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Entertainment

Graham Firm Declares Season of In-Individual Performances

Graham Company Announces Season of In-Person Performances

The Martha Graham Dance Company will debut new works by Andrea Miller and Hofesh Shechter in their upcoming season in New York, the troupe announced on Thursday. Miller’s first will be performed at the Joyce Theater this fall. Shechters Tanz will be premiered in April 2022 as part of the first City Center Dance Festival.

A third new piece, inspired by Graham’s mostly lost “Canticle for Innocent Comedians,” premieres in March 2022 at the Soraya Performing Arts Center in Northridge, California, and performed at the City Center Festival.

While the company made brief appearances this spring – they did a short program at the Guggenheim in April and on a mixed bill at the Kaatsbaan in May – the season opener at the Joyce from October 26th to 31st will be their full live performances. “I believe the exhilaration of being in the physical presence of our audience – experiencing this deeply personal and emotional connection with heightened appreciation – will be the unmistakable highlight of this season,” said Janet Eilber, the group’s artistic director, in a statement.

Miller’s dance, still untitled, is performed by eight dancers and set to music by the composer Will Epstein, with whom she previously worked. Shechter’s work, currently called “Convergence,” will use all of the company’s dancers; Daniil Simkin, soloist of the American Ballet Theater and the Staatsballett Berlin, will be present at selected performances.

Sonya Tayeh directs the new version of “Canticle for Innocent Comedians” from 1952. She will create the prelude, the finale, the transitions and “Sun”, one of the eight nature-related vignettes. Micaela Taylor, Yin Yue, Juliano Nunes, Kristina and Sadé Alleyne, and Jenn Freeman will do five more. The remaining sections were created by Robert Cohan, a member of the original cast who died in January; and Graham, whose choreography for “Moon” has been preserved. The piece is set to music by jazz pianist Jason Moran.

The Graham season will also feature a repertoire from its founder and inspiration, from “Appalachian Spring,” one of her best-known works, to “Acts of Light,” which has not been shown in New York since 2007.

The company tours between the two stops in Manhattan: in the USA as well as in France, Germany and Turkey. After the City Center Festival, it’s off to Greece in April and China in May.

More information is available at marthagraham.org.

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Health

Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine will get barely weaker over time, firm knowledge exhibits, however stays robust in stopping extreme illness.

Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine gets slightly weaker over time, company data shows, but remains strong in preventing severe disease.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s effectiveness wanes slightly over time, according to newly released data from the companies, but remains strong in preventing severe disease. With coronavirus cases surging again in many states, the findings may influence the Biden administration’s deliberations about delivering a booster shot.

The vaccine had a sky-high efficacy rate of about 96 percent against symptomatic Covid-19 for the first two months, the study showed, but then declined about 6 percent every two months after that, falling to 83.7 percent after six months. Against severe disease, its efficacy held steady at about 97 percent. The data was posted online on Wednesday and has not been published in a scientific journal.

Despite the decline, the data confirm that the vaccine gives potent protection against Covid-19. Still, the study raises questions about how much protection two doses will provide in the months to come. Adding to these concerns is the rise of the Delta variant, which makes vaccines somewhat less effective against infection. The variant became dominant only after the study ended. But recent studies have also shown that vaccines remain strongly protective against the worst outcomes of Covid-19 caused by the Delta variant.

The findings come from 42,000 volunteers in six countries who participated in a clinical trial that Pfizer and BioNTech began last July. Half of the volunteers got the vaccine while the other half got a placebo. Both groups received two shots spaced three weeks apart. The researchers compared the number of people in each group who developed symptoms of Covid-19, which was then confirmed by a P.C.R. virus test.

When the companies announced their first batch of results, the vaccine showed an efficacy against symptomatic Covid-19 of 95 percent. In other words, the risk of getting sick was reduced by 95 percent in the group that got the vaccine compared to the group that got the placebo.

That result — the first for any Covid-19 vaccine — brought an exhilarating dose of hope to the world in December when it was riding what had been the biggest wave of the pandemic. Since then, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has made up the majority of shots that Americans have received, with more than 191 million doses given so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

After the first analysis, the Pfizer and BioNTech researchers continued to follow the volunteers. The research became more challenging as time passed, because volunteers who got the placebo could ask to get the vaccine once it was authorized in their country.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

For the new study, the researchers followed the volunteers for six months after vaccination, up to a cutoff date of March 13. Looking over that entire period, the researchers estimated the vaccine’s efficacy at 91.5 percent against symptomatic Covid-19. (The study did not measure the rate of asymptomatic virus infections.)

But within that period, the efficacy did gradually drop. Between one week and two months after the second dose, the efficacy was 96.2 percent. In the period between two and four months, the efficacy fell to 90.1 percent. And between four months and six months, the efficacy hit 83.7 percent.

Each estimate came with a margin of uncertainty. But over the six months of the trial, there was a clear decline in efficacy.

