Month: June 2021

Categories
Politics

Fugees’ Pras, Jho Low charged in scheme to get Trump administration to drop probe

Fugees' Pras, Jho Low charged in scheme to get Trump administration to drop probe

In this April 23, 2015 file photo, Jho Low, Director of the Jynwel Foundation, poses at the launch of the Global Daily website in Washington, D.C.

Stuart Ramson | Invision for the United Nations Foundation

A federal grand jury has hit the fugitive Malaysia financier Jho Low and Fugees rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel with new criminal charges, accusing them of running a back-channel campaign to get the Trump administration to drop an investigation of Low and the 1MDB investment company and to have a Chinese dissident returned to China.

The new charges against Low, 39, and the 48-year-old Michel come six months after former President Donald Trump pardoned former top Republican fundraiser Elliot Broidy in connection with his guilty plea in October for his role in the illegal lobbying effort on Low’s behalf.

CNBC has reached out to Broidy’s lawyer to ask whether Broidy testified before the grand jury that indicted Low and Michel.

Because of his pardon, Broidy would be unable to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to testify at a grand jury investigating his activities related to Low and Michel.

Broidy, who is a Los Angeles-based businessman, was paid $9 million for his efforts on their behalf, with “the expectation of tens of millions more in success fees,” federal authorities have said.

Low and Michel were charged two years ago in federal court in Washington, D.C., with allegedly illegally funneling millions of dollars of Low’s money to support the 2012 presidential campaign of then-President Barack Obama.

Pras Michel of the Hip hop group the Fugees performs on August 1, 1996 in New York City, New York.

Al Pereira | Michael Ochs Archives | Getty Images

CNBC Politics

Read more of CNBC’s politics coverage:

The indictment issued Thursday by a grand jury in Washington accuses Low and Michel of conspiring with Broidy, a woman named Nickie Lum Davis and others “to engage in undisclosed lobbying campaigns at the direction of Low and the Vice Minister of Public Security for the People’s Republic of China, respectively,” according to the Justice Department.

The goals of those campaigns were “both to have the 1MDB embezzlement investigation and forfeiture proceedings involving Low and others dropped and to have a Chinese dissident sent back to China.”

That dissident is understood to be billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Kwok and Miles Guo.

The new indictment also accuses Michel and Low of conspiring to commit money laundering related to the foreign influence campaigns, the Justice Department said. Michel is additionally charged with witness tampering and conspiracy to make false statements to banks.

Davis pleaded guilty in August to violating the foreign lobbying act as part of the Justice Department’s probe involving 1MDB. 

Also in August, Trump’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht, off the coast of Connecticut, on federal criminal charges accusing him and others of defrauding thousands of donors through a crowdfunding campaign to privately build sections of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump pardoned Bannon on his last night in office in January, the same time he pardoned Broidy.

The investment bank Goldman Sachs last year entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department related to the conspiracy in which the bank and its Malaysian unit violated U.S. bribery laws by paying Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials to get business from 1MDB.

Goldman, which received around $600 million in fees for bond deals that funded the bank, agreed to pay more than $2.9 billion as part of that deferred prosecution agreement.

Categories
Health

Covid-Sniffing Canines Are Correct, However Extensive Use Faces Hurdles

Covid-Sniffing Dogs Are Accurate, But Wide Use Faces Hurdles

Dog noses are great Covid-19 detectors, according to numerous laboratory studies, and Covid detection dogs have already started working at airports in other countries and at some events in the US, like a Miami Heat basketball game.

However, some public health and sniffer dog training experts say more information and planning is needed to ensure they are accurate in real-life situations.

“There are no national standards” for scented dogs, said Cynthia M. Otto, director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the authors of a new article on the use of scented dogs in Covid detection.

And while private groups certify drug sniffing and bomb and rescue dogs, there are no similar medical detection programs in place in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, according to the new paper.

Lois Privor-Dumm, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the article, said there is no question that dogs have great potential in medical fields. But she wants to investigate how they could be used on a large scale, for example by the government.

“What are all the ethical considerations? What are the regulatory considerations? How practical is that? ”She asked. Not only the quality of detection, but logistics and cost would be central to any widespread application, as with any public health intervention.

Quality control is a first step and a big one. Medical odor detection is more complicated than detecting drugs or bombs, said Dr. Otto. A dog working to detect drugs or explosives in an airport has a consistent context and a fairly simple target odor. With Covid detection, researchers know that dogs can differentiate between sweat and urine from an infected person. But they don’t know what chemicals the dog is identifying.

Because human smells vary, medical sniffer dogs must be trained on many different people. “We have all races and ages and diets and all these things that make people smell,” said Dr. Otto.

The symptoms of many illnesses are similar to those of Covid, and dogs smelling odors related to fever or pneumonia would be ineffective. Therefore, according to Dr. Otto “include many people who are negative but might have a cough or a fever or other things”. Obviously, if the dogs mistake flu for Covid, that would be a critical mistake.

Dogs can also be trained on sweat, saliva, or urine. In the United Arab Emirates, the dogs worked with urine samples. In Miami they just walked past a number of people.

Any positive cases of Covid infection that the dogs detect are usually confirmed using today’s gold standard to confirm the presence of the coronavirus, a PCR test. However, a review of the research published last week concluded that dogs fared better than the test.

But these are experimental results. Dogs are good at remotely detecting explosives and other substances, but so far, Dr. Otto that she is not aware of any published research showing the accuracy of dogs who sniff people in a line instead of urine or sweat.

