Month: June 2021

Categories
Entertainment

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Subsequent Musical Technology

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Next Musical Generation

Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, actually didn’t need another Grammy.

In 2020 she received the award for the best world music album for the fourth time with “Celia”, her homage to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to its form, Grammy voters chose well-known names and snubbed the world music phenomenon of the year: Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s ambitious, thoughtful album that attracted hundreds of millions of streams and made it an international sensation. (“African Giant” also featured a guest appearance by Kidjo.)

In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was friendly, but pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa will take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”

Kidjo, 60, follows this declaration with her new album “Mother Nature”, which is full of collaborations with aspiring African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, who American songwriter Shungudzo and singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, their guests do everything they can to keep up with Kidjo’s leather fervor.

“This young generation has the same concern that I have had throughout my career – they tried to convey a very positive image of my continent Africa,” said Kidjo via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and its impact on their lives and how they want to deal with it. With climate change, we will pay the highest price for it in Africa, especially the youth. It will be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because time is running out for questions. “

The songs on “Mother Nature” offer snappy programmed Afrobeats, lively Congolese soukous, lavish Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about the preservation of the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.

Kidjo recorded “Dignity” – a song that got excited when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot – with Alade, 32, a major Nigerian pop star she had worked with earlier in 2019. Like Kidjo, Alade has worked with musicians from all over Africa and beyond (including Beyoncé on the soundtrack of “Black Is King”).

“I grew up with their music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models I have. The only thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her uncompromising Africanity no matter where she goes. As for Africa, she is definitely our Angélique, our songbird – anytime, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see how she does what she does and how she does it, even though she’s been doing it for so long. I look at them and I am encouraged to just keep doing what I am doing. “

Like most of Kidjo’s music over the years, the new album is multilingual – mostly English, but also French and West African languages ​​like Fon and Nago – and it blends new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born – 1960 – because it was a turning point in African history when several countries gained their independence. (She was planning a Carnegie Hall concert in March 2020 around the milestone, which was canceled when New York closed due to the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” which was made in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz was released.

For “Africa, One of a Kind” Mr. Eazi built the track around a sample of the song “Africa” by Malian singer Salif Keita from 1995, but Kidjo increased the stakes: She persuaded Keita, now 71, to come out of retirement to sing it again. The video of the song shows a dance, Gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.

“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And if the bottle is broken, the party’s over,” she said.

The reception of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time and had nowhere to go,” said Kidjo. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from America: “Celia” and before that, a transformative remake of Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light”. But Kidjo and her husband and long-time musical partner, keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, wrote their own songs in 2019, the year in which they also released and toured for “Celia”.

When bans were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung staff working remotely. There was one perk on an album that dealt with global warming: “a minimal carbon footprint,” noted Kidjo.

She gathered the album’s staff through connections and chance. Kidjo happened upon Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her through direct messages on Instagram. In fact, they had met years earlier at a fan encounter when Kidjo signed a t-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world music festival in Australia.

Their joint song “Free & Equal” is based on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We have been fighting since I could speak,” raps Sampa and then praises “Angélique / Connecting through the generations, power of musique”.

“She was the person I saw, who looked like me, who was from the continent, spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.

“She knows how much reach African music has today – the continent is simply connected to the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is having legends who are able to nod to young people to acknowledge that we are continuing what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo started. She said, “I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m turning to you. ‘”

Kidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also gave skeleton tracks to some of the electronics savvy producers like Kel-P from Nigeria, who spread Afrobeats and other African rhythms around the world. “I said you found a way to make this a global rhythm,” said Kidjo. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way because their own culture fits it perfectly. The puzzle is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa is based on our tradition and always has an integrative way of doing things. “

Some of Kidjo’s vocals are given a computerized twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for Africa to become self-employed. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?'” She said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board and I don’t understand anything about it. It looks like something from space! ”She laughed. “But it’s okay, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand to love it.

“Any collaboration is about preserving people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say I send you the song and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just do it.’ What this album taught me is that we develop beautiful things when we really take the time to talk to each other. “

Categories
Health

Biden is on observe to fall in need of vaccinating 70% of American adults by the Fourth of July

Biden is on track to fall short of vaccinating 70% of American adults by the Fourth of July

President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 2, 2021.

Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images

With less than three weeks to go until Independence Day, President Joe Biden’s latest vaccination goals are in jeopardy.

The country is not on pace to hit his two main targets outlined in early May: fully vaccinating 160 million adult Americans and administering at least one shot to 70% of adults across the U.S. by July 4, according to a CNBC analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

About 65% of adults are at least partially vaccinated as of Wednesday, CDC data shows. Roughly 13.6 million would have to receive their first shot over the next 18 days to get that figure to 70%, an average of about 756,000 new vaccinations each day. The U.S., however, is averaging 336,000 newly vaccinated adults per day over the past week.

If the U.S. maintains that latest seven-day average, 67% of adults will be at least partially vaccinated by that day.

When asked about the consequences of missing the 70% target at a news briefing last week, the White House’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the Fourth of July would not be the end of the country’s vaccination efforts as the risk of infection and illness remains for those who haven’t gotten a shot.

“If you don’t meet the precise goal and you fall short by a few percent, that doesn’t mean you stop in your effort to get people vaccinated,” Fauci said. “We want to reach 70% of the adult population by the Fourth of July. I believe we can, I hope we will, and if we don’t we’re going to continue to keep pushing.”

Fauci emphasized that people who don’t get vaccinated, are still at risk. “If you get vaccinated, you dramatically, dramatically diminish the risk of getting infected and almost eliminate the risk of serious disease,” he said.

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also stressed the importance of vaccination in preventing the delta variant, which was first identified in India and is rapidly emerging as the dominant strain in the U.K, from taking hold in the United States.

White House Covid czar Jeff Zients told reporters Thursday that the U.S. would cross the 70% mark and “continue across the summer months to push beyond 70%,” but did not specify whether he expects the country to reach that mark by the goal deadline.