The new study comes on the heels of data from Israel suggesting that the Pfizer-BioNTech’s protection may be waning there. But experts have pushed back against a rush to approving a booster there. The data have too many sources of uncertainty, they say, to make a precise estimate of how much effectiveness has waned. For example, the Delta-driven outbreak hit parts of the country with high vaccination rates first and has been hitting other regions later. “Such an analysis is still highly uncertain,” said Doron Gazit, a physicist at Hebrew University who analyzes Covid-19 trends for the Israeli government.

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Politics

Matt Gaetz’s marketing campaign paid $20,000 to Trump crony Roger Stone’s firm

Matt Gaetz's campaign paid $20,000 to Trump crony Roger Stone's company

Florida Republican Republican Matt Gaetz’s campaign committee paid at least $ 20,000 to a company the Justice Department claims was used by GOP politician Roger Stone and his wife to avoid taxes, such as campaign funding reports showed.

Gaetz’s campaign paid Drake Ventures LLC for three months for “Strategic Campaign Consulting,” according to the quarterly filings of the Federal Electoral Commission committee, the latest of which was released Thursday.

That filing showed that the campaign raised approximately $ 1.45 million and spent more than $ 1.9 million between April and June, and also revealed that more than $ 825,000 was spent on the Logan Circle Group , who hired PR firm Gaetz when news surfaced that he was involved in a federal investigation into sex trafficking. Gaetz is not charged with criminal law and denies any wrongdoing.

The Logan Circle Group is run by Harlan Hill, who was banned from appearing on Fox News after tweeting that Vice President Kamala Harris “comes across as such an unbearable lie.”

Gaetz’s campaign also paid $ 50,000 in legal fees for the quarter, half of which went to the law firm of Marc Fernich, the defense attorney whose notable clients include the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the long-dead belong gang boss John Gotti.

The Gaetz campaign paid Stone’s company in four separate portions of $ 5,000, the documents showed. The FEC filings list a Fort Lauderdale address for Drake Ventures associated with Stone, who lives near the coastal city of Florida.

The first of those rates came in late March, less than a week before the New York Times first reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and was paying for her travel with him. Three days after the news broke, a second payment of $ 5,000 was made to Stone.

Gaetz’s friend, former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, pleaded guilty to a number of crimes in May in the case that reportedly led to the investigation of Gaetz. Greenberg cooperates with the federal prosecutor’s office.

The other two payments to Drake Ventures came after the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit against Stone and his wife, Nydia Stone, in mid-April alleging the couple used the company as an “alter ego” to “get their personal income off the ground.” protect”. forced collection and finance a lavish lifestyle. “

“They used Drake Ventures to obtain payments to be made to Roger Stone personally to pay for their personal expenses, protect their assets and avoid reporting taxable income to the IRS,” the DOJ wrote in its appeal .

The Stones owe nearly $ 2 million in unpaid federal taxes and other fees, the DOJ alleged in the lawsuit filed in Fort Lauderdale federal district court.

Federal prosecutors also accused the Stones of “defrauding the United States” by using assets in Drake Ventures’ accounts to buy their home on behalf of a separate trust.

Stone has described the lawsuit as “politically motivated”.

“Our FEC filings speak for themselves,” said a Gaetz spokesman on Thursday evening in an email to CNBC. “Despite an endless barrage of lies from the media, Congressman Gaetz continues to be one of the greatest fundraisers in Congress and the only Republican not to accept donations from federal lobbyists or PACs. He thanks his tens of thousands of donors and pledges “to always fight for them.”

Hardly any information was given about the company’s “strategic campaign advice” for the Gaetz campaign.

“I’m not interested in talking about the case or anything on record,” said Brian Harris, an attorney representing Stone and Drake Ventures on the DOJ lawsuit, in a brief phone call with CNBC before hanging up .

Stone did not respond to CNBC’s inquiries about Gaetz’s campaign committee payments. Two other attorneys representing the Stones and Drake Ventures, Derick Vollrath and Jeffrey Neiman, made no comment.

Stone and Gaetz are both Florida based and both are loyal to former President Donald Trump, who has lived at his Palm Beach golf club since leaving office in January.

In late December, Trump pardoned 68-year-old Stone, who had been convicted of lying to Congress under oath.

– CNBC’s Brian Schwartz contributed to this report.

Categories
Health

Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Protects In opposition to Delta Variant, Firm Experiences

Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Protects Against Delta Variant, Company Reports

Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine is still effective eight months after being vaccinated against the highly contagious Delta variant, the company reported Thursday – a result that should reassure the 11 million Americans who received the vaccination.

The vaccine showed a slight decrease in effectiveness against the variant compared to its effectiveness against the original virus, the company said. But the vaccine was more effective against the Delta variant than the beta variant, which was first identified in South Africa – the pattern was also seen with mRNA vaccines.

Antibodies stimulated by the vaccine get stronger over time, researchers also reported.

The results were described in a press release, and the company announced that both studies were submitted for online publication on Thursday. One of these studies was accepted for publication in a scientific journal. Both studies are small, and the researchers said they published the results early because of the great public interest.