If the government were to officially conduct or approve dogs for Covid detection, some standards would need to be set for how dogs should be trained and their performance assessed. Dr. Otto is on a committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology that is now meeting to develop standards for scent detection dogs in a variety of situations, including detecting Covid.

She said even if the standards were clearly set, finding enough dogs to do widespread odor detection was another hurdle. Trained dogs are not easy to come by. “We have a shortage of bomb detection dogs in this country. We’ve been dealing with it for years, ”she said.

Dogs can be retrained from one smell to another, but that can be tricky. “Some countries take their bomb trained dogs and train them on Covid. But you know, all you have to do is think of an airport, if you have a dog that sniffs both covid and bombs and it alerts you, then what do you have? “

Well-trained dogs are also costly and require paid, well-trained human handlers. According to the report, dogs can cost $ 10,000 and odor training can cost $ 16,000 per dog. For example, the Transportation Security Administration has a $ 12 million explosive detection dog and handler training facility in San Antonio and estimates the cost of training dogs and handlers at $ 33,000 for explosives detection and $ 46,000 for passenger control.

All of these questions will determine how dogs will be used in the future. Your ability is there. “I think they absolutely can,” said Dr. Otto. “This is how we implement them.”

Categories
Entertainment

Juilliard College students Protest Tuition Enhance With Marches and Music

Juilliard Students Protest Tuition Increase With Marches and Music

The Juilliard School, one of the world’s leading performing arts conservatories, is known for concerts rather than pickets. But students protesting a proposed tuition hike occupied portions of the Lincoln Center campus this week and led music and dance-filled protests on West 65th Street when they were later denied entry to a school building.

The protests began Monday when a group of students speaking out against plans to increase tuition fees from $ 49,260 to $ 51,230 a year occupied portions of the school’s Irene Diamond building and took photos of dozen of them multi-colored sheets of paper posted on social media arranged to include the words “LESSON DEADLINE.”

On Wednesday, students said they had received an email from the administration stating that “classrooms” could not be used for after-school events without permission. “Posting signs, posters or leaflets, setting up in the lobby, requesting or distributing printed materials also requires prior approval,” the statement said.

The students returned to the Diamond building that day, marched through the halls and stopped in front of the school president Damian Woetzel’s door. At some point, some said, they knocked on his door and sang, “We know you’re in there. Will you meet the needs of the students and freeze the class? “

Protesters later said they had been banned from the Diamond building and the school told them it was investigating an incident involving reported violations “relating to the safety of the community”. On Thursday, around 20 students continued protesting on the sidewalk outside, waving posters, accusing the school of using persistent tactics to suppress dissent.

“They made it clear that they weren’t listening to us,” says Carl Hallberg, an 18-year-old acting student.

Rosalie Contreras, a spokeswoman for Juilliard, wrote in an email that the school is increasing funding, raising the minimum wage for student workers on campus to $ 15 an hour, and providing special funding for students in financial need Have available.

“Juilliard respects the right of all members of the community, including students, to express their views freely with demonstrations held at an appropriate time, place, and manner,” added Ms. Contreras. “Unfortunately, the demonstration escalated to the point on Wednesday that an employee called public security.”

Both Mr. Hallberg and another student, Gabe Canepa, said they were part of a campus group called Socialist Penguins that had called for the protests. They said they hadn’t compromised anyone’s safety.

Mr. Canepa, a 19-year-old dance student, added that the students took the tuition increase seriously because it would reduce their spending on “rent, groceries, subway fares and school supplies”.

An online petition by the group states that “the already astronomically high tuition fees” are harmful to working-class students. It added, “We are calling for Juilliard to cancel their proposed tuition increase.”

Students who participated in the protests said about 300 current students, or about 30 to a third of those currently enrolled, signed the petition.

The events at Juilliard this week seem to have been less controversial than school occupations that have taken place elsewhere in Manhattan over the years, including New York University, Cooper Union and New School, where cops with helmets and plastic shields arrested people who took over part of the school’s Fifth Avenue building in 2009. However, the conflict struck at odds.

Juilliard is also under pressure when it comes to diversity issues. In May, CBS News quoted a black college student there as saying she had been disturbed by an acting workshop asking class members to pretend they were slaves while whips, rain and racial slurs were played. Juilliard told CBS that the workshop was a “mistake” and regretted “that the workshop caused pain to the students”.

Following Wednesday’s protests, several students said they had received emails from Sabrina Tanbara, the deputy dean of studies, informing them that their access to the Diamond building had been suspended pending investigation.

The next day, Juilliard’s dean for student development emailed all students with some details about what the school was reviewing. Regarding the Wednesday afternoon protest outside the President’s office, Dean Barrett Hipes wrote: “Yesterday public security received a report of confrontational and intimidating behavior from students that led to an administrative assistant working alone in an office their own safety. “

Since the students could not enter the Diamond building on Thursday, they protested outside and asked passing motorists to honk their horns in support.

A young man was fashionable on West 65th Street. Mr. Hallberg strummed a guitar and another student plucked a stand-up bass and led a singalong of the labor standard “Which side are you on?”

Some students said they felt punished without due process.

Sarah Williams, a 19-year-old oboe student, said she wrote to Ms. Tanbara asking what specific she should have done to expel her from the Diamond building. She said she hadn’t received an answer yet.

“My resources have been eliminated without any explanation,” she said.