Biden’s goal of 160 million fully vaccinated adults is also on track to fall short if the pace of shots does not pick up in the next few weeks. Nearly 142 million adults have completed a vaccination program, on pace to land at around 152 million on the Fourth of July assuming the current pace of daily reported vaccinations holds steady.

When Biden first announced the two goals on May 4, the country was on pace to hit both. But the vaccination rate has fallen in the weeks since, from a seven-day average of 2.2 million shots per day across all age groups on the day of the announcement to 1.2 million per day as of June 16, according to the CDC.

The White House has doubled down on recent efforts to boost the vaccination rate. Biden announced June as a “national month of action” in which his administration would mobilize national organizations, community- and faith-based partners, celebrities, athletes, and other influential groups to be part of the vaccination campaign. The White House also asked pharmacies to extend hours for the month of June and partnered with Uber and Lyft to offer free rides to vaccination sites.

States are also offering incentives ranging from free beer to $1 million lotteries to try to convince Americans to get jabbed. 

Though the nationwide rate is still about 5 percentage points away, 14 states and the District of Columbia have already crossed the 70% milestone. New York is the latest to get there, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that the state would lift most of its Covid restrictions as a result. 

Other states lag, with 22 of them below the 60% mark. That includes Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Wyoming, which have each reached less than 50% of adult residents with one or more shots.

The U.S. has undoubtedly made progress in fighting Covid, and nationwide case counts are down to levels not seen since the start of the pandemic, which U.S. officials attribute to the country’s vaccination campaign. American life is closer to its pre-pandemic normal than at any point since last March now that the CDC’s lifted most of its mask recommendations and started to ease travel restrictions.

Even so, pockets of the U.S. with low vaccination rates are a risk for the country’s ability to control the pandemic, said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University. 

“Once you have an unvaccinated population, that’s a vulnerable population likely to see surges in cases,” she said. Ongoing spread means the potential for new variants to emerge, with the possibility that one will be able to evade the protection offered by vaccines.

“It is valuable to have aspirations and very ambitious targets ahead of us and I think we should do our best to reach those targets,” El-Sadr said of Biden’s July 4 goals. “If we don’t reach them, it doesn’t mean that we accept it as a failure and stop doing what we’re doing. It means we redouble our efforts.”

Categories
World News

Biden laid the foundations for an alliance to protect democracy

Biden laid the foundations for an alliance to preserve democracy

To understand the bold ambition behind President Joe Biden’s Europe trip this week, consider him less as the US commander in chief and more as the doctor in charge of the democratic (little “d”) world.

80 years ago, when far fewer democracies were besieged by rising authoritarian forces, Franklin Roosevelt declared himself Dr. Win-the-war. Now that the democratic world is under attack again, it is Biden’s turn to get Dr. To be Save Democracy.

After repeatedly diagnosing the cancers that threaten global democracies, Biden sped up the course of treatment last week. Like any good doctor, he understands that after so many years of invasive and metastatic disease, healing and recovery remain uncertain.

Waiting longer would have ensured the patient’s failure in what Biden diagnosed as a “turning point” in the historical and systemic struggle against authoritarianism. As he said this week at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, setting out a leitmotif for his entire presidency: “We must prove to the world and to our own people that democracy can still meet the challenges of our time and the needs of our people.”

While the 78-year-old president’s message and remarkable perseverance during the trip’s five whistle stops were impressive, any US leader can organize a similar series of meetings. This included his bilateral collaboration with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, followed by the G-7 meeting of the world’s leading industrial democracies, then the meeting of NATO leaders, a US-European Union summit and the conclusion in Geneva with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, the embodiment that Biden fights for.

More remarkable is what Biden did to them. Through careful planning and negotiation, his team and partners created dozens of pages of agreements, communiques, and future commitments. All of this should provide a narrative thread and provoke a common cause among the world’s leading democracies.

Behind all of this, there is an overarching focus of the Biden government on China as the challenge of our time. In contrast to the Trump administration, which has brought itself into conflict with Europe and China at the same time, the Biden administration has made every effort to win the Europeans on its side in the competition with China, even if compromises from individual countries and a whole European Union are calling for China to be its leading trading partner.

Agreements reached last week included a communique from the Carbis Bay G-7 Summit, which included a commitment to provide the world with another billion doses of Covid vaccines this year, a plan to revitalize it of member countries and a commitment to a global minimum VAT.

This included a statement from the US-EU summit, perhaps the least reported and underestimated of the week’s agreements, which established a series of dialogues that encouraged closer cooperation on everything from Covid aid and climate change to technological cooperation and China could enable.

“We intend to continue coordinating our common concerns, including ongoing human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet,” the statement said, “the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic processes, economic coercion, disinformation campaigns and regional security issues.”

The end of a 17-year-old trade and customs dispute between Boeing and Airbus has the increasing competition with China as a motivating factor. Even the joint declaration by the US President and Russia on strategic stability contained in three paragraphs had China in its sights, with the aim of initiating a bilateral dialogue on strategic stability, the aim of which was to create a more predictable environment with Moscow Washington’s energies are more direct to Beijing.

However, beneath the surface of all President Biden’s meetings lingered lingering doubts about the durability of this renewed American commitment to alliances, democratic partners, and a common cause – which led to an understandable whiplash among leaders attending meetings of a. had participated in a completely different tone with President Trump.

Europeans have every reason to wonder what the next US election might bring as Trump and his allies still refuse to accept his election defeat and claim fraud. They also have their own electoral uncertainties as the German elections in September are set to end Chancellor Angela Merkel’s nearly 16-year term and French President Macron faces the local elections on Sunday, which preview his next year’s showdown with Marine Le Pen could offer.

Thanks in no small part to these uncertainties, Biden’s great success with his partners over the past week, who were just too eager to embrace the change. What the Trump administration demonstrated, as did the first few months of Biden’s presidency, is the continued dependence of global democracies on US leadership. So why not use the present to implement as many agreements and habits as possible in the hope that they could last.