“The coverage of the variants will be better than expected,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “There was a lot of misinformation out there so we decided we had to get this public right away.”

The intense discourse about Delta’s threat has made even immunized people worry about whether they are protected. The variant first identified in India is much more transmissible than previous versions of the virus, and its global spread has resulted in new health restrictions from Ireland to Malaysia.

In the USA, the variant now accounts for every fourth new infection. Public health officials said the vaccines approved in the United States will work against all existing variants, but the data is primarily based on studies of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

That made some people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine ask, What about us?

The frustration built before the Delta variant appeared. For example, the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that vaccinated people could do without masks in many indoor situations were mainly based on data for mRNA vaccines. And reports of an accumulation of infections among players on the Yankees baseball team that the J. & J. Shot did nothing to allay fears that the vaccine might be inferior to others.

Martha Young, 63, of Mountain View, California received the J. & J. shot on April 9th. It wasn’t their first choice, but it was offered. But since then she has said, “I’m very, very frustrated with the lack of information.”

She added, referring to the J. & J. “I felt like I didn’t count, like I was statistically insignificant because so few of us stand a chance that we don’t have to worry about us.”

Some people familiar with the J. & J. Vaccine complained that they felt cheated by experts who said the vaccines were all equally good. “I was surprised to see others make that claim,” said Natalie Dean, biostatistician at the University of Florida. “I did not like it. People don’t want to feel misled. “

However, other experts said the clinical trials should have shown that the J. & J. Vaccine was lower than that of the mRNA vaccines. “Of course, 72 percent is less than 95 or 94 percent,” says Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai in New York.

Part of the difficulty with comparing the vaccines is that they were all tested individually and with different measures of success. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna studies were designed to capture symptomatic infections, while the J. & J. Study looked at the prevention of moderate to severe infections by the vaccine.

Still, it’s clear that all vaccines keep people out of the intensive care unit and morgue far more effectively than scientists could hope for, said Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London.

Updated

July 1, 2021, 10:13 p.m. ET

“It’s like arguing whether you want a Ferrari or a Porsche that goes 250 or 180 mph on a road that is only allowed to drive 30 miles an hour,” he said.

However, there are differences: The J. & J. The vaccine can allow more so-called breakthrough infections – which occur in people who are fully vaccinated – with mild to no symptoms than the mRNA vaccines.

People with asymptomatic infections are very unlikely to spread the virus, but their diagnosis can become a problem when they’re caught by routine tests – as was the case with the Yankees cluster – and they have to go into quarantine, said John Moore, one Virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

Information on the effectiveness of the J. & J. The vaccine was slow to get to market because it was launched later and its use was suspended due to concerns about infrequent blood clots. Many medical centers and hospitals offered staff the mRNA vaccines early on and were able to conduct studies to evaluate these vaccines.

But blood samples from people who were tested with the J. & J. Vaccines are a comparatively rare commodity, said Dr. Krammer. “It’s not that nobody cares, or we’re hiding something because the vaccine isn’t good,” he said. “It’s more of an access problem.”

In the absence of data, some experts had suggested that the J. & J. Vaccination against the Delta variant probably performed about as well as the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is widely used in Europe. But this vaccine is given in two doses compared to J. & J’s single dose.

“The thing that I do at J. & J. is that their technology platform is essentially very, very similar – almost indistinguishable from AstraZeneca, ”said Dr. Altmann. “Should it really be a two-dose vaccine like everything else?”

The single dose offers benefits for those with limited access or who do not want two doses for other reasons. The J. & J. The vaccine also lasts longer in the refrigerator than the others and was a welcome option earlier in the pandemic when vaccines were scarce.

But after the advent of variants like Beta and Delta, which seem to bypass the immune system in part, the discussion about boosters for J. & J. Receiver intensified. One dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is much less effective against variants than two doses, and experts feared that J. & J. Shot could be similar.

The new study addressed some of these concerns.

While blood antibody levels produced after immunization with Pfizer or Moderna decrease after an initial increase, antibodies – and immune cells – are released by the J. & J. Vaccine remains at a high level. (Other studies have shown that immune responses generated by mRNA vaccines are likely to last for years, too.)

A lack of information about the J. & J. Vaccine had led many people to speculate that it might need to be supplemented with a dose of an mRNA vaccine. But at least for now, people who have the J. & J. Vaccine shouldn’t need a booster shot, nor can they legally get one, “unless they’re playing the system, unless they pretend they’re vaccine naïve and get an mRNA vaccine and are essentially lying,” said Dr . Moore, “and I certainly … don’t recommend people do that.”

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Health

Doximity CEO ignored Silicon Valley knowledge, constructed $10 billion firm

Doximity CEO ignored Silicon Valley wisdom, built $10 billion company

Jeff Tangney, CEO, of Doximity at the New York Stock Exchange for their IPO, June 24, 2021.

Source: NYSE

Jeff Tangney launched his first health-tech start-up, Epocrates, in the middle of the dot-com bubble. While the company survived the crash and eventually went public, the endgame was a disappointing acquisition for less than $300 million.