Raphael Zimmerman, a 20-year-old clarinet student, said he had received an email from Ms. Tanbara informing him that he would be contacted to set up an “investigative interview” to present his report on the activities outside the office of the Catch up with President late Wednesday afternoon.

“I think the many minutes we spent knocking on that door and singing were a nuisance,” he said, “essentially we are denying our right to assemble and demonstrate.”

Categories
Health

Biogen Alzheimer’s drug and the brand new battle over dementia remedy

Biogen Alzheimer’s drug and the new battle over dementia treatment

Aduhelm from Biogen

Source: Biogen

The FDA approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm marked a milestone in Dr. Paul Aisen. The director of the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute at USC has focused on the treatment of neurodegenerative disease for the past three decades and in recent years has helped guide this particular drug through the various phases of clinical trials.

But as he sat in his sun-drenched San Diego office in early June, he felt slightly puzzled by the way the Food and Drug Administration approved their use in early June on an “accelerated” basis, normally reserved for cancer drugs. This meant that the clinical benefit was considered likely, but approval for long-term use would be the subject of a larger study in a fourth phase of studies.

Aisen, who works as a paid advisor to Biogen, emphasizes the “unusual nature” of the regulator’s green light, as an advisory board of experts voted and publicly opposed the approval, and insists that there were still “many questions the “I have – they still have no answers.”

Three members of the FDA’s panel that oversees the research have resigned since it was approved this week, including Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a medicine professor at Harvard Medical School, who said in a letter the agency’s decision on Biogen was “probably the worst drug approval decision in history.” recent US history. “

Last November, that panel said in an 8-1 vote that Biogen’s late-stage phase did not provide “strong evidence” showing that aducanumab is effective in treating Alzheimer’s; two other panellists said the data was “uncertain”.

While Aisen sees Aduhelm as an “effective treatment” for a disease that affects millions of Americans, he also has concerns about the impact of the FDA’s decision on the range of other potential treatment options that are in the late stages of development.

An immediate challenge facing other teams working on a broader Alzheimer’s drug pipeline, he said in a recent video call, would be to keep participants in ongoing studies, let alone attract new ones.

“In most cases,” he said, many people with Alzheimer’s disease would drop out of other drug trials to begin treatment with the newly approved Aduhelm. Leaving them would make the study data for these alternative drugs less useful, even if the drugs in question might one day prove to be safer, more effective, or more suitable for different stages of the disease. But perhaps pervertedly, he still regards Aduhelm’s approval as “a boost to these efforts – a powerful boost”.

Over 6 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s

In the past few years, some large pharmaceutical companies have abandoned brain disease research efforts, including Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim in 2018 – in fact, Biogen Aduhelm had given up at one point during clinical trials in 2019 before reversing its decision – after decades of failure in search of a breakthrough.

The controversy surrounding the Biogen drug, including its potential cost, is hitting a massive, unmet need for dementia treatment and a disease that costs the US up to $ 259 billion annually. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that more than 6 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, and by 2050 that number could reach over 12 million people, which costs a trillion dollars a year.

Because of this, some dementia drug experts are focusing on the new attention and funding, rather than the potential downsides of Biogen approval, said Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, a neurologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who does an annual review of. publishes Alzheimer’s drug development pipeline. His research consistently showed that drug failure rates prior to Biogen’s approval were 99.6 percent, a stark contrast to 1 in 5 successful cancer drugs (20%).

Cummings says that any short-term adverse side effect for other drug trials “will be overcome, if at all, by increased interest from companies, venture capital, and biotechnology once they see that there is a way to get approval for a particular drug”. Illness.”

In recent history, the National Institutes of Health spent two to three times more research on heart disease and cancer than they did on dementia, and the lack of qualified participants in clinical trials also slowed progress.

Next in the dementia drug pipeline

For the handful of other Alzheimer’s drugs in development hoping to overcome the same regulatory hurdles and prove their effectiveness – including Eli Lillys Donanemab, Roches Gantenerumab, and Eiseis Lecanemab – there could be a silver lining, the first mover advantage to cede to Aduhelm.

After decades of expensive but largely unsuccessful research attempts, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s CEO David Ricks said that after a series of positive phase two results for its Donanemab offering, his company is “getting closer and closer to the goal”.

Speaking at CNBC’s Healthy Returns Summit in May, a month before the FDA approved Aduhelm’s rival Biogen, he said his team felt “good about the probability of success” and said he wanted an “accelerated” route too explore what he called “adaptative avenues for the FDA to consider earlier study of data” that “should be used in a serious and widespread disease like Alzheimer’s”.

However, he conceded that recruiting for the next phase of the studies would require a significantly larger cohort of participants, and since it would take 18 months, he did not expect a new approved product until late 2023 at the earliest.

Several experts told CNBC that the Biogen drug’s unique threshold for regulatory approval, with the treatment potential appearing to trump uncertain real-world benefits, efforts of competitors like Lilly, who are focused on drug development on relatively based on similar techniques.

Aduhelm’s own clinical study data had shown that the drug successfully attacked and cleared clusters of a certain type of protein that many researchers believe may be responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. But it didn’t offer enough evidence to prove that the drug provided cognitive benefits to patients.

Debate on targeting amyloid beta formations

Known by scientists as aducanumab, it works by offering a set of identical antibodies that are cloned from white blood cells. These antibodies are chosen for their targeting abilities, as they can identify specific proteins called beta-amyloids that have built up certain formations in the body.