With that in mind, the week began appropriately with the New Atlantic Charter signed with British Prime Minister Johnson, a useful reminder of the historic difference the internationally active United States can make on the 80th anniversary of the original Atlantic Charter, which was adopted by the US President Franklin Roosevelt was agreed and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“Our revitalized Atlantic Charter”, says the new document, “builds on the commitments and aspirations formulated 80 years ago and reaffirms our ongoing commitment to preserve our enduring values ​​and to defend them against new and old challenges. We pledge to work closely with all partners who share our democratic values ​​and to counter the efforts of those who seek to undermine our alliances and institutions. “

It is worth remembering that nearly four full months before the US formally entered World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to the original charter outlining their ambitious common goals for the postwar world and clear US support for the British war effort expressed on 08/14/1941.

It is also worth thinking about what kind of world would have been created if the US had not stepped forward.

Given the threatened liberal order of the post-war era, the New Atlantic Charter could serve as a call for a renewed international commitment to the revival of democracy.

As early as December last year, I wrote at this point: “Joe Biden has the rarest opportunity in history: the chance to be a transformative president.”

Biden’s trip to Europe recognizes and builds on this opportunity. Perhaps just as motivating, however, are the known but unspoken costs of failure at a time when the question of the global forces that will shape the future is at stake.

Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and President and CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked for the Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant editor-in-chief and senior editor for the European edition of the newspaper. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Times bestseller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his view every Saturday of the top stories and trends of the past week.

Categories
Politics

Rising From Pandemic, New York Seeks a New Mayor to Face Looming Crises

Rising From Pandemic, New York Seeks a New Mayor to Face Looming Crises

The New York City mayor’s race began in the throes of a pandemic, in a shuttered city convulsed by a public health catastrophe, economic devastation and widespread protests over police brutality.

Now, with voters heading to the primary polls on Tuesday, New York finds itself in a very different place. As the city roars back to life, its residents are at once buoyed by optimism around reopenings, but also anxious about public safety, affordable housing, jobs — and the very character of the nation’s largest city.

The primary election marks the end of an extraordinary chapter in New York’s history and the start of another, an inflection point that will play a defining role in shaping the post-pandemic future of the city. The leading mayoral candidates have promoted starkly divergent visions for confronting a series of overlapping crises, making this primary, which will almost certainly determine the next mayor, the most significant city election in a generation.

Public polling and interviews with elected officials, voters and party strategists suggest that on the cusp of Tuesday’s election, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is the front-runner, fueled by his focus on public safety issues and his ability to connect in working- and middle-class communities of color.

Yet even on the last weekend of the race, the contest to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio appears fluid and unpredictable, and credible polling remains sparse.

Two other leading candidates, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, campaigned together on Saturday in Queens and Manhattan, a show of unity that also injected ugly clashes over race into the final hours of the election, as Mr. Adams accused his rivals of coming together “in the last three days” and “saying, ‘We can’t trust a person of color to be the mayor of the City of New York.’”

Mr. Yang, at a later event, noted that he had been “Asian my entire life.” (Mr. Adams later clarified that he meant that Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia were trying to prevent a Black or Latino candidate from becoming mayor.)

The primary election will ultimately offer a clear sense of Democratic attitudes around confronting crime, a major national issue that has become the most urgent matter in the mayoral primary.

The outcome will also show whether New Yorkers wanted a political outsider eager to shake up City Hall bureaucracy, like Mr. Yang, or a seasoned government veteran like Ms. Garcia to navigate staggering challenges from issues of education to evictions to economic revival.

And it will reveal whether Democrats are in the mood to “reimagine” a far more equitable city through transformational progressive policies, as Maya D. Wiley is promising, or if they are more focused on everyday municipal problems.

In recent polls and last-minute fund-raising, Ms. Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio, seem to be gaining late traction, while Mr. Yang, a former presidential candidate, remains a serious contender even amid signs that his momentum may have stalled.

But other factors may muddy the outcome.

For the first time in New York City, the mayoral nominee will be determined by ranked-choice voting, which allows New Yorkers to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Some New Yorkers remain undecided about how to rank their choices, and whether to rank at all.

And with many New Yorkers accustomed to a primary that usually takes place in September, it is not at all clear what the composition of a post-pandemic June electorate will look like.

For such a high-stakes election, the contest has felt at once endless and rushed. For months, it was a low-key affair, defined by dutiful Zoom forums and a distracted city.

But if there has been one constant in the last month, it has been the centrality of crime and policing to the contest.

“Public safety has clearly emerged as a significant issue,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s highest-ranking House member, when asked to name the defining issue of the mayor’s race. “How to balance that aspiration with fair, respectful policing, I think has been critical throughout the balance of this campaign.”

Six months ago, few would have predicted that public safety would be the top issue of the race, only a year after the“defund the police” movement took hold in the city. Crime rates are far lower than in earlier eras, and residents are confronting a long list of challenges as the city emerges from the pandemic.

But amid a rise this spring in shootings, jarring episodes of violence on the subways, bias attacks against Asian Americans and Jews — and heavy coverage of crime on local television — virtually every public poll shows public safety has become the biggest concern among Democratic voters.

Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia, Mr. Yang and Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citi executive, vigorously disagree with the “defund the police” movement. But no one has been more vocal about public safety issues than Mr. Adams, a former police captain who has declared safety the “prerequisite” to prosperity.

Mr. Adams, who had a complex career at the Police Department and battled police misconduct as a leader of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group, says that he was once a victim of police brutality himself, and argues that he is well equipped to manage both police reform and spikes in violence.

In recent weeks, however, Mr. Adams has come under growing scrutiny over questions of transparency and ethics tied to taxes and disclosures around real estate holdings. That dynamic may fuel doubts about his candidacy in the final days, as his opponents have sharply questioned his judgment and integrity.

If he wins, it will be in part because of his significant institutional support, as a veteran politician with union backing and relationships with key constituencies — but also because his message connects at a visceral level in some neighborhoods across the city.