By the time Tangney started his next venture, Doximity, in 2010, he’d learned a few things: Don’t raise too much money. Don’t burn too much cash. Fix a real problem for doctors.

With Doximity, Tangney created a web service that’s both a professional network — think LinkedIn for doctors — and a secure way for medical experts to communicate and share information with patients and colleagues. It now counts 1.8 million medical pros in the U.S. as users, including over 80% of physicians.

On Thursday, Doximity debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, closing the week with a market cap of almost $10 billion after raising around $500 million in its IPO. Tangney’s stake is worth $2.9 billion.

Those are big numbers especially when you consider that, prior to this week, Doximity never showed up on a “unicorn” list of billion-dollar tech companies. Its last financing round in 2014 valued the company at under $400 million. Tangney said that because Doximity is profitable it still hasn’t touched the $50 million it raised seven years ago.

“I did resist some of the Silicon Valley wisdom of, you need to go big, you need to hire 40 more salespeople and do all these things,” Tangney, 48, said in an interview on Thursday, after ringing the bell at the NYSE.

In Doximity’s target market, there’s no point in aiming for rocketship growth, Tangney said. The company generates revenue from drugmakers, who use the site to market treatments to a very targeted audience, and health systems looking to promote content to doctors across the country. It’s also a recruiting tool hospitals and health centers use to fill key jobs.

Tangney recognized early on that he could expand only as rapidly as customer budgets would allow.

“The reality of health care and our clients, who are very staid institutions, a lot of non-profits that have been around for 100 years, is that even if you lean in and hire tons of sales and marketing people, they’re not going to let you grow,” Tangney said.

He’s also not inclined to pay for branding just for the sake of building his profile — another reason why the company has remained largely unknown in Silicon Valley even though it’s headquartered in San Francisco. Doximity’s advertising budget for last fiscal year totaled $2.6 million, or roughly the amount Uber spends on an average day.

Tangney said the best advertising has come from doctors touting the product within their practitioner networks.

Meanwhile, the company generated over $200 million in revenue last fiscal year and produced over $50 million in net income.

Climbing trip at Stanford

Tangney’s journey to Doximity started in the late 1990s while he was living in New York with a trained physician named Richard Fiedotin. From their un-air-conditioned apartment, the pair came up with the idea of creating an app for the Palm Pilot, which had just hit the market, that would allow doctors to get critical information.

Tangney and Fiedotin took that idea with them to Stanford Graduate School of Business, where they met another physician named Tom Lee. The three bonded over the intersection of tech and health care while on a teambuilding climbing trip for students in the program.

In 1998, they started what became Epocrates, and over the next two years raised about $40 million from some of Silicon Valley’s top health investors. As mobile moved to BlackBerry devices and then to iPhones, Epocrates gained traction as a way for doctors to make decisions about prescriptions and patient safety while on the move.

The venture capitalists told Tangney to hire like crazy, so he did. Then came the tech crash and the crisis from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2002, Epocrates was forced to cut a bunch of jobs, Tangney said.

The company held on, but it was a slog. Fiedotin left a few years later, and Lee departed to start One Medical, a chain of primary care clinics that uses technology to improve the patient experience. Tangney stuck around a bit longer, and tried to take Epocrates public. Then came the financial crisis of 2008, and the company had to withdraw its prospectus.

Tangney finally left in late 2009, a year before the eventual IPO and four years before Athenahealth bought the company for $293 million.

“There was a point during the last couple years of my tenure where it felt like we were in this tunnel, marching toward a goal,” Tangney said. “I wasn’t having as much fun. When you’re not in that place of loving what you do, you’re not doing your best work.”

Tangney had spent the past decade selling products to medical centers and talking to doctors about the challenges they faced doing their jobs. He kept those conversations going and learned that communication was a constant point of stress, whether it’s getting in touch with patients, other doctors, administrators or recruiters. In Tangney’s estimation, 80% of communication in the industry “is done via snail mail and fax.”

“Software is indeed eating the world but it kind of choked a little bit on health care,” he said.

Shari Buck had worked with Tangney at Epocrates. She’s one of the first people he approached with the idea of creating a professional network designed for doctors. Buck said she hopped on board “without reservation,” joining as one of the three co-founders, along with Nate Gross, a doctor who is also the founder of health-tech incubator Rock Health.

Doximity co-founders Jeff Tangney (left), Nate Gross and Shari Buck

Doximity

“Before we had an office, Jeff would drive up to Marin to meet me,” Buck said. “We would meet in a workspace above the garage. We used to laugh at how Apple it was,” she said, referring to the storied location where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started their computer company.

Tangney also turned to Lee as a sounding board and advisor. At One Medical, Lee had the perfect test audience for Tangney: A growing base of doctors who were enthusiastic about technology.

At the time, Tangney was not at all focused on revenue, but was rather pursuing an approach more akin to consumer internet start-ups, trying to build a big base of engaged users with the hope that money would eventually follow.