There is ample evidence that these beta-amyloid formations, also known as “pathological aggregates” or “plaques,” are a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease, although the exact causal mechanisms are not yet fully understood, according to Christian Pike von USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Nonetheless, he says the antibodies can help prevent these plaques from forming before other particles are caused to break them apart, a process that is clearly identifiable in before and after neural imaging.

As an analogy, it may be helpful to think of the amyloid beta proteins as young people walking through a city during the day, where the city is the human body and the day is a human lifespan. In certain cities, when afternoon turns into evening, individual young people gather, and some of these gatherings can become toxic and begin to cause problems. The antibodies supplied by Aduhelm act like police officers arriving at the scene, identifying disruptive gatherings, surrounding them, separating them, and then instructing bystanders to disperse the young people.

“When you say, ‘Well, hey, the FDA is buying in that general concept,'” Pike said on a phone call, “if we can remove beta-amyloid from the brains of people with the disease, even if we can there is limited evidence of cognitive benefits, “he continued,” there could be a variety of different therapies that would qualify under these criteria.

The long string of past failures within the Alzheimer’s pipeline that targeted beta-amyloid will continue to weigh on optimism until conclusive evidence is produced – something this week’s controversy over the first new approved Alzheimer’s drug in decades shows has not yet been done.

“What we’re going to find out by using this drug one way or another is whether or not the amyloid clearing hypothesis is correct,” says USC health economist Darius Lakdawalla, who argues that Biogens will continue to test it Drug will prove useful to this confirmatory experiment.

“If it’s right, then I think it opens the door to a lot of innovation, a lot of drug candidates that will try to remove amyloid in the pursuit of that hypothesis in the future.”

Categories
Politics

To Counter China’s Belt-and-Highway, Biden Tries to Unite G7

To Counter China's Belt-and-Road, Biden Tries to Unite G7

PLYMOUTH, England – President Biden on Saturday urged the nations of Europe and Japan to counter China’s growing economic and security influence by providing hundreds of billions in funding to developing countries as an alternative to building new roads, railways, ports and communications networks in Beijing offer.

It was the first time the world’s richest nations discussed organizing a direct alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s overseas loan and investment plan that now spans Africa, Latin America and, hesitantly until it has spread to Europe itself. But the White House made no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement between the United States and its allies over how to respond to China’s rising power.

Mr Biden has made the challenge of an emerging China and a disruptive Russia at the heart of a foreign policy aimed at building democracies around the world as bulwarks against the spread of authoritarianism. For its part, Beijing has pointed to the US’s poor response to the pandemic and divisive American policies – particularly the January 6 uprising in the Capitol – as a sign that democracy is failing.

In scope and ambition, China’s development efforts far surpass the Marshall Plan, the United States’ program to rebuild Europe after World War II. At the Summit of the Group of Seven, discussions on Saturday about how to counteract this mirrored the debate in the West over whether to see China as a partner, a competitor, an adversary or an absolute security threat.

It is far from clear that the wealthy democracies will be able to come up with a comprehensive answer.

The plan described by the White House appeared to bring together existing projects in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and encourage private funding. An information sheet distributed to reporters named it “Build Back Better for the World,” with roots in Mr. Biden’s campaign theme – B3W for short, a game about China’s BRI.

He stressed the environment, anti-corruption efforts, the free flow of information and funding conditions that would allow developing countries to avoid excessive debt. One of the criticisms of Belt and Road is that the nations that sign it become dependent on China, which gives Beijing too much leverage over them.

It was a sign of growing concern about the ubiquitous Chinese surveillance that the UK hosts of this year’s G7 meeting cut all Internet and Wi-Fi connections in the room where the leaders met and so they away from uncoupled from the outside world.

Leaders broadly agree that China is using its investment strategy to both strengthen its state-owned enterprises and build a network of commercial ports and communication systems through Huawei, over which it would have significant control. But officials emerging from the meeting said Germany, Italy and the European Union are clearly concerned about risking their huge trade and investment deals with Beijing or accelerating what has increasingly taken on the tone of a new Cold War.

Mr Biden used the meeting to advance his argument that the fundamental struggle in the post-pandemic era will be democracy versus autocracies.

The first test could be whether he can convince the Allies to refuse participation in projects that rely on forced labor. It is unclear, American officials said what language about rejecting goods or investing in such projects would be included in the meeting’s final communiqué, which will be released on Sunday.

But the meeting comes just one day after Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken, who is traveling here with Mr. Biden, told his Chinese counterpart in a telephone conversation that the United States is actively opposing “ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing” of Muslims in Xinjiang in far west China and “the deterioration of democratic norms” in Hong Kong. The European heads of state and government have largely avoided this terminology.

The divisions on how to view China help explain why the West has not yet found a coordinated response to the Belt and Road. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations described Washington’s own reactions as a “scattershot,” a mixture of modest adjustments by Congress to rules governing the Export-Import Bank to compete with high-tech Chinese loans and efforts to get Huawei to China’s telecommunications, outlaw champion.

The risk to American strategy is that dealing with a patchwork of separate programs – and Western insistence on good environmental and human rights practices – may seem less attractive to developing countries than Beijing’s all-in-one package of finance and new technology .

“Many BRI countries appreciate the speed with which China can move from planning to construction,” said the council report, written by a bipartisan group of China experts and former US officials.

These countries, she added, also value China’s “willingness to build what host countries want instead of telling them what to do and the ease with which to deal with a single group of builders, financiers and government officials.”