“Mr. Adams! You got my vote!” Blanca Soto, who turns 60 on Monday, cried out as she walked by an Adams event in Harlem on Thursday.

“I am rooting for him because he’s not going to take away from the police officers,” said Ms. Soto, a health aide, who called safety her top issue. “I do want to see more police, especially in the subways. We had them there before. I don’t know what happened, but everything was good when that was going on.”

Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller; Shaun Donovan, a former federal housing secretary; Ms. Morales, a former nonprofit executive; and Ms. Wiley have taken a starkly different view on several policing matters. They support varying degrees of cuts to the Police Department’s budget, arguing for investments in communities instead. The department’s operating budget has been about $6 billion. Ms. Wiley, Mr. Stringer and Ms. Morales have also been skeptical of adding more police officers to patrol the subway.

Ms. Wiley argues that the best way to stop violence is often to invest in the social safety net, including in mental health professionals, violence interrupters and in schools.

Understand the N.Y.C. Mayoral Race

Ms. Wiley, who has been endorsed by some of the most prominent left-wing leaders in the country, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, is seeking to build a coalition that includes white progressives as well as voters of color across the ideological spectrum.

Rival campaigns have long believed that she has the potential to build perhaps the broadest coalition of voters in the race, but polls suggest that she has not yet done so in a meaningful way.

Mr. Jeffries, who has endorsed Ms. Wiley and campaigned with her, said that she offers change from the status quo, “a fresh face” who is both prepared “and is offering a compelling vision for investing in those communities that have traditionally been left behind.”

Mr. Jeffries has said that he is ranking Mr. Adams second, and that if Mr. Adams were to win, it would be on the strength of Black and Latino communities “who have increasingly felt excluded from the promises of New York City, as it has become increasingly expensive.”

A number of campaigns and political strategists see Latino voters as the crucial, late-breaking swing vote, and the leading candidates all see opportunities with slices of that diverse constituency, with candidates including Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley airing new Spanish-language ads in recent days — an Adams spot criticizes Ms. Garcia in Spanish — and Mr. Yang spending Thursday in the Bronx, home to the city’s largest Latino population.

Mr. Yang, who would be the city’s first Asian American mayor, is betting that he can reshape the electorate by engaging more young, Asian American and Latino voters as he casts himself as a “change” candidate.

Mr. Yang was a front-runner in the race for months, boosted by his strong name identification and air of celebrity, as well as a hopeful message about New York’s potential and an energetic in-person campaign schedule.

But as New York reopened and crime became a bigger issue in voters’ minds — and as Mr. Yang faced growing scrutiny over gaffes and gaps in his municipal knowledge — he has lost ground.

His tone in the homestretch is a striking departure from the exuberant pitch that defined his early message, as he sharpens his criticism of Mr. Adams and tries to cut into his advantage on public safety issues. Mr. Yang, who has no city government experience, has also sought to use that outsider standing to deliver searing indictments of the political class.

Ms. Garcia has moderate instincts — she was one of the few leading mayoral candidates to favor President Biden as her first choice in the presidential primary — but she is primarily running as a pragmatic technocrat steeped in municipal knowledge.

She has been endorsed by the editorial boards of The New York Times and The New York Daily News, among others, and has generated palpable traction in politically engaged, highly educated corners of the city, like the Upper West Side, even as Mr. Stringer and Mr. Donovan have also vied for the government experience mantle.

“I don’t think New York does that well, as progressive as I am, with a series of progressives who think that we should spend more time dealing with those kinds of issues rather than actual stuff that needs to be done,” said William Pinzler, 74, as he prepared to vote for Ms. Garcia at Lincoln Center. “Kathryn Garcia picked up the garbage.”

But Ms. Garcia, who has struggled to deliver a standout moment during several televised debates, is in many ways still introducing herself, and it is not yet clear whether she can attract the same kind of support citywide.

Asked what lessons national Democrats may take from the results of Tuesday’s contest, Representative Grace Meng, who has endorsed Mr. Yang as her first choice and Ms. Garcia as her second, and appeared with them on Saturday, pointed to questions of both personal characteristics and policy visions.

“How much people prioritize a leader with experience or vision to get us out of the pandemic, but also to address issues like public safety and education — I think that it’ll kind of be a filter through which we see the next round of elections nationally,” she said. “Wherever they may be.”

Categories
Health

Covid Proved the C.D.C. Is Damaged. Can It Be Fastened?

Covid Proved the C.D.C. Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed?

MacCannell says he did everything he could to get the crisis under control: he and his team developed protocols to help public health labs launch new sequencing programs; developed plans to collaborate with commercial laboratories, which have a much larger overall capacity; and set up a consortium of scientists across the country to collaborate and pool resources. But those efforts are only stopgaps, he admits, and in any case, the approval and funding required to get started was delayed by many months. “There was a big gap between what we expected and what we actually saw,” says MacCannell. “Not just at the federal level, but at every step from there.”

Genomic surveillance is one of many shortcomings that plague the disease surveillance system that the CDC presides over. These deficiencies are invisible to anyone who does not work in the field, because at first glance the system makes sense. Public health emergencies identified at the local level are reported to state health officials and then passed on to the CDC as necessary, where officials analyze the information, issue guidelines, and coordinate federal action. There is a special system for the 120 or so “reportable diseases” – like Lyme disease and hepatitis – all of which agree are serious enough to warrant immediate action, and another for “syndromic surveillance,” according to the epidemiologist Search the emergency room in real time can search data on symptoms of concern. But under this broad structure there is often chaos.

As the coronavirus turned into a full blown pandemic, CDC scientists struggled to answer even basic questions about what the disease looked like or where or how it spread.