Lee said they batted around ideas for future revenue opportunities. Helping medical recruiters find talent was a clear possibility.

“Recruiting doctors is not a well-defined profession and had been done poorly,” said Lee, who’s now founder and CEO of health company Galileo. “A doctor receives a lot of job opportunities. In classic medical marketing, you’d get these glossy photos of opportunities that were completely outdated, showing glorious pictures of suburban communities and symphony life and fishing.”

Best ideas come over cocktails

For Tangney, product development at Doximity has always been centered around what doctors need. So he created a medical advisory board a decade ago, bringing together a few dozen physicians in the network for a weekend every year.

The group gets together on a Saturday afternoon to provide feedback on new products, learn about updates that could be coming and for some general brainstorming. The talks continue informally over evening drinks and then resume Sunday morning, ending with lunch.

“Software is indeed eating the world but it kind of choked a little bit on health care.”

While Doximity had to skip this year’s gathering because of Covid-19, the event has been held in Napa and at Pebble Beach, and more recently at the company’s San Francisco office.

“It’s been probably the biggest influence on our product roadmap,” Buck said. “We talk about what we plan on building, individual features and new crazy ideas that we have. The best ideas come at cocktail hour on Saturday night.”

Buck said Tangney is known for carrying around little notebooks that he diligently fills up cover to cover over the two days.

Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital attended the Napa weekend in 2012, not long after his venture firm led Doximity’s first investment, a $10.8 million financing round.

Spain was thoroughly invested in Doximity’s success, and not just because of the money Emergence had on the line. He wasn’t yet a partner at the firm but had convinced his superiors to back a pre-revenue business. It was an atypical bet for Emergence, which focuses on early-stage cloud software companies.

Spain said that while board meetings were instructive because he could see signups going in the right direction and engagement on the site increasing, the Napa weekend was much more insightful. He got to hear directly from doctors about what they needed to improve their practice.

“They felt like they had a hand in co-creating this thing Doximity was building,” said Spain, whose firm owns a $1.35 billion stake in the company as of Friday’s close. “I’d never seen that before.”

Some of those doctors ultimately made good money from the IPO. Doximity allocated up to 3.5 million shares to doctors on the platform, representing 15% of the offering. After Doximity’s stock price jumped 115% in its first two days, the value of shares owned by doctors climbed from $91 million to over $195 million.

“Physicians are sort of outsiders in the financial markets and business world,” Tangney said. “Yet in our life and world they’re the insiders, they’re the people we care about most. We’d rather the shares go to them if there’s a pop than to some hedge fund somewhere.”

One challenge for Tangney as he continues to seek expansion opportunities is that there’s a finite universe of users and the core product already reaches the vast majority of them. The company serves more than 80% of U.S. physicians and over 90% of recent medical school graduates. There are only about 1 million doctors in the country.

Still, Tangney sees a decade of revenue growth ahead. There are digital ad dollars to capture as pharmaceutical companies move spending online. And there’s the power of medical referrals, helping doctors get patients to the right places based on where the top experts work and which hospital specializes in treating a particular disease.

Doximity also just entered telehealth, a $4.3 billion market opportunity, according to the prospectus. As a response to the pandemic, Doximity launched a video-based virtual visit service that doctors can use from their existing app and patients can use without having to download anything.

The company said it signed over 150 telehealth subscription agreements with medical systems and served over 63 million virtual visits in the fiscal year that ended in March. Yet the product only accounts for 2% of its revenue.

At the highest level, Tangney said, health care accounts for 18% of the U.S. economy, so there’s no shortage of money available if Doximity’s service continues to add valuable features.

“We’re steadfastly focused on these very busy million people who really take care of the sick all day and aren’t given great tools to collaborate with each other easily and to make care better,” he said.

WATCH: Disrupting Healthcare

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Politics

Males charged in shell firm inventory fraud scheme, used SEC filings

Men charged in shell company stock fraud scheme, used SEC filings

Three men have embarked on a brazen scheme to “secretly kidnap” and take over dormant mailbox companies, whose shares they then fraudulently inflated to sell to ignorant investors, according to the indictment, which was unsealed on Friday.

The 2017-2019 men allegedly used fake resignation letters to take control of four mailbox companies, then used the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR public filing system and fake press releases to fraudulently “pump up” their stock prices by seeking new business opportunities says.

Millions of shares of those stocks, which the defendants bought in many cases for less than 1 cent a share, were then sold over-the-counter by the men and others at gains of up to 900%, according to the court record.

The defendants – Mark Allen Miller, Christopher James Rajkaran and Saeid Jaberian, also known as Andre Jaberian – are charged in 15 cases of securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and wire transfer fraud.

The indictment states that Minnesota residents, Miller and Jaberian, as well as an unidentified person who is a relative of Miller, actually became the nominal CEOs and presidents of the companies affected by the scam.

Prosecutors believe the men made hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal profits just from the behavior described in the indictment, according to a spokeswoman for the US prosecutor in Minnesota.