Still, Mr Biden feels an opening as European nations have begun to understand the risks of reliance on Chinese supply chains and watch China’s reach expand into their own backyards.

Britain, which once pursued arguably the most China-friendly policies in Europe, has firmly stood behind the American hard line, especially with regard to Huawei, which the US sees as a security threat. After trying to accommodate Huawei, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that it was ripping older Huawei devices from its networks.

Biden in Europe

Updated

June 12, 2021, 7:11 a.m. ET

Germany, for which China has become the number 1 market for Volkswagen and BMW, remains committed to its commitment and is profoundly opposed to a new Cold War. It has launched decisions about the use of Huawei and other Chinese-made network devices after Chinese officials threatened to retaliate by banning the sale of German luxury cars in China.

Italy became the first member of the G7 to join the “Belt and Road” in 2019. It then had to resign in part under pressure from NATO allies who feared that Italian infrastructure, including the telecommunications network, would depend on Chinese technology.

When China sent face masks and ventilators to a desperate Italy during the Covid outbreak, an Italian official told his fellow Europeans stressed that the country would remember who its friends were after the pandemic.

France has not joined Belt and Road, despite welcoming Chinese investment in the country and not banning Huawei from its wireless network. Relations with China have cooled after President Emmanuel Macron criticized Beijing for its lack of transparency about the origins of the coronavirus.

“America would be well served if the European Union works together and defines a coherent China strategy,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the USA. “Interests are not served well if there is a German China strategy, a French China strategy and a British China strategy.”

That’s easier said than done. Britain moved closer to the US under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump – less because it changed its view of China’s strategy or security risks than because it feared being isolated from its key ally after Brexit.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who firmly believes in her commitment to China, will resign in a few months. But not much is likely to change in Germany’s politics, especially if her successor as CDU leader Armin Laschet replaces her in the Chancellery. He is considered to be in step with Ms. Merkel.

France is a different story. Macron faces a formidable challenge from the populist right in next year’s elections. Right-wing leader Marine LePen has vowed to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Whenever you have one of these meetings, you will see a fluid movement in one country or another,” said Simon Fraser, a former top official in the UK Foreign Office. But he added: “There is a lack of cohesion on the European side that needs to be addressed”.

Italy is a good test case of how China has tried to build influence in Europe. Since joining Belt and Road, Rome has signed nearly two dozen agreements with Beijing, ranging from tax rules to sanitary rules for pork exports. However, Italy also vetoed a 5G deal between Huawei and one of its telecommunications companies.

At the heart of China’s investment in Europe is a rail network that would connect its factories on the Pacific Ocean to London – a project China’s Prime Minister Li Keqiang once called an expressway to Europe. Italy, which has a terminus on the route, welcomes the investment as a tonic for its ailing economy.

But Britain’s relations with China are frozen. The government imposed sanctions on China’s treatment of the Uyghur population and offered residency and access to citizenship to more than 300,000 British foreign passport holders in Hong Kong after China imposed a draconian national security law on the former British colony.

Analysts say China’s human rights record is hardening European attitudes across the board. The European Parliament refused to ratify a landmark investment agreement backed by Germany as China stubbornly responded to sanctions for its treatment of the Uyghurs. China has sanctioned ten EU politicians.

There is also evidence that Mr Biden realizes that his aggressive language about China – as the great adversary in a fateful struggle between democracies and autocracies – is uncomfortable for many Europeans. He largely avoided this framing in the days leading up to his European tour and spoke more generally about the need to promote democracies in a competitive world.

For some analysts, this opens the door to a hopeful scenario in which the United States and Europe are moving towards each other, moderating the most extreme aspects of the confrontation towards reconciliation in each other’s approaches.

“America becomes more realistic from the hard line to China, while Europe becomes more realistic from the soft line,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Categories
World News

Meet the researcher attempting to get Biden to forgive pupil debt

Meet the researcher trying to get Biden to forgive student debt

Charlie Eaton

Courtesy: Charlie Eaton

The odds of student loan forgiveness happening have never been greater, experts say. Yet a number of large obstacles stand in the way, some practical and others ideological.

Does the president have the authority to cancel the debt? Officials at the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice are currently trying to find answers to that question.

If they conclude President Joe Biden can do so, will he? And if they decide he doesn’t, will Democrats, despite their razor-thin majority, manage to pass legislation forgiving student debt?

At the center of the ideological debate, meanwhile, is the question over who would really benefit from a jubilee. A number of critics of broad student loan forgiveness say the policy would direct taxpayer dollars to people who are already relatively well-off, since college degrees lead to higher earnings.

More from Invest in You:
Almost half of Americans to take on debt as a treat post-pandemic
How to resist the urge to splurge in a post-pandemic spending spree
How to avoid overspending in this hot housing market

Biden has also questioned the fairness of canceling student debt, framing borrowers on multiple recent occasions as more privileged than others. “The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? Biden said in an interview with The New York Times in May. “I don’t agree.”

And at a CNN town hall back in February, Biden said it didn’t make sense to cancel the loans “for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

Now a group of scholars at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, have published research they hope will change the minds of Biden and other critics when it comes to student loan forgiveness.

Their biggest finding is that canceling $50,000 for all student loan borrowers would wipe out more than $17,000 per person among Black households in the bottom 10% of net worth, and over $11,000 among white and Latinx households in that lowest range.

Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwards

Meanwhile, the average cancellation would be just $562 per person for those in the top 10% of net worth.