The system itself is profoundly disjointed and the technology behind it is less mature than many American households. State health departments are not meaningfully linked, nor are hospitals, clinics, laboratories and local health authorities. The CDC maintains more than 100 separate disease-specific computer systems (a by-product of the agency’s funding silos), and many of them cannot communicate with one another. Critical data is often passed from health facilities to health departments through a tortured process that can include handwritten notes, manual spreadsheets, fax machines, and mail. It is not uncommon for basic information such as race, ethnicity, age, or address to be missing from clinical reports. It’s also not uncommon for these reports to wane at the state or local level without ever getting to federal officials. Even the most serious diseases, which should be logged within 24 hours of their discovery and reported to the CDC in good time, are not necessarily systematically routed into this chain. “It depends on the jurisdiction,” Janet Hamilton, executive director of the State and Territorial Epidemiologists Council, recently told me. “Some regions have solid health departments and good reporting, while others don’t.”

Disease surveillance is also hampered by the uneven patchwork of surveillance programs across the country and the need to negotiate data sharing and other agreements with each state separately. Antibiotic resistance, respiratory infections and other pathogens are being tracked robustly in some areas and very poorly or not at all in others (for example, respiratory infections are monitored more closely in the Four Corners region than elsewhere), partly because the agency does not have the ability or authority to obtain all of the data it needs every community. Hanage compares the entire apparatus with a Rube Goldberg machine. “There is nothing central,” he says. “Random patchwork collaborations were initiated and transformed and are now having an overwhelming impact on our understanding of public health. Don’t let that criticize the people who did these things because the alternative couldn’t have been anything. But the result is something without a rational plan behind it. “

The loopholes make it difficult to track even known diseases and barely get a grip on new ones. During a recent romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak, officials were forced to make billion-dollar life or death decisions about which products to pull from which shelves in which regions of the country, based on data that included screenshots and text-messages to epidemiologists and health authorities. During the 2019 Vaping Injury (or Evali) outbreak, doctors faxed hundreds of pages of medical records directly to local health officials in some cases. Epidemiologists could hardly process the data in this format, let alone analyze it for clues. “There’s no pre-built process when something like a vaping injury or Zika or SARS-CoV-2 comes up,” says Hamilton. “There are 64 different public health jurisdictions in this country, and each will have their own ideas about what information should be collected and shared.”

In 2020, as the coronavirus went from a few isolated outbreaks to a full-blown pandemic, CDC scientists struggled to answer even basic questions about what the disease itself looked like or where or how it spread. “We were asked who is being hospitalized, who are the severe cases, what are the characteristics, and it was so frustrating,” Anne Schuchat, the agency’s deputy director, told a panel of colleagues last fall. “People went out to check graphs manually. I felt like the health sector has this data. It’s in their system. Can we work with them? ”The agency was unable to reliably track the number of tests or cases across the country. It also struggled to update hospital records, which include things like bed availability and ventilator supplies. The Trump administration hired a private contractor to collect this data on charges of political favoritism. And when multiple vaccines were eventually deployed, the agency was unable to monitor supplies or keep a close eye on waste.

Categories
Health

Singapore slows tempo of reopening as native circumstances stabilize

Singapore slows pace of reopening as local cases stabilize

A man wearing a protective face mask walks past an indoor waterfall at Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore.

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SINGAPORE – The Singapore government said Friday it would further relax Covid-related restrictions next week, albeit at a slower pace than previously announced, as local infections have not decreased significantly.

The government started easing some measures this week, including increasing restrictions on social gatherings and event attendees.

It said that as of Monday, “higher risk activities” such as eating in and indoor sports and exercise may be resumed in groups of two people – instead of the five people previously announced.

We remain concerned, especially if we do not have to reach a high level of vaccination yet,

Gan Kim Yong

Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry

Barring another super-spreader event or large cluster of infections, the government will allow these activities for groups of up to five people from mid-July.

“The number of cases in the community has stabilized somewhat, but it is not falling significantly and we see several unrelated cases every day,” said Gan Kim Yong, Singapore’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, co-chair of the Covid- Country Task Force.

“That’s why we remain concerned, especially if we don’t have to reach a high level of vaccination yet,” Gan told reporters at a briefing.

Singapore needs to be cautious in resuming activities that are viewed as more risky due to the more transmissible variant of the Delta, first discovered in India, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said at the same meeting.

Ong, who is also co-chair of the Covid task force, said a gradual reopening will help “buy time to get more people vaccinated, so it is imperative now to step up vaccinations”.

Singapore has one of the fastest vaccinations in the Asia-Pacific region, but it is lagging behind many western countries. Around 2.7 million people – or about 49% of the population – had at least the first dose of the Covid vaccine by Tuesday, Ong said. Around 35% of the population are fully vaccinated, he added.

The country had largely controlled the spread of Covid until locally transmitted cases flared up in late April. Many of the recent cases have been caused by the Delta variant. The surge in cases forced the government to tighten social distancing measures twice last month.

The community’s daily reported cases dropped to single digits for most of the past week, but have remained above 10 cases a day since Sunday as a large cluster of infections emerged around a damp market in southern Singapore.

In total, the Southeast Asian country has reported 34 deaths and more than 62,300 confirmed cases since early 2020 as of Thursday, data from the Ministry of Health showed.

Categories
Politics

Controversial below Trump, federal vacation below Biden

Controversial under Trump, federal holiday under Biden

(L-R) Ninety-four-year-old activist and retired educator Opal Lee, known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth, speaks with U.S. President Joe Biden after he signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in the East Room of the White House on June 17, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

The scene at the White House on Thursday might have been hard to fathom just one year ago.

A diverse crowd of lawmakers, activists and community leaders — including pop icon Usher, with whom many photos were taken — gathered in the East Room to witness President Joe Biden sign into law a new federal holiday: Juneteenth, which on June 19 commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.

With coronavirus infections near record lows in the U.S. amid a full-bore vaccination campaign at all levels of government, few members of the indoors, in-person crowd were seen wearing masks.

“We are gathered here, in a house built by enslaved people,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to hold the title. “We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and we are here to witness President Joe Biden establish Juneteenth as a national holiday.”

“We have come far and we have far to go, but today is a day of celebration,” Harris said.