The indictment, filed in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, was first reported Friday on the Twitter account of Seamus Hughes, associate director of the Extremism Program at George Washington University.

Hughes regularly scours the federal court’s online archive system, PACER, for interesting criminal and civil litigation documents that were not previously reported.

The Securities and Exchange Commission did not immediately respond when CNBC asked if the agency had taken any action against the defendants and whether they had made changes to the EDGAR file system to prevent tampering by suspected fraudsters.

None of the defendants could be reached for comment.

Rajkaran, a resident of Queens, New York and Guyana, was arrested on Friday as a possible aviation hazard after appearing in court in Brooklyn, New York.

The other two defendants, Miller and Jaberian, are due to appear in federal court in Minnesota on July 2.

The four mailbox companies affected by the alleged conspiracy were Digitiliti, Encompass Holdings, Bell Buckle Holdings, and Utilicraft Aerospace Industries.

While the companies were supposedly doing business – online privacy services, computer software, debt collection, and aerospace – all were actually dormant mailbox companies “with no business or income to speak of,” the indictment said.

The companies had all stopped filing required documents with the SEC and the Secretary of State, but their shares were publicly traded on the over-the-counter market.

After the corporate quartet was identified, “the conspirators then bought shares in the dormant public letterbox companies at low prices on the OTC market,” the indictment said.

“The conspirators were able to buy hundreds of thousands or even millions of shares because the shares traded for a fraction of a penny per share.”

In the Digitiliti case, according to the indictment, Miller drafted a fake resignation letter and board minutes in September 2017, falsely stating that the company’s previous CEO had resigned and Miller had been appointed president and CEO.

Miller then filed with the SEC papers falsely identifying himself as the company’s new head and asked for “the login codes that allow him access to the company’s SEC-EDGAR filing account.”

This in turn “allowed Miller to make public filings with the SEC on behalf of the company.”

The EDGAR system is used by publicly traded companies to disclose material events, including quarterly and annual financial results, changes in management, and sales and purchases of significant amounts of company stock by insiders and others.

The indictment states that Miller bought 50,000 Digitiliti shares in November 2017.

“After Digitiliti’s kidnapping, the Defendant Miller used his control over the company to issue a false and misleading press release on behalf of the company,” the indictment stated.

“On or about July 9, 2018, Miller issued a press release falsely claiming that Digitiliti was ‘negotiating’ with a private company that is trying to ‘buy’ Digitiliti.”

The press release also falsely alleged that the private company “has a proven track record of generating revenue and succeeding in a highly desirable sector of the market,” according to the indictment.

Miller sold his 50,000 Digitiliti shares three weeks later.

During the alleged hijacking of Encompass Holdings from June to November 2017, Miller and Rajkaran together bought more than 40 million shares in the company at low prices, the indictment said.

As with Digitiliti, Miller claimed in a forged letter of resignation and board minutes that he had become president and CEO, the indictment said.

Rajkaran then began posting about the company on investorhub.com to “promote and raise the price of ECMH stock,” the indictment stated.

“For example, he announced that the new CEO is’ likely to have nearly 20 million real estate holdings”[s] and construction machinery … heard, he owns several shopping centers in Mn ‘, “the indictment reads.

Miller then released a press release falsely claiming that Encompass “had signed a letter of intent to acquire approximately $ 6.4 million in assets from DDG Properties. according to the indictment.

“None of that was true.”

The stock price rose in response to the allegations, and Miller shortly thereafter sold 12 million shares in the company at fraudulently inflated prices and made a gain of more than 300%, the indictment said.

Rajkaran achieved an earnings return of around 150% after dumping more than 34 million shares, according to the indictment.

Categories
Entertainment

Donald York, Musical Director of Paul Taylor Firm, Dies at 73

Donald York, Musical Director of Paul Taylor Company, Dies at 73

In her review for The Times, Anna Kisselgoff described the score as “contains panting sounds, pop songs and the occasional mean beating of a drumstick that breaks through the classical structures and struggles to stay intact at the bottom of the pit”.

Once, Mr. York waved his baton and conducted an absolutely silent orchestra.

Donald Griffith York was born on June 19, 1947 in Watertown, NY. His mother Magdalene (Murphy) York was an organist and choir director; his father, Orel York, was a history teacher who later worked as an instructor for the FBI

Donald grew up in Delmar, a suburb of Albany. He had perfect hearing and was already composing piano music at the age of 7. As a teenager, he attended a summer program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. In 1969 he earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from Juilliard.

Recognition…York family

After graduating, he played in several contemporary bands, including a synthesizer group called The First Moog Quartet, and for the pop duo Hall and Oates, before joining Paul Taylor in the mid-1970s. He has also conducted for the New York City Ballet and Broadway musicals, including “Clams on the Half Shell Revue”, Bette Midler’s mockery of Broadway show tunes. And he composed choral works and song poems.

In the early 1990s, Mr. York moved to Southern California. He is survived by his companion Debbie Prutsman, a performer and educator; his wife Anne York, a graphic artist he was separated from; three stepchildren, Nick, Tasha, and Andrew Bogdanski; and a brother, Richard. In 1985 he divorced his first wife.