In other words: A jubilee would most benefit those who are least well-off.

CNBC spoke this week with Charlie Eaton, an economic sociologist and one of the report’s authors, about its findings and how he hopes they will impact the ongoing debate about student loan forgiveness. (The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Annie Nova: Where do you think the idea that student loan forgiveness would help those who are well-off comes from?

Charlie Eaton: Part of the myth that cancellation would help wealthy people comes from the original theory that was used to justify student loans: that individuals are better off borrowing to go to college than not going to college at all. Folks are committed to this model and justify it as something that promotes equity.

Student loan forgiveness would only be a small initial step toward redressing the economic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But it’s necessary.

AN: You write that race is “a glaring omission” in the arguments against student loan forgiveness. Why do you think race has been left out?

CE: A lot of the most groundbreaking work on wealth inequality has happened in the last decade. I think the newness of this knowledge is part of it. But there’s also been a willful ignorance on racial inequality by those folks who wanted to see student loans as an easy way to pay for higher education in America in place of adequate taxes and spending.

AN: You talk about student loan forgiveness as a form of racial reparations. Why?

CE: Student loan forgiveness would only be a small initial step toward redressing the economic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But it’s necessary to enable Black borrowers to build wealth, because Black college-goers borrow at much higher rates than white borrowers. And, as a result, it’s much harder for them to get home loans and accumulate savings.

AN: Your report expresses doubts about the effectiveness of more narrow student loan forgiveness policies, such as one that would target low-income borrowers. Why do you think a broader cancellation is the way to go?

CE: If you try to layer on these exclusions, you have greater risk of failing to undo the inequities that have been created by our student loan system. For example, if you were going to go just by income, and you said we’re not going to cancel student loans for folks who make more than $75,000 a year, you’d be excluding the disproportionate number of Black professionals who may have incomes at that level but also have much more student debt than their white counterparts.

AN: What do you see as the biggest challenge to getting student loans cancelled?

CE: Joe Biden. He seems to have accepted this myth that student debt cancellation disproportionally helps wealthier folks when the opposite is true. He has said it wouldn’t be fair to cancel debt for folks who went to Harvard or Yale or Penn. The thing is Harvard has essentially already cancelled debt for its students: Only 3% of undergraduates at Harvard have any student loan debt at all. I’m hoping our research will get through to Biden to help him understand student debt cancellation will flow to those who need it.

AN: Do you know if anyone in the Biden administration has seen your research yet?

CE: We’ve shared our work directly with White House and Department of Education staff. And we’re optimistic that the Biden administration is looking seriously at the president’s ability to cancel student debt.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Categories
Health

F.D.A. Nonetheless Lacks a Everlasting Commissioner

F.D.A. Still Lacks a Permanent Commissioner

In addition to Dr. Woodcock still considered other candidates, but no one was publicly announced as a candidate during the sixth month of the president’s tenure. A White House spokesman refused to comment on the delay or the controversial candidates. But some people who should still be in the running are: Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former senior FDA official and Vice Dean of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Florence Houn, a former FDA official and former Vice President at Celgene who is now a consultant.

A new addition to the list is Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, a medical doctor and molecular immunologist who served as the FDA’s assistant scientific director during the Obama administration. But dr. McMurry-Heath’s candidacy would be hampered by her current position as director of the Biotechnology Industry Association, which lobbies for biotech companies.

In interviews, current and former FDA staff and industry executives cited several pressing priorities as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the nation.

The agency will shortly decide whether the three Covid vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which are already widely used, will be approved on a permanent basis. AstraZeneca and Novavax are expected to start filing applications for their emergency vaccines shortly. They are completing data collection from their Phase 3 studies in the United States. AstraZeneca is already approved in other countries, although some have restricted its use due to side effects. Novavax has not yet been approved elsewhere. Sanofi is also in phase 3 clinical trials and is expected to apply in the fall.

The federal government invested more than $ 19 billion in vaccines, but less than half of that in therapeutics. The Biden government has called for a renewed focus on developing treatments for Covid and its complications. Several therapies – remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, and the steroid dexamethasone – have improved outcomes in some Covid patients, but they don’t work for everyone.

The FDA has promised a new system called BEST to track side effects on the Covid vaccines, but it’s still not operating as promised. In the meantime, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are relying heavily on older tracking systems that they acknowledge to be profoundly flawed, largely because they rely on patients or health care providers to have bad reactions to their opinion report the vaccine without providing evidence. The agency is under increasing pressure to fix the system.

For years, clinics, academic institutions, and commercial laboratories have urged the FDA to develop their own in-house tests for various diseases without regulatory oversight. The FDA has resisted this for just as long. But in August, the Trump administration ordered the agency to approve these laboratory-developed tests to detect numerous diseases, including Covid-19, without first confirming that they work.

Categories
Health

Moderna says it hasn’t discovered a hyperlink between its shot and coronary heart irritation

Moderna asks FDA to authorize 5 additional doses per Covid vaccine vial to speed distribution, source tells CNBC

A healthcare worker stops during the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in New York on Jan.

Facebook Facebook logo Sign up on Facebook to connect with Mike Segar Reuters

Moderna has not found a link between its Covid-19 vaccine and the rare heart inflammation cases reported in young people who received the vaccination, the company said on Friday.

The Massachusetts-based biotech said it reached the conclusion after “carefully reviewing the safety data previously available for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for cases of myocarditis and / or pericarditis”.