As she spoke, the president stepped off the podium and approached the front row, then knelt down to embrace Opal Lee, the 94-year-old Texas activist credited as a driving force behind the push for the new holiday.

“I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down, for me, as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president,” Biden told the crowd before signing the bill into law.

The 11th national annual holiday was established just two days before Juneteenth itself, and less than three weeks after the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. It also came on the heels of the first anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the unarmed Black man whose caught-on-tape murder in police custody triggered a nationwide eruption of civil unrest.

At a time when Republicans and Democrats agree on virtually nothing, they came together this week to vote overwhelmingly in favor of making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Yet just a year ago in mid-June of 2020, all of those factors — Tulsa, Juneteenth, the waves of protest and the Covid pandemic — posed problems for then-President Donald Trump, who had come under fire for announcing plans to hold a rally in Tulsa on the holiday.

“I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal after moving the date of the rally. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

The contrast between Trump’s final Juneteenth as president and Biden’s first could hardly be more stark. It illustrates not only the seismic changes at play in the nation and how they shaped the present, but also the difference in how the two presidents have approached issues of race.

The path to a federal holiday

Juneteenth celebrates the date in 1865 when enslaved Black people in Texas finally heard that they had been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had issued more than two years earlier.

The Confederate Army under Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox in Virginia on April 9, 1865, a capitulation that led to the end of the Civil War. But it wasn’t until June 19 that Union forces under Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas, to deliver General Order No. 3, officially ending slavery in the state.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” the order reads.

Lincoln had been shot at Ford’s Theatre by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth just five days after Lee’s surrender.

The name “Juneteenth” evolved from numerous different names and spellings over the course of decades, historians note.

While the vast majority of states already recognize Juneteenth as a holiday, activists such as Opal Lee have fought for decades for the day to receive federal designation.

In 1939, when Lee was 12 years old, a White mob set fire to her family’s home. No one was arrested. In 2016, Lee, then 89, began to walk from her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. — some 1,400 miles — to advocate for making Juneteenth a national holiday.

“The fact is none of us are free till we’re all free,” Lee told The New York Times in a June 2020 interview.

One year later, Lee attended the White House ceremony to designate Juneteenth as the the first new holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

Previous attempts to pass a Juneteenth bill in Congress were unsuccessful. In 2020, one such bill was blocked in the Senate by Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who objected to the cost of giving federal employees another day off.

This time around, he backed off, saying in a statement: “It is clear that there is no appetite in Congress to further discuss the matter.”

The reason why?

“In two words, it’s George Floyd,” said Karlos Hill, chair of the African and African-American Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma, in an interview with CNBC.

In May 2020, video of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes had set off a firestorm of protests around the country. The officer’s conduct drew condemnation from across the political spectrum, and prompted lawmakers to draft a police reform bill in Floyd’s name.

Chauvin in April was found guilty on charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

“It took something that stark to change the conversation,” Hill said.

“These things are connected deeply,” Hill said, explaining that the shock of Floyd’s death “created a space and opportunity for Juneteenth.”

Few lawmakers — even those with complaints about the bill — stood in the way this week, when the legislation introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., flew through Congress.

The bill was approved unanimously in the Senate on Tuesday night. A day later, it passed the House in an overwhelming 415-14 vote. The 14 votes against were all Republicans, while 195 GOP lawmakers voted yes.

Among the Republican criticisms were that the decision to name the holiday “Juneteenth National Independence Day” clashed with the existing Independence Day on July 4. They pointed out that the holiday has also been referred to as Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day and other names throughout its history.

Others complained, like Johnson, about the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue lost by giving federal workers another day off. And some lawmakers railed against Democrats for rushing the bill to the House floor, bypassing congressional committees and the opportunity to vote on amendments in the process.

One Republican, Matt Rosendale of Montana, issued a statement before the final vote announcing his opposition to the measure because, he claimed, it was an effort to further “identity politics” and “critical race theory” in America.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, dismissed Rosendale’s stance as “kooky.”

The 14 House members who voted against the bill are: Rosendale; Mo Brooks, R-Ala.; Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn.; Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.; Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif.; Mike Rogers, R-Ala.; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; Chip Roy, R-Texas; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Tom McClintock, R-Calif.; Ronny Jackson, R-Texas; Thomas Massie, R-Ky.; and Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.

Trump’s Juneteenth

In a statement Friday afternoon celebrating Juneteenth, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said of her party: “We enthusiastically welcome its adoption as our newest national holiday after President Trump called for it last year.”

In September, Trump as part of a series of overtures to Black voters did promise to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. But there is much more to Trump’s relationship to Juneteenth than McDaniel’s statement suggests.

In June 2020, with the pandemic raging, no vaccines in sight and then-candidate Biden holding a clear edge in the polls, Trump announced he would return to the campaign trail to hold in-person events.

The marquee event of his campaign kickoff: a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19.

The Trump campaign initially defended the scheduling decision as an opportunity for him to tout his “record of success for Black Americans.” But critics called it a slap in the face for Trump to pick Juneteenth to come to Tulsa, the site of one of the worst White-on-Black massacres in U.S. history, to re-launch his re-election campaign in the middle of a national upheaval about racism.

The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender, in an adapted excerpt from his forthcoming book about Trump’s election loss to Biden, reported that top campaign official Brad Parscale had selected the time and place for the rally, and that he had “dug in” after others urged him to make changes.

Bender reported that Trump, bewildered by the backlash to the rally date, had asked a Black Secret Service agent if he knew about Juneteenth. The agent said that he did know about it, adding, “It’s very offensive to me that you’re having this rally on Juneteenth,” according to Bender.

Less than a week before the rally, Trump tweeted he would move the event to June 20, after hearing from “many of my African American friends and supporters” who have “reached out to suggest that we consider changing the date out of respect for this Holiday.”

On Juneteenth itself, Trump’s White House issued a proclamation celebrating the holiday as a reminder of “both the unimaginable injustice of slavery and the incomparable joy that must have attended emancipation.”