Mr. York was a nocturnal composer. It was his habit to go to bed at 7 p.m., wake up between 1 and 2 a.m., make a pot of coffee, and go to work. He called these hours his “crazy time,” Ms. Prutsman said, adding that he would normally be ready by dawn.

Mr. York retired on November 17, 2019 and bowed at the final performance of the Paul Taylor Company season at Lincoln Center. His last concert composition for the American Brass Quintet will be performed in July at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he studied as a teenager. On his death, Mr. York wrote an operatic musical about a child prodigy named “Gifted”.

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Business

E-Waste, firm linked to New Jersey deli, broadcasts reverse merger

$100 million New Jersey deli company owner kills consulting deal with shareholder

Hometown Deli, Paulsboro, N.J.

Mike Calia | CNBC

E-Waste, a shell company linked to a nearly $100 million company that owns just one New Jersey deli, announced Tuesday it will enter into a reverse merger with a privately held electric vehicle corporation called EZRAider Global Inc.

E-Waste, which itself has a sky-high market capitalization of $110 million despite having no business operations, had been marketed along with deli company Hometown International for such a reverse merger or similar transaction.

“This demonstrates that there is a credible process in place for [E-Waste] to complete a merger with an appropriate private company,” said a person with knowledge of the situation who declined to be named. “The merger will be an efficient and robust manner for EZRAider to access the U.S. capital markets.”

E-Waste’s mailing address is in a North Carolina office building and is the same address as a company connected to Peter Coker Sr., whose son, Peter Coker Jr., is chairman and CEO of Hometown International. The deli owner until recently held a $150,000 promissory note from E-Waste.

EZRAider described itself in an April news release as a proprietary electric vehicle platform that comes in 2-, 4- and 6-wheel-drive options “when combined with the Ecart trailer.”

“It was originally developed in Israel for military troop mobility in the field and has since become available to governments and consumer markets in numerous countries, including the US,” EZRaider said in its release at the time.

“When paired with accessories, EZRaider vehicles are competitive for a wide variety of uses including urban commuting & errands, agriculture, off-road work and adventure, search and rescue, fire, security, military, enhanced mobility for disabled persons, golf, tourism, hunting, fishing, camping, facilities maintenance, micro-deliveries and more.”

In March, EZRaider Global Inc. said it had obtained a $50 million investment commitment from Luxembourg-based Global Emerging Markets Group to take the company public.

A Securities and Exchange Commission filing by E-Waste on Tuesday noted GEM’s involvement in the reverse merger.

CNBC in April detailed the fact that E-Waste before fall 2020 was registered at the Manhattan office of GEM Group. That article also noted that as of early 2020 four of the five biggest shareholders of E-Waste were, in order of size of shares held: the Valletta, Malta-based GEM Global Yield Fund LLC SCS, and three individuals whose address was that of something called GEM Advisors, located on Madison Avenue in New York.

At the time, E-Waste’s president, treasurer and secretary was a man named Peter de Svastich, who is a managing director at the GEM Group.

GEM, which had been E-Waste’s controlling shareholder, sold 6 million restricted shares of the company’s stock last year for $30,000 to Global Equity Limited — a Macau, China-based entity.

Global Equity Limited is also the biggest single shareholder of record in Hometown International, the deli company.

E-Waste’s filing Tuesday with the SEC detailed the series of transactions that will underlay its reverse merger with EZRaider.

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The company said another company, the privately held EZ Global, will acquire a limited liability company called EZ Raider LLC, which will include the rights to acquire a fourth company, based in Israel, called DS Raider Ltd.

“EZ Global will enter into a reverse merger with E-Waste and a newly-formed acquisition subsidiary of E-Waste,” the SEC filing said.

“All the outstanding shares of capital stock of EZ Global will be transferred to E-Waste in exchange for shares of E-Waste Common Stock.”

The filing said that after the reverse merge, E-Waste will conduct a private placement offering of its securities on the terms described below to complete the acquisition of DS Israel by EZ Global.

The transaction is expected to be completed on or before June 30.

“Following the completion of all necessary business and legal due diligence after the execution of this Term Sheet, EZ Global will offer and sell a minimum of … $2,000,000.00 … and a maximum of …$3,000,000 … principal amount of EZ Global’s senior secured convertible notes,” the filing said. It added that those “will be sold to a limited number of sophisticated investors and/or non-US persons.”

According to the filing, “GEM Global Yield Fund LLC SCS or its affiliate, agent, or assign (‘GEM’) has entered into a purchase agreement with EZ Global to purchase up to $50,000,000 of EZ Global’s issued and outstanding shares of registered and freely tradeable common stock issued pursuant to the Securities Act for a period of thirty-six months.”

Both E-Waste and Hometown International, whose stock trades on the over-the-counter Pink market, disavowed weeks ago their preposterously high market capitalizations in SEC filings, which noted that their share price did not reflect the value of their businesses.