“The company will continue to monitor these reports closely and is actively working with public health and regulators to further evaluate this issue,” said a statement.

A spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A CDC advisory body is organizing on 18.

A CDC official said Thursday that by May 31, the agency had received reports of 275 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in this age group, up from the 10 to 102 expected cases. The condition includes inflammation of the heart muscle or the lining around it.

“We clearly have an imbalance,” said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office on Thursday at a meeting of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products. The group met to discuss safety issues related to the use of Covid-19 vaccines in children 6 months and older.

The CDC’s vaccine safety group said last month it is studying heart infections in “relatively few” people who have received Covid vaccinations. Officials say they still don’t know if the condition is really related to the vaccines.

Some of the reported cases could be something other than myocarditis or pericarditis upon further investigation, Shimabukuro said Thursday.

Men make up the majority of reported cases and most cases appear to be mild, officials say. Of the 270 people who developed the disease and were discharged, 81% made a full recovery, according to a CDC presentation at Thursday’s meeting. By May 31, 15 people had been hospitalized, three of them in intensive care, the agency said.

Although no link has been found between the vaccines and the disease, health experts say side effects occur rarely once a vaccine or drug is administered to the general population. The US has distributed millions of Covid vaccines which have helped contain new cases and hospital stays across the country.

Categories
Politics

Justice Division to step up enforcement of voting rights protections

Justice Department to step up enforcement of voting rights protections

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday that the Justice Department will swiftly increase its resources dedicated to enforcing voting rights protections, citing a 2013 decision by the Supreme Court as well as bills being pushed by conservatives across the country that aim to tighten election procedures.

In a speech delivered at the department’s headquarters, Garland said that in the next 30 days he will double the civil rights division’s staff dedicated to protecting the right to vote.

The department, he said, had already begun scrutinizing new laws that he said “seek to curb voter access,” as well as policies and measures that are already on the books.

In particular, Garland said the department was reviewing recent studies that showed that, in some jurisdictions, nonwhite people wait in line much longer than white people to vote.

“To meet the challenge of the current moment, we must rededicate the resources of the Department of Justice to a critical part of its original mission: Enforcing federal law to protect the franchise for all voters,” Garland said.

Garland, a former federal judge, said the department’s new steps were inspired by “a dramatic rise in legislative efforts that will make it harder for citizens to cast a vote that counts.”

“So far this year, at least 14 states have passed new laws that make it harder to vote, and some jurisdictions, based on disinformation, have utilized abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine public confidence in our democracy,” Garland said.

The attorney general alluded to a 2020 election recount underway in Arizona’s Maricopa County supported by former President Donald Trump. The Justice Department wrote in a letter last month that the review by the state’s Republican Senate may violate federal law.

“Many of the justifications proffered in support of these post-election audits and restrictions on voting have relied on assertions of material vote fraud in the 2020 election that have been refuted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court, federal and state, that has considered them,” Garland said.

He added, “Moreover, many of the changes are not even calibrated to address the kinds of voter fraud that are alleged as their justification.”

Garland has been at pains to emphasize the independence of his Justice Department from President Joe Biden, a Democrat, even as he distances the federal agency from its controversial record under Trump, who at times pushed its lawyers to defend his personal interests. Trump has falsely alleged that his loss in the 2020 election was fraudulent.

In addition to the wave of conservative voting bills in states such as Texas, Georgia and Arizona, Garland also cited a Supreme Court decision from 2013 known as Shelby County v. Holder.

The decision effectively struck down the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, which forced certain jurisdictions with records of discrimination to have election law changes approved by the Justice Department.

Garland recounted that in 1961, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy called into his office the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Burke Marshall, and Marshall’s first assistant, John Doar.

Before the pre-clearance requirement was signed into law in 1965, Garland said, “the only way to guarantee the right of Black Americans to vote was to bring individual actions in each county and parish that discriminated against them.”

“Kennedy told his assistants that was what he wanted to do,” Garland said. “‘Well, General,’ Burke Marshall replied, ‘if you want that, you’ve got to have a lot more lawyers.'”

“Well, today, we are again without a pre-clearance provision,” Garland said. “So again, the civil rights division is going to need more lawyers.”

In addition to beefing up the staff of the civil rights division, Garland said the Justice Department will publish guidance on post-election audits and on early voting and voting by mail. He said the department will also publish new guidance ahead of the decennial redistricting cycle.

“We will publish new guidance to make clear the voting protections that apply to all jurisdictions as they redraw their new legislative maps,” Garland said.

Garland added that the department, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, will also pursue criminal charges against those who violate federal laws in spreading election disinformation in efforts to suppress the vote.

“We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers,” Garland said. “Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon in a case over the Voting Rights Act that could have implications for legal challenges against the new voting restrictions. The court has a 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republicans.

Subscribe to CNBC Pro for the TV livestream, deep insights and analysis.

Categories
Entertainment

A Movie Tries to Make a Distinction for Home Violence Survivors

A Film Tries to Make a Difference for Domestic Violence Survivors

In 2013, Tanisha Davis, a 26-year-old woman from Rochester, NY, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing her boyfriend and a beating the night he died. The judge agreed that she was a victim of domestic violence, but said that her response deserves no indulgence. “You handled the situation completely wrong,” he told her. “You could have left.”

In 2021, the same judge dismissed Davis on a new law that allowed domestic violence survivors to have more nuanced consideration in the courts, thanks in part to a documentary that helped shape their case.