Less than a month earlier, the Floyd video had prompted millions of people to participate in marches and demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality. Numerous protests led to outbreaks of violence and looting in major cities.

Before the event at Tulsa’s BOK Center, Trump, who at that point was still active on Twitter, took to the social media app to issue an ominous threat for potential counterdemonstrators.

“Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma, please understand you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle or Minneapolis,” Trump tweeted. “It will be a much different scene.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who gave a Juneteenth address in Tulsa that Friday, at the time accused Trump of “provoking an incident” with the tweet.

Trump’s crowd in Tulsa fell short of expectations, failing to fill thousands of seats in the nearly 20,000-capacity arena. But in attendance was Herman Cain, a prominent Black businessman, conservative commentator and former Republican presidential candidate.

The 74-year-old Cain, a stage 4 cancer survivor, was photographed at the event sitting next to other people, none of whom appeared to be wearing masks.

In early July, Cain was hospitalized with the coronavirus, and he was put on a ventilator as his condition worsened. He died July 30, making him among the most high-profile people in the U.S. to succumb to the virus. Cain’s associates have said there is “no way of knowing for sure” how or where he caught Covid.

The Journal’s Bender reported that Trump raged about his lack of support from Black voters on the day after the Tulsa rally.

“I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks — it’s always Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law,] telling me to do this,” Trump told one confidant, Bender reported. “And they all f—— hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.”

Hill said that the U.S. is now “in a different reality” compared with last June, “in a sense that we’ve witnessed the full fallout from George Floyd.”

“We’ve gone on as if things have rectified themselves, and that’s just not the case,” Hill said. As a federal holiday, “Juneteenth might, just might, give pause to that.”

Categories
World News

Video of Montreal Police Kneeling on Black Teenager Spurs Outcry

Hong Kong Website Doxxing Police Gets Blocked, Raising Censorship Fears

MONTREAL – For some Canadians, the 90-second video brought back memories of George Floyd: A white police officer appears to be kneeling on the neck of a black teenager lying face down on the floor on a Montreal street.

Police said Saturday that they are investigating what happened after a video of the encounter sparked an outcry from politicians and human rights defenders, many of whom were alarmed about the way the 14-year-old was apparently being held back.

Montreal police said the encounter took place on June 10 after officers were called to a fight between 15 young people near a high school in the Villeray neighborhood of Montreal. They said that two of the youths were armed.

It was not clear what happened in advance of the encounter between the officer and the teenager. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the teen was tied by the officers’ knees for less than a minute and that one officer said the teen had what looked like a stun gun.

The outcry comes as Canada sees a national awakening to institutional racism, including among the police force, fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement. The murder of Mr. Floyd by Minneapolis police last year sparked this movement.

“This brings back memories of what happened to George Floyd because the police use the same technique,” said Balarama Holness, a human rights activist running for Montreal mayor.

“The police must be held accountable,” continued Holness. “These techniques shouldn’t be allowed, period.”

Fernando Belton, a criminal defense attorney who represents the teenager in the video, said he and another teenager, also 14 years old, were arrested after police officers arrived at the scene and the teenagers began to flee. He said one teenager was overtaken by two police officers while the second was arrested by six officers. He said they both had knees on their necks.

“Why do you need so much police force on teenagers?” asked Mr. Belton, who teaches a racial profiling class at the University of Ottawa. “We’re not talking about criminals here, we’re talking about teenagers who are arrested in broad daylight.”

The outcry over the video comes after Brenda Lucki, the commissioner of Canada’s famous national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was forced to retract her earlier denials of systemic racism within the police force. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau argued that police across the country are grappling with systemic racism.

Last year, Canadians reacted with outrage to a police dashcam video showing an indigenous chief being held by one police officer and thrown to the ground by another, hit on the head and put in a stranglehold.

While Canada prides itself on being a progressive, liberal bastion, human rights activists say its law enforcement agencies need to go through profound cultural changes to prevent attacks on minorities.

Concerns about police behavior have spread beyond Montreal. A study by the Ontario Human Rights Commission found that between 2013 and 2017, blacks in Toronto were nearly 20 times more likely than whites to be involved in fatal shootings by Toronto police.

Categories
Entertainment

5 Motion Films to Stream Now

Five Action Movies to Stream Now

For action movie fans looking for new thrills to watch at home, there are a lot of car chases, explosions and fights (knife, sword and fist) to sift through. We’re helping to make the choice easier by providing some streaming highlights.

Rent or buy on Google Play or FandangoNow.

I’m a sucker for family-centered, postapocalyptic survivalist films like “A Quiet Place” and “It Comes at Night.” On a smaller scale, “F.E.A.R.” a.k.a. “Forget Everything And Run,” directed by Geoff Reisner and Jason Tobias, mirrors those works for sharp thrills. In a secluded mountain wasteland, the weary parents Josephine (Marci Miller) and Ethan (Tobias) subsist with their young son, Josh (Danny Ruiz), in a cold, dilapidated cabin. The government quarantined their tiny town after a chemical leak from a local plant created a Zombie-making virus.

You can be infected by a bite or by drinking contaminated water, but you may not know because your Zombie-conversion could be asymptomatic. The couple’s infected teenage daughter, Mia (Cece Kelly), wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

The family survives on scarce supplies, but a band of marauding cannibals led by Desiree (a vicious Susan Moore Harmon) depletes the stores further, forcing Ethan to venture into the snowy terrain in search of both medicine and food. Packed with bloody eye-gouging and savage head shots aimed at the fast-moving undead, “F.E.A.R” provides suspense and feverish shocks.

Stream it on Netflix.

As a mob enforcer, Ferry (Frank Lammers) shows the world a somewhat misleading persona in this Dutch-language gangster flick by Cecilia Verheyden.

Beneath Ferry’s bruising, beer-keg-shaped frame is a well of sweetness. His mob boss, Brink (Huub Stapel), a salt of the earth type, treats the bleached-blonde Ferry like a son. But when Brink’s own son, Matthijs (Tim Linde), is killed, he wants Ferry to avenge his death, pitting his enforcer’s unquestioning loyalty against his softer heart.

Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city. For a year, the “Offstage” series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now we’re looking at its rebound.

While tracking Matthijs’s three killers southward, Ferry is forced to reconnect with his estranged sister Claudia (Monic Hendrickx), who has cancer. Along the way, the ferocious Ferry falls for the bubbly Danielle (Elise Schaap), but his happiness is short-lived when he learns a startling truth about her. Switching between puffy-faced barbarism and bashful sweetness, Lammers gives a wonderful physical performance. Watching him grapple with the enforcer’s internal turmoil subverts the tough guy trope by making “Ferry” an absorbing gangster character study.

Stream it on Netflix.

Detective Jodie Snyman (Erica Wessels) doesn’t distance herself from victims. She heads a child trafficking task force in Johannesburg, South Africa. Assisting her on the case is Ntombizonke Bapai (Hlubi Mboya), a forensic crime-scene investigator with a grim past. In 1994, Ntombizonke and five other Black girls were abducted. More than two decades later, armed with a pistol and silencer, donning a black hood and mask, she’s seeking revenge against the ring of pedophiles who kidnapped her along with many others.

“I Am All Girls,” a harrowing procedural and vigilante thriller directed by Donovan Marsh, is propelled by the grounded performances of Wessels and Mboya. The pair hold together a wide narrative that intertwines the present-day investigation with disquieting flashbacks to Ntombizonke’s traumatic childhood. Her fits of roving retribution bear passing similarities to Regina King’s Sister Night in “Watchmen.” And a queer romance develops between the forensic investigator and Snyman, making “I Am All Girls” more than a police story with gunplay. Marsh’s action film beats with a big heart for the oppressed and the forgotten.

Rent or buy it on Amazon.

There’s a mole in the Wor Lok Tung triad. And the orange-haired gangster Ting Cheuk Fei (Michael Tse Tin Wah) is their prime suspect. Ting first infiltrated the mob three years ago but has gotten nowhere since. A prominent mob leader, Brother Hei (Hui Shiu Hung), is nearing a megadeal with the head of the Eastern Trade Company, the drug lord Sung Jing Kwong (Ken Chan). Ting needs to sabotage the deal, but a couple of obstacles lie in his way: way: The young Chief Inspector investigating the gangsters lives comfortably on Sung’s payroll by dishing classified tips to him. Also, Brother Hei’s close associate, Kam Chiu Nin (Ben Ng), deeply suspects Ting of being the mole.

The director Ka Fai Wong’s mobster thriller set in China, “The Infernal Walker” has a highly convoluted plot featuring swift back-stabbing, secret clues, wild diversions and obnoxious schemes. I found the whole barrage — fast car chases featuring luxe Mustangs and Lamborghinis and parkour pursuits through dank claustrophobic alleyways — extremely entertaining. Intermittent bits of silly melodrama run through this thuggish romp, but “The Infernal Walker,” endowed with sharp, up-tempo pacing, fulfills that craving for a triad movie.

Stream it on Netflix.

You’ve got to admire the ingenuity to make a chop shop a kill house where wrenches become axes and screwdrivers emerge as projectiles. Daniel Benmayor’s revenge movie set in Barcelona is a melting pot of ingenious kills and familiar action references. Maximo (Teo García), a top lieutenant to an aging mobster (and a mirror of Maximus in “Gladiator”), wants out so his adoptive brother, the ruthless Lucero (Óscar Jaenada), orders the murders of Maximo and his young son. Maximo is believed dead, but he survives.

Two years later, Maximo teams with Lucero’s scorned adoptive sister María (Andrea Duro) and a teen named Leo (Óscar Casas) to get vengeance. Referred to by his opponents as John Wayne, Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, the silent Maximo delivers top-notch brawling. In one clever sequence set in a kung fu den, Benmayor sets the combatants’ silhouettes against foggy backgrounds so their agile movements pop, another touch that makes “Xtreme” an entertaining battle royal.

Categories
Health

How Emergent BioSolutions Earned Earnings However Delivered Disappointing Vaccine Returns

How Emergent BioSolutions Earned Profits But Delivered Disappointing Vaccine Returns

After placing the no-bid contract with Emergent, the Trump administration reverted to traditional contract rules and looked for competitive proposals for additional fillings and packaging, known in the industry as fill-finish work, the documents show. Ology Bioservices, based in Alachua, Fla., Agreed to provide essentially the same services as the Camden and Rockville Emergent plants for three quarters to nearly one third the cost, according to a contract-based calculation.

According to an agreement made in August, Ology would collect state fees of $ 6.83 per vial. By comparison, Emergent’s existing lines would cost between $ 9.03 and $ 18.40 per vial.

A health department spokeswoman said Ology is cheaper in part because it can fill more than 100,000 vials in a single batch, which is five times that of Emergent. This “lowers the price per bottle by spreading the fixed costs over more bottles,” she said in an email.

Even after the launch of Ology, the government continued its higher-cost agreement with Emergent to ensure “additional capacity is available when or when it is needed to fill vaccines or therapeutics,” she said. At the time of the deal, former and current federal officials said the government wanted to secure as much manufacturing capacity as possible before commercial companies buy it out.

Over the years, Emergent has grown by funding the expansion of its manufacturing facilities and the accumulation of product reserves.

In November 2019, the company announced that it would double its sales, including by expanding its contract manufacturing business. A senior vice president, Syed Husain, outlined a “game plan” that would “cross-sell additional services” to existing customers, including the federal government. Six months later, Emergent signed the contract that expanded its existing government contract to include work in its Camden and Rockville locations.

Dr. Robert Kadlec, a former Trump administration official who oversaw the agency that awarded Covid-19 contracts, had previously worked as a consultant for Emergent. Dr. Kadlec has said that he did not negotiate the emergent deal but approved it. Emergent said it negotiated the agreement with professional government officials.