Hometown International in mid-April drew widespread attention when hedge fund manager David Einhorn, in a client letter, noted that it recently had a more than $100 million market capitalization despite owning only the small deli in Paulsboro, New Jersey.

Since then, CNBC has detailed how the tangled history of arrests, lawsuits and regulatory sanctions involving a number of people connected to Hometown and E-Waste, among them Coker Sr., his business partner, a lawyer involved in the creation of the deli company, and others.

E-Waste’s former president, John Rollo, last month resigned from that post, which he had assumed after a career that included winning Grammy Awards as a music sound engineer and working as a patient transporter at a New Jersey hospital.

Rollo was replaced by 31-year-old Elliot Mermel, a California resident whose business background includes founding a company that raised crickets as human food and a partnership in a cannabis-related business with Paul Pierce, the former Boston Celtics superstar basketball player.

Shortly after Rollo quit, Hometown International’s shareholder fired the deli company CEO, Paul Morina, who is the principal and head wrestling coach at Paulsboro High School, and replaced him with Coker Jr.

A person familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC that the moves to replace the executives were part of ongoing housecleaning effort at both companies. The person insisted on anonymity in order to speak freely about the circumstances of the moves.

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Health

Moderna Vaccine Extremely Efficient in Adolescents, Firm Says

Moderna Vaccine Highly Effective in Adolescents, Company Says

The authorization of a second vaccine for adolescents could help convince more parents, some of whom have expressed reluctance about having their children vaccinated, that the shots are safe, experts said. “Most parents vaccinate their children,” Dr. O’Leary said. “With the Covid vaccines, we’ve seen a little bit more hesitancy, but the further along we get demonstrating safety and effectiveness, the more people we’re seeing wanting the vaccine.”

It would also give parents and teenagers a choice between vaccines, although experts noted that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appear to be equally safe and effective.

“This really give parents, I think, a little bit more confidence,” said Rupali Limaye, an expert on vaccine use and hesitancy at Johns Hopkins University. “If they’ve had personal experience, for example, with one of the mRNA products and not the other, they might feel more comfortable then saying, ‘You know, I had a great experience with Moderna, so I really want my child to get Moderna.’”

But because the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both require two shots, spaced several weeks apart, ensuring that all teens have access to the vaccine may remain a challenge. “I think we’ll still unfortunately not be able to reach more underserved populations that are facing vaccine disparities, because it’s still the two-dose regimen,” Dr. Limaye said. Authorizing a one-dose vaccine, like the Johnson & Johnson shot, for use in adolescents may help close these gaps, she said.

The U.S. already has enough doses to vaccinate adolescents many times over. There are approximately 25 million American children between the ages of 12 and 17, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That is roughly the same number of shots that Pfizer and Moderna are distributing, in total, per week in the U.S.

“Right now, we have more than enough supply to vaccinate our teens,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. “So it’s not so much that the Moderna vaccine is critical for having supply for our population, but rather, having a second vaccine come online for that age group that could be available to the rest of the world — I think that is important.”

Many other countries, however, will not be ready to vaccinate their adolescents for quite some time. Although more than 1.7 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, there are enormous inequities between countries; 84 percent of doses have gone to people in high- and upper-middle-income countries. Just 0.3 percent have gone to low-income countries.

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Business

Mark Cuban, different buyers, put $250,000 in basketball tech firm GRIND

Mark Cuban, other investors, put $250,000 in basketball tech company GRIND

Thomas Fields, founder of GRIND Basketball.

Source: GRIND

The term has become popular in professional basketball, but Thomas Fields really “trusted” the process when he attracted money from investors, including Mark Cuban, to expand his business.

Fields is the founder of GRIND, a sporting goods company, and convinced the owner of Dallas Mavericks to get into the business. The 26-year-old Houston native received $ 250,000 for his appearance on “Shark Tank” for his portable shooting machine.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, days after his appearance on Shark Tank on May 7, Fields recalled the process of introducing GRIND into Mach 2020, days before the sport was suspended due to Covid-19.

“It literally took two weeks for the pandemic to hit,” Fields said. “After that, we worked in a Covid world, so we don’t even know what this non-Covid world looks like.”

Throw the sharks

In business terms, GRIND has done well during the pandemic. The basketball machine is set up for a single user and automatically returns the ball to the player, allowing 1,000 hits per hour.

Fields said the company had revenue of around $ 217,000 in the first five months from lockdowns and large gatherings banned. The product currently retails for $ 1,595, according to its website. Similar shooting machines sell for over $ 5,000 on Amazon.

And Fields notes that GRIND folds into a duffel bag in 90 seconds, weighs about 100 pounds, and describes the product as “affordable and accessible to any athlete who wants it”.

When asked about recent sales, Fields declined to disclose numbers, citing privacy concerns for his new partners. “Shark Tank” invited Fields to the show after six rounds of interviews. The last pitch took place in Las Vegas last September.

Mark Cuban on ABC’s “Shark Tank”