It is not uncommon for documentary projects to have an impact on legal proceedings once they have found an audience and built public attention. But the film that Davis helped, “And So I Stayed,” wasn’t out yet – it wasn’t even finished – when filmmakers Natalie Pattillo and Daniel A. Nelson put together a short video for the court of them described their lives.

“You could see how strong the bonds she had with her family and the strength of the support she would have” if she were released, said Angela N. Ellis, one of her lawyers. The prosecutor and the judge both mentioned that they were watching the footage when they agreed to release her in March.

During her eight years in prison, Davis, 34, spoke to her son, who is now 15, every day. Now that she is at home, “I can just call him in the next room,” she said. “I can’t even explain this joy. I cry tears of joy all the time. “

For the filmmakers, it was an unexpectedly bright ending to an often heartbreaking and unsettling film. And So I Stayed, which premieres Saturday at the Brooklyn Film Festival (online until June 13), is personal for Pattillo, who is a survivor herself and whose sister was killed by a friend in 2010. The documentary grew out of her graduation project at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Nelson, her co-director.

“I didn’t realize how common it is that women are imprisoned for defending themselves or their children,” said Pattillo. “When I found out, I couldn’t stop reporting” to show how misunderstood and punitive these cases are within the judicial system.

The film’s first focus was on Kim Dadou Brown, who spent 17 years in prison for killing her violent boyfriend. She became a lawyer and traveled to Albany to brief New York lawmakers on the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, the long-smoldering piece of legislation that eventually helped free Davis. Introduced in 2011, it was finally passed in 2019 after the Democrats flipped the state senate.

The law is one of the few laws in the country that gives judges more leniency in convicting victims of domestic violence who commit crimes against their perpetrators. It follows a growing, research-based understanding of the patterns of abusive relationships and the unique impact they have on the people in them.

“Leaving is the hardest part,” and the most dangerous, said Dadou Brown. “I thought all men were hitting and I stuck with mine so I knew which way the hitting would be coming.”

After Dadou Brown, a Rochester native and former healthcare worker, was paroled in 2008, she volunteered with survivors and crossed the state for rallies – even when money was tight because her felony status made it difficult to find jobs, she said. With 17 earrings (one for each year of imprisonment) and her signature false eyelashes, “she’s just a force,” said Pattillo. “It’s sheer tenacity. This is Kim. “

When the bill was passed, there was high spirits among its supporters and filmmakers. But they left their cameras on.

One case considered a surefire test of the crime was that of Nicole Addimando, a young mother of two in Poughkeepsie, NY, who fatally shot and killed Christopher Grover, her living friend and father of the children, in 2017. The film contains footage from police cameras the night she was found disoriented and driving around in the early hours of the morning with her 4 and 2 year olds in the backseat.

Her case made national headlines for the severity of the abuse she allegedly suffered: bites and blue eyes; Bruises and burns on her body, including during pregnancy, that have been documented by doctors; Rapes that Grover videotaped and uploaded to a porn site. In the film, a social worker calls it not just assault, but “sexual torture”. In 2020, Addimando was sentenced to 19 years of life imprisonment for second degree manslaughter; the judge contested the applicability of the Survivor Justice Act.

“I felt like we let them down,” said Dadou Brown, who was at the conviction.

In the film, Addimando can mainly be heard as the voice on the phone from prison; with a phone call, her mother tries to comfort her that she is at least still alive, that she has escaped being mistreated. “I’m still not free,” she replies, crying.

While there are no statewide statistics on the number of women incarcerated who have defended themselves against abusers, federal research suggests that around half of women in jail have experienced physical abuse or sexual violence, most from romantic partners. Black women are disproportionately harassed by both intimate partner violence and the judicial system: they are most often killed by a romantic partner and more likely to end up in prison, according to Bernadine Waller, a researcher at Adelphi University.

According to Nelson, the filmmaker, bringing stories like this to the screen is not about questioning the triggers, but rather about contextualizing the convicts. “The legal system forces you to create the perfect victim,” he said, “and a prosecutor will do everything in his power to characterize a survivor so that he does not fit in that box.” (In Addimando’s case, the judge said she “reluctantly consented” to the sexual abuse.)

Garrard Beeney, an Addimando attorney pending a decision on her appeal, said the investigation into the documentary into the judiciary’s handling of survivors was “a necessary but, in my opinion, not sufficient step” to change the process . Police, prosecutors and judges need training to think about domestic violence, he said. “We need this type of retraining more urgently than a gradual process of understanding.”

For Pattillo, who had two of her three children while filming, a few moments felt overwhelmingly raw. “There is always survivor’s fault when dealing with trauma,” she said, adding, referring to Addimando, “Why was I fine and not Nikki? Why don’t you take care of your children every night? “

But it is also “very healing,” she added, “to have helped survivors feel seen, heard and believed through this film.”

It originally ended on a dark note, at a vigil for Addimando. Then came the Davis case. The filmmakers were there on the day she was released from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Getting used to the outdoors again – during a pandemic – is still a challenge, Davis said last week. But she wanted her story to be told as a warning to the victims and as a beacon. The filmmakers plan to make the documentary available to the legal system – “a toolkit,” Nelson said on how to apply the new law.

Dadou Brown was also in Bedford Hills; she drove Davis’ family there. Her advocacy, said Dadou Brown, has become her life’s work. “I’m so happy to have so many dream moments,” she said. “Even when I come home from prison. My next dream will come true, to bring Nikki home. “