovakia, National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union and the Czech Republic used the 840 hectare property over the decades and deterred intruders with watch dogs and armed patrols.

When the professional soldiers withdrew in 2006, the secret activities became even more shady. Dozens of arms depots hidden among the trees have been taken over by arms dealers, a rocket fuel company, and other private companies.

Then, in October 2014, came the biggest mystery of all.

A huge explosion ripped through Depot No. 16, knocking farmers in nearby fields to the ground and raining dangerous debris on the area.

The explosion set the stage for an international espionage thriller that further upsets Russia’s relations with the West: Who was behind the explosion that killed two Czech workers, and what was the motive?

This astonishing claim sparked a diplomatic turmoil which in recent weeks has resulted in the displacement of nearly 100 Russian and Czech diplomats from Prague and Moscow and brought relations between the two countries to the lowest level since the end of the Cold War.

The villagers, who are more focused on local property values ​​than geopolitics, just want things to stop blowing up.

Vojtech Simonik, holding a piece of splinter that landed in his garden in 2014, said he felt “no relief, just shock and astonishment” when he saw the Czech Prime Minister talk about Russia’s role on television.

The announcement “caused a stir here,” said Simonik, who worked in the camp for a while and dismantled artillery shells. “After seven years of silence, all arguments start again.”

The fenced-in property where the explosions took place winds around the edge of two small neighboring villages with around 1,500 inhabitants – Vlachovice (pronounced VLAKH-o-vee-tseh), the larger settlement, and Vrbetice (pronounced VR-byet-tee) – tseh), just a few houses and a side street that leads to the main entrance of the former military camp.

Vlachovice Mayor Zdenek Hovezak said he had long wanted to know what was going on in the camp but got stuck because everyone there, including the villagers hired for cleaning and other tasks, had to sign agreements in which they were bound to secrecy.

“Little did I know there were so many explosives near our village,” said Hovezak, who had just been elected and was about to take office when the explosion occurred in October.

The Military Technical Institute, a government agency that has managed the site since the Czech Army withdrew, is currently examining what to do with the property, but insists that it will not be re-used to store explosives for military or private purposes becomes company.

Rostislav Kassa, a local contractor, said he didn’t care if Russia was responsible for the demolition of the site – although he firmly believes it – but he was angry that the Czech authorities were making efforts to raise the alarm years before beat, ignored explosions.

Troubled by reports that a rocket fuel company had rented space in the warehouse, he launched a petition in 2009 warning of a possible environmental disaster. Most residents signed, he said, but his complaints to the Department of Defense went unheeded.

“It doesn’t really matter who blew it up,” he said. “The main problem is that our government is allowing this.” His own theory is that Russia wanted to cut off the supply of rocket fuel to NATO forces and not, as is commonly believed, wanted to blow up weapons for Ukraine.

Ales Lysacek, head of the village’s volunteer fire department, recalled being called to the camp that day in October 2014 after a fire broke out there. He was ordered to come back by the police guarding the entrance and a few minutes later, after a series of small explosions, a gigantic explosion sent a shock wave that knocked him and his men off their feet.

“We had no idea what was in all the depots,” said Mr Lysacek. No one had ever thought of telling the local firefighters about the potential danger. Officials later assured villagers that the explosions were an accident, but Mr. Lysacek said, “Nobody here really believed them.”

After the 2014 explosions, it took pyrotechnic experts six years to search the warehouse and surrounding village land for unexploded ammunition and other hazardous waste.

The arduous clean-up operation, during which roads were often blocked and villagers repeatedly evacuated from their homes for safety reasons, only ended last October.

Mr Hovezak, the mayor, was amazed, like most of the villagers, when he told Prime Minister Andrei Babis at a press conference last month that the big 2014 explosion on their doorstep was the work of the Russian Military Intelligence, known as the GRU

“I was completely shocked,” said the mayor. “Nobody here ever imagined that Russian agents could be involved.”

That it was them, at least after years of investigation by the Czech police and the Czech security service, only raised questions about what was really going on in the camp and the suspicion among locals that they were only being told half the truth.

Mr Simonik, who found the splinter in his garden, said he wasn’t entirely convinced that Russia was to blame, but he never believed the explosion was just an accident. “I definitely think it didn’t explode on its own,” he said. “It was triggered by someone.”

Who that could be is a question that in the past and present of Russia, whose troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to overthrow their reformist communist leadership, has reopened old cracks across the country, but still for defeat by some Czechs is held responsible against Nazi Germany.

“The older generation remembers how the Russians freed us from Hitler, while others remember the year 1968 when they invaded us,” said Ladislav Obadal, the deputy mayor of Vlachovice. “But hardly anyone has a good word for the Russians now.”

Except for President Milos Zeman, a frequent visitor to Moscow who was recently on TV to contradict the government’s report on the explosions. The explosions may have been an accident – sabotage by Russian spies was just one of two plausible theories.

Mr. Zeman’s testimony sparked protests among Czechs in Prague who for a long time considered him far too friendly to Russia. It was also received with anger by the residents of Vlachovice-Vrbetice, who believe Moscow should compensate the villages for any physical and psychological damage, a demand the mayor backed if Russia’s role is proven.

Jaroslav Kassa, 70, the father of the local contractor, who said his disaster warnings were ignored, is undoubtedly to blame for the Kremlin.

“Of course the Russians did,” said Kassa, noting that the Russian military would have detailed plans for the sprawling facility from the time the Soviet Army used it after the 1968 invasion.

His views have led to disputes with his neighbor Jozef Svehlak, 74. Recalling how he knew and liked a former Soviet commander at the camp, Mr Svehlak said he had never heard of Russian spies in the region in the 1970s, only western ones during the Cold War.

Half a century later, the fact that spies are supposed to be running around again is a measure of how suspicions of the Cold War are rising in this remote eastern corner of the Czech Republic.

“It’s fun to see James Bond in films,” said another of Mr Kassa’s son Jaroslav. “But we don’t want him to hide behind our hill.”

Categories
Health

From the Wastewater Drain, Strong Pandemic Knowledge

From the Wastewater Drain, Solid Pandemic Data

Although Covid-19 is primarily a respiratory disease, research early in the pandemic found that people infected with the coronavirus frequently toss it in their stools. This finding, coupled with the magnitude and urgency of the crisis, immediately sparked interest in tracking the virus by sampling wastewater.

By finding and then counting specific coronavirus genes in wastewater, the researchers hoped to determine if the virus was present in a particular region and how widespread it was. It wasn’t long before sewage monitoring projects started popping up all over Kansas City, Missouri, until Kathmandu, Nepal.

The resulting data, which now appears in a flurry of academic papers and preprints, has provided strong evidence of the principle. Scientists have detected the virus in all sorts of environments: in treated and untreated water, in sludge and settled solids, in sewers and septic tanks, in pit latrines and open drainage systems. They found it in water that ran into huge wastewater treatment plants and out of schools, dormitories, and nursing homes. “It’s just amazing how robust this tool has become,” said Peter Grevatt, executive director of the Water Research Foundation.

Teams around the world – in the US, France, Portugal, India, Iran, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere – also found that the sewage data appeared to be an accurate indicator of what was happening in the real world. As the number of diagnosed Covid-19 cases increased in an area, more coronavirus appeared in wastewater. Virus levels fell when areas were closed and increased when they were reopened.

Several teams have also confirmed that wastewater can serve as an early warning system. Virus concentrations in wastewater often peaked days before doctors saw a peak in official Covid-19 cases.

This lead time, which can range from a few days to two weeks, depends in part on the robustness of local clinical testing programs. Scientists say, if more people are tested for the virus more often, the sewage data will offer less warning. The lead time is also because infected people often start shedding the SARS-CoV-2 virus before they experience symptoms and then often delay seeking medical care once they get sick.

“I think wastewater has proven to be one of the most objective means of understanding what SARS-CoV-2 is doing in our society,” said Gertjan Medema, a microbiologist at the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands.

Categories
Politics

Trump Nonetheless Has Iron Grip on Republicans

Trump Still Has Iron Grip on Republicans

Donald J. Trump, who was banned from Facebook, stranded in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website, went largely out of sight this week. However, the Republican Party’s surrender to the former president has become clearer than ever, as has the damage to American politics he has caused by his lie that his election was stolen.

In Washington, Republicans moved to remove Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership position in the House of Representatives. This was punishment for denouncing Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud as a threat to democracy. Florida and Texas lawmakers have taken sweeping new measures that would restrict voting and reiterated Mr Trump and his allies’ fictional narrative that the electoral system had been rigged against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party began a bizarre November election results review looking for traces of bamboo in last year’s polls.

The tumultuous dramas clearly demonstrated the extent to which, six months after the elections, the nation is still grappling with the aftermath of an attack by a lost presidential candidate on a fundamental principle of American democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.

They also provided clear evidence that the former president not only managed to quell dissent within his party, but also persuaded most of the GOP to make a gigantic bet: the surest way to regain power is by his Accepting combative style, racial divisions and acceptance Beyond the pale conspiracy theories, rather than wooing the suburban swing voters who are costing the party the White House and who may be following substantial policies on the pandemic, the economy and other issues search.

Loyalty to the former president persists despite his role in inciting his supporters prior to the January 6 uprising at the Capitol, with his supporters either ignoring, redefining, or in some cases tacitly accepting the deadly attack on Congress.

“We’re just so far from any reasonable construction,” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime party official who was swept out of her Virginia suburb of Congressional headquarters in the 2018 medium-term backlash against Mr. Trump. “It’s a real disease that infects the party on all levels. We’re just going to say that black is now white. “

Yet while Republicans wrap themselves in the fantasy of a stolen election, Democrats are entrenched in the day-to-day business of running a nation still struggling to get out of a deadly pandemic.

Strategists from both parties say that a mismatched dynamic – two parties operating in two different realities – is likely to determine politics in the country for years to come.

At the same time, President Biden faces a bigger challenge: what to do with that large part of the public who questions its legitimacy and a Republican party that is wooing support for this segment by putting forward bills that restrict voting and, possibly, confidence in them Would further undermine the future? Elections.

A CNN poll released last week found that nearly a third of Americans, including 70 percent Republicans, said Mr Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.

White House advisors say Mr Biden believes the best way to restore confidence in the democratic process is to show that the government can provide tangible benefits to voters – whether vaccines or stimulus measures.

Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who oversaw the Democratic Campaigns Committee’s strategy to win the house during the recent midterm elections, said the Republican focus on cultural issues like bans on transgender athletes was a “win-win” situation for his party. Many Democrats will only face scatter-shot attacks on their agenda as they continue to stand up against the polarizing rhetoric of Mr. Trump, which helped the party flip suburban swing districts in 2018 and 2020.

“I would much rather have a record of my side by side with the Americans in recovery,” said Sena. “What story does the American public want to hear – what have Democrats done to get the country moving again, or Donald Trump and his culture war?”

Mr Biden predicted during the election campaign that if Mr Trump were gone, Republicans would have a “revelation” and be back to the party he knew during his decades in the Senate. When asked about Republicans this week, Mr Biden complained that he no longer understood them and seemed a little baffled by the “mini-revolution” within their ranks.

“I think Republicans are further from figuring out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they’d be at that point,” he said.

But for much of the past week, Republicans have been vividly portraying exactly what they stand for now: Trumpism. Many have adopted his approach of paying homage to white grievances with racist utterances, and Republican-led legislatures across the country are imposing restrictions that would restrict electoral access in ways that disproportionately affect color voters.

There are also high-level electoral considerations. With his highly polarizing style, Mr Trump motivated his grassroots and critics alike and urged both parties to register the turnout in the 2020 election. His total of 74 million votes was the second highest ever, after just 81 million from Mr Biden, and Mr Trump has demonstrated the ability to turn his political supporters against any Republican who opposes him.

That convinced Republicans they had to show unwavering loyalty to a late president in order to keep the voters he won.

“I would just say to my Republican colleagues, can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no, ”Senator Lindsey Graham said in an interview with Fox News this week. “I’ve found that we can’t grow without him.”

In some ways, the former president is downsized more than ever. Defeated in the polls, he spends his time at his Florida resort playing golf and entertaining visitors. He is missing the presidency bullying pulpit, has been banned from Twitter and was unable to restore his account from Facebook this week. He left with an approval rating of less than 40 percent, the lowest final rating for the first term of president since Jimmy Carter.

Still, its dominance over Republicans is reflected in everything from Congress to the state houses. Local and federal lawmakers who have urged their party to accept the election results, and with them the loss of Mr Trump, have faced a steady drumbeat of criticism and primary challenges. Those threats seem to be having an impact: the small number of Republican officials who have been critical of Mr Trump in the past, including the ten who voted for his impeachment in February, was largely silent this week, declining interview requests and offering little public support for Mrs. Cheney.

Her likely successor, Rep Elise Stefanik, has publicly applied for the post and has sought to establish her Trump as bona fide by giving credibility to his baseless allegations of electoral fraud in interviews with die-hard supporters of the former president.

The focus on the elections has displaced almost any discussion of politics or party orthodoxy. The Heritage Action Scorecard, which is used to rate lawmakers based on their conservative voting results, earned Ms. Cheney a lifetime score of 82 percent. Ms. Stefanik, who has a more moderate vote, but is a much louder supporter of the former president, scored 52 percent.

Ms. Stefanik and many other Republican leaders are betting that the way to maintain Trump-era election wins is to bolster their base with populist politics, which is central to the president’s brand, even if it is swing- Fending off voters.

After months of feeding lies the conservative news media about the elections, much of the party has come to believe them to be true.

Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has led focus groups of Trump voters for years, said she had found an increased openness since the election to what she calls “QAnon curious,” a willingness to share conspiracy theories about stolen elections and a deep one to entertain state. “Many of these grassroots voters live in a nihilism for the truth, where you don’t believe in anything and think anything could be wrong,” said Ms. Longwell, who spoke out against Mr. Trump.

Some Republican strategists fear the party will have no opportunity to attack Mr Biden, who has proposed the most comprehensive spending and tax plans in generations.

“Republicans need to get back to the kitchen table issues that voters really care about, sprinkling a bit of culture here and there but not getting carried away,” said Scott Reed, a seasoned Republican strategist who helped create this last election has to destroy right-wing populists. “And some of them make an industry out of getting carried away.”

While sticking with Mr. Trump could help the party increase voter turnout in its base, Republicans like Ms. Comstock argue that such a strategy will harm the party with key demographics, including younger voters, color voters, women and suburbanites.

Intraparty battles are already cropping up in the emerging primaries as candidates accuse each other of infidelity to the former president. Many party leaders fear that doing so could result in die-hard candidates coming out victorious and eventually losing parliamentary elections in conservative states, where Republicans like Missouri and Ohio were supposed to gain the upper hand.

“To declare Trump the winner of a shrinking minority, this is not an area you want to go to,” said Ms. Comstock. “The future of the party will not be for a 70-year-old man in Mar-a-Lago to speak in the mirror and all these sycophants to come down and levitate to get his approval.”

However, those who have objected to Mr. Trump and paid the price say there is little political incentive to tackle the flood. Criticizing Mr. Trump, or even defending those who do so, can leave elected officials in a kind of political no man’s land: viewed as treasonable to Republican voters, but still too conservative on other issues to be accepted by Democrats and Independents .

“It seems like it’s getting harder and harder for people to go down the stump and defend someone like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, who endorsed Mr Biden and was censored by the Arizona Republican Party during one this year Panel appearance at Harvard this week. “About 70 percent of Republicans likely genuinely believe the election was stolen, and that is debilitating. It’s really.”

Categories
Business

On-line Dishonest Expenses Upend Dartmouth Medical Faculty

Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School

HANOVER, N.H. — Sirey Zhang, a first-year student at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, was on spring break in March when he received an email from administrators accusing him of cheating.

Dartmouth had reviewed Mr. Zhang’s online activity on Canvas, its learning management system, during three remote exams, the email said. The data indicated that he had looked up course material related to one question during each test, honor code violations that could lead to expulsion, the email said.

Mr. Zhang, 22, said he had not cheated. But when the school’s student affairs office suggested he would have a better outcome if he expressed remorse and pleaded guilty, he said he felt he had little choice but to agree. Now he faces suspension and a misconduct mark on his academic record that could derail his dream of becoming a pediatrician.

“What has happened to me in the last month, despite not cheating, has resulted in one of the most terrifying, isolating experiences of my life,” said Mr. Zhang, who has filed an appeal.

He is one of 17 medical students whom Dartmouth recently accused of cheating on remote tests while in-person exams were shut down because of the coronavirus. The allegations have prompted an on-campus protest, letters of concern to school administrators from more than two dozen faculty members and complaints of unfair treatment from the student government, turning the pastoral Ivy League campus into a national battleground over escalating school surveillance during the pandemic.

At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth’s use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times.

Dartmouth’s drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges’ reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic.

While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate.

Some universities are now facing a backlash over the technology. A few, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently said they would cease using the exam-monitoring tools.

“These kinds of technical solutions to academic misconduct seem like a magic bullet,” said Shaanan Cohney, a cybersecurity lecturer at the University of Melbourne who researches remote learning software. But “universities which lack some of the structure or the expertise to understand these issues on a deeper level end up running into really significant trouble.”

At Dartmouth, the use of Canvas in the cheating investigation was unusual because the software was not designed as a forensic tool. Instead, professors post assignments on it and students submit their homework through it.

That has raised questions about Dartmouth’s methodology. While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, The Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device.

“If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence,” said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth’s methodology.

Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, “automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user,” according to a school email that students made public.

The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers. Nine pleaded guilty, including Mr. Zhang, according to school documents; some have filed appeals.

Some accused students said Dartmouth had hamstrung their ability to defend themselves. They said they had less than 48 hours to respond to the charges, were not provided complete data logs for the exams, were advised to plead guilty though they denied cheating or were given just two minutes to make their case in online hearings, according to six of the students and a review of documents.

Five of the students declined to be named for fear of reprisals by Dartmouth.

Duane A. Compton, the dean of the Geisel School, said in an interview that its methods for identifying possible cheating cases were fair and valid. Administrators investigated carefully, he said, and provided accused students with all the data on which the cheating charges were based. He denied that the student affairs office had advised those who said they had not cheated to plead guilty.

Dr. Compton acknowledged that the investigation had caused distress on campus. But he said Geisel, founded in 1797 and one of the nation’s oldest medical schools, was obligated to hold its students accountable.

“We take academic integrity very seriously,” he said. “We wouldn’t want people to be able to be eligible for a medical license without really having the appropriate training.”

Updated 

May 8, 2021, 5:12 p.m. ET

Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, did not return requests for comment.

In January, a faculty member reported possible cheating during remote exams, Dr. Compton said. Geisel opened an investigation.

To hinder online cheating, Geisel requires students to turn on ExamSoft — a separate tool that prevents them from looking up study materials during tests — on the laptop or tablet on which they take exams. The school also requires students to keep a backup device nearby. The faculty member’s report made administrators concerned that some students may have used their backup device to look at course material on Canvas while taking tests on their primary device.

Geisel’s Committee on Student Performance and Conduct, a faculty group with student members that investigates academic integrity cases, then asked the school’s technology staff to audit Canvas activity during 18 remote exams that all first- and second-year students had taken during the academic year. The review looked at more than 3,000 exams since last fall.

The tech staff then developed a system to recognize online activity patterns that might signal cheating, said Sean McNamara, Dartmouth’s senior director of information security. The pattern typically showed activity on a Canvas course home page — on, say, neurology — during an exam followed by activity on a Canvas study page, like a practice quiz, related to the test question.

“You see that pattern of essentially a human reading the content and selecting where they’re going on the page,” Mr. McNamara said. “The data is very clear in describing that behavior.”

The audit identified 38 potential cheating cases. But the committee quickly eliminated some of those because one professor had directed students to use Canvas, Dr. Compton said.

In emails sent in mid-March, the committee told the 17 accused students that an analysis showed they had been active on relevant Canvas pages during one or more exams. The emails contained spreadsheets with the exam’s name, the test question number, time stamps and the names of Canvas pages that showed online activity.

Almost immediately, questions emerged over whether the committee had mistaken automated activity on Canvas for human activity, based on a limited subset of exam data.

Geisel students said they often had dozens of course pages open on Canvas, which they rarely logged out of. Those pages can automatically generate activity data even when no one is looking at them, according to The Times’s analysis and technology experts.

School officials said that their analysis, which they hired a legal consulting firm to validate, discounted automated activity and that accused students had been given all necessary data in their cases.

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But at least two students told the committee in March that the audit had misinterpreted automated Canvas activity as human cheating. The committee dismissed the charges against them.

In another case, a professor notified the committee that the Canvas pages used as evidence contained no information related to the exam questions his student was accused of cheating on, according to an analysis submitted to the committee. The student has appealed.

The committee has also not provided students with the wording of the exam questions they were accused of cheating on, complete Canvas activity logs for the exams, the amount of time spent on each Canvas page and data on whether the system flagged their page activity as automated or user-initiated, according to documents.

Dartmouth declined to comment on the data issues, citing the appeals.

Mr. Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation compared Dartmouth’s methods to accusing someone of stealing a piece of fruit in a grocery store by presenting a snapshot of that person touching an orange, but not releasing video footage showing whether the person later put back the orange, bought it or pocketed it without paying.

Dr. Compton said the committee’s dismissal of cases over time validated its methodology.

“The fact that we had a large number of students and we were very deliberate about eliminating a large, large fraction or majority of those students from consideration,” he said, “I think actually makes the case well for us trying to be really careful about this.”

Tensions flared in early April when an anonymous student account on Instagram posted about the cheating charges. Soon after, Dartmouth issued a social media policy warning that students’ anonymous posts “may still be traced back” to them.

Around the same time, Geisel administrators held a virtual forum and were barraged with questions about the investigation. The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000.

Many on campus were outraged. On April 21, dozens of students in white lab coats gathered in the rain in front of Dr. Compton’s office to protest. Some held signs that said “BELIEVE YOUR STUDENTS” and “DUE PROCESS FOR ALL” in indigo letters, which dissolved in the rain into blue splotches.

Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth.

“Some students have built their whole lives around medical school and now they’re being thrown out like they’re worthless,” said Meredith Ryan, a fourth-year medical student not connected to the investigation.

That same day, more than two dozen members of Dartmouth’s faculty wrote a letter to Dr. Compton saying that the cheating inquiry had created “deep mistrust” on campus and that the school should “make amends with the students falsely accused.”

In an email to students and faculty a week later, Dr. Compton apologized that Geisel’s handling of the cases had “added to the already high levels of stress and alienation” of the pandemic and said the school was working to improve its procedures.

The medical school has already made one change that could reduce the risk of false cheating allegations. For remote exams, new guidelines said, students are now “expected to log out of Canvas on all devices prior to testing.”

Mr. Zhang, the first-year student, said the investigation had shaken his faith in an institution he loves. He had decided to become a doctor, he said, to address disparities in health care access after he won a fellowship as a Dartmouth undergraduate to study medicine in Tanzania.

Mr. Zhang said he felt compelled to speak publicly to help reform a process he found traumatizing.

“I’m terrified,” he said. “But if me speaking up means that there’s at least one student in the future who doesn’t have to feel the way that I did, then it’s all worthwhile.”

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Business

Southwest plans to start out hiring flight attendants once more as journey rebounds

Southwest plans to start hiring flight attendants again as travel rebounds

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-73V jet leaves Midway International Airport in Chicago, Illinois on April 6, 2021.

Kamil Krzaczynski | AFP | Getty Images

Airlines spent much of the last year worrying about having too many people busy after the demand for travel dropped. Now they are trying to avoid the opposite problem when customers return and the effects of the Covid pandemic wear off.

Southwest Airlines is the newest airline to address this issue and plans to recruit flight attendants in the coming weeks, according to CNBC. A spokesman from the southwest said it was too early to determine how many flight attendants would be needed.

Competitors like American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines recently announced that they intend to resume pilot hiring this year in hopes that they can meet increasing travel demand in the years ahead as hundreds of Pilots hired near the federal retirement age are 65 years.

Dallas-based Southwest recently announced that it will be calling back flight attendants who have been on temporary vacation next month at the company’s urging.

“In order to meet future operational requirements, all flight attendants were called back to work from June 1st and we will have to hire flight attendants in the near future,” the staff said in a statement.

Southwest has started reaching out to candidates who had conditional vacancies when the pandemic froze hiring last year.

“We are pleased to announce that the majority of these candidates are still interested in joining our in-flight family and this is helping us rebuild a pool of candidates,” the memo reads.

The airline is also hiring some ramp agents and other ground workers.

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Health

Every day instances rise above 400,000 once more

Daily cases rise above 400,000 again

Medical workers attend to a patient with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a syringe infusion pump donated by France is seen next to his bed in the emergency room of Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, India on May 7, 2021.

Adnan Abidi | Reuters

India’s daily new Covid-19 cases topped 400,000 for the third time this month as the country struggles to contain a devastating second wave.

Health ministry data released on Friday showed there were 414,188 new cases in 24 hours of at least 3,915 people who had succumbed to the disease. However, reports of overburdened crematoria and cemeteries, as well as a growing number of obituaries in local newspapers, suggest that the official figures underestimate the real death toll.

The total number of reported cases in the South Asian country is currently 21.49 million while the number of deaths exceeds 234,000. In just the past seven days, India has reported more than 2.7 million cases and over 25,700 deaths, or an average of at least 153 people an hour die.

While the Indian government has so far resisted calls for another national lockdown, states have tightened restrictions, including local lockdowns and curfews. However, health professionals are concerned that the pandemic is now spreading to small towns and villages where health infrastructure is not advanced enough to support a surge in certain cases.

The second wave started in February, but cases rose at an alarming rate from April. The World Health Organization has stated that the sharp rise in infections may be due in part to several mutated versions of the virus circulating in the country, including local variant B.1.617 and variant B.1.1.7, which have been detected in the UK

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has criticized the fact that large crowds gathered for religious festivals and election campaigns across the country earlier this year and then left most of the responsibility for combating the outbreak to state governments. India’s hospitals are overwhelmed and there is a lack of beds, medical oxygen and drugs to treat Covid-19 patients.

India’s Supreme Court reportedly asked the central government to prepare for an expected third wave of outbreaks and revise its formula for distributing oxygen across the country. That comes a day after the Supreme Court gave the government 24 hours to formulate a plan to meet Delhi’s oxygen needs.

The court intervened after 12 Covid-19 patients, including a doctor, died in a New Delhi hospital last week when medical oxygen was gone for 80 minutes, according to the Associated Press.

K. VijayRaghavan, the main scientific advisor to the Indian government, urged people on Twitter to maintain social distancing and other Covid-appropriate behavior to prevent the virus from spreading exponentially. But many of the cities that are experiencing an increase in certain cases are also very densely populated.

Earlier this week, he told a press conference that a third wave “is inevitable given the higher levels of the virus circulating. However, it is not clear on what timescale this third phase will take place. Hopefully gradually, but we should prepare for it.” new waves. “

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Entertainment

Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Heart Telecasts, Dies at 94

Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

Martin Bookspan, who turned a classical music childhood into a career as an announcer for the television shows “Live From Lincoln Center” and radio shows for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his Aventura home. Fla. He was 94 years old.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Rachel Sobel.

Mr Bookspan started violin lessons at the age of 6, but when he entered college he realized that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a steadfast contributor to Live From Lincoln Center, the PBS show that became America’s premier source of classical music on radio television. He joined the program when it aired in 1976.

“Live From Lincoln Center” was not much different to him than radio – it was heard but not seen. He opened the show and then handed it over to presenters such as Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.

“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The convenient and familiar part of every show was Marty Bookspan. “

Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” said Mr. Goberman. “He spoke in a very uncomplicated, friendly and talkative manner.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said, “Even on the phone, it’s a voice that resonates with the undiluted atmosphere of high culture, the kind of voice you get on a public Hear TV promises could drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you can’t imagine delivering your favorite team’s game after game. “

Mr Bookspan himself said: “If I have a technique, it is the sportcaster technique.”

“With sports promoters bringing the game to life, I hope I’ve brought concerts to life,” he said in 2006 as he prepared to leave Live From Lincoln Center after 30 years. “I want the audience to be engaged and love what they hear.”

By then, Live From Lincoln Center audiences were used to hearing his warm-up exercises before the concert and his withdrawals after the concert. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and well-known actors on stage, the action had an air of glamor, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in locker rooms and closets – even in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, in a women’s bathroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.

Martin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926 in Boston. His father Simon was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance. his mother Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a housewife. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.

At Harvard, Martin did not study music, but German literature. He graduated with honors in 1947.

He could also be heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was composer Aaron Copland, who revealed he was considering writing a piece for choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring”.

In his future radio career, Mr. Bookspan interviewed more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

After working as music director at WBMS, a classical music broadcaster in Boston, he joined the Boston Symphony staff in 1954 as radio, television and recording coordinator. In 1956 he moved to New York to become director of music recording at WQXR, then owned by the New York Times.

At WQXR he hired John Corigliano, then a young composer, as an assistant. He turned out to be a concerned boss.

Mr Corigliano called sick one summer morning. “I should have known better because Marty was so considerate that he called later that afternoon,” said Corigliano, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in an interview. “I went to the beach. Marty called and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, “How is John doing?” My roommate said, “Oh, he’s great. He’s on the beach. ‘

“I came in the next day. There is Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’ “

Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the ASCAP music licensing agency as the coordinator for symphony and concert activities. He later was Vice President and Director of Artists and Repertoire at Moss Music Group, an artist management agency. He was also an Associate Professor of Music at New York University.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he was an art critic for several television networks, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He hosted “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and announced the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light” in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He also wrote reviews of recordings for the New York Times (on open-role tapes in the 1960s and on CDs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Its Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He oversaw radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.

His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. In addition to Mrs. Sobel, a son, David, survived; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and a great grandson.

Tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s musical knowledge “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad libitum.

One night in 1959 he was the announcer for a program on the Boston Symphony in which pianist Rudolf Serkin played Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan made his usual introduction before Serkin and conductor Charles Munch took the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that after the immersion, she said, “I did what I learned that I should never do it again: I left my booth.”

He went into the green room with Serkin, who “struck off with all his might, hit the pedals for everything they were worth, got caught up in work and didn’t notice anything else” – as Mr. Bookspan recalled in another interview to chat with Aaron Copland who was on hand for the concert.

Suddenly there was silence in Brahms’s second movement.

“I ran across the stage and up the stairs, tapping the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I went to the microphone and puffed and puffed and said, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath I’ll tell you what’s going on.'”

Mr. Bookspan spoke non-stop for more than 15 minutes until the piano was repaired and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again.

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Business

The Separate Worlds of Invoice and Melinda Gates

The Separate Worlds of Bill and Melinda Gates

“It was a constant stress point in the foundation. It was Warren who put it down, but Bill’s appetite is always, “We should do this, we should do this.” The teams end up with this huge to-do list, ”said the former CEO.

Mr Buffett admitted in an interview with The Times last year that he spoke out against institutional bloating. “That’s the only piece of advice I never silence because it’s the natural tendency of any organization,” he said.

Foundation staff often have to wear multiple hats to meet requirements. For example, one employee, Anita Zaidi, serves in the highly technical role of director of vaccine development and surveillance, but also serves as president for gender equality.

In a 2015 TED talk, Mr Gates warned of the global threat posed by contagious respiratory viruses. The foundation was full of top talent working to develop new vaccines. However, there was not a single person out of around 1,600 employees fully dedicated to the pandemic prior to the outbreak of Covid-19.

All contract workarounds and consultants had so much bandwidth and it was decided not to have a dedicated team to work on the matter. Instead, the foundation championed the Coalition for Epidemic Preparation Innovation, which helped develop vaccines to control outbreaks.

When the pandemic broke out, the foundation used its resources and expertise. It has so far allocated $ 1.75 billion to fight the pandemic and has played a key role in shaping the global response.

Even without the divorce, the foundation was in the midst of change. Mr. Buffett, the third trustee, turns 91 this summer. Mr. Gates’ father, Bill Gates Sr., who was co-chair and directing hand of the foundation, died last September. Some observers have wondered if the couple’s three children could get involved anytime soon. The older two are already in college and medical school. Others have raised the possibility that this is the moment to loosen the grip of the family and install a board drawn by professionals outside the inner circle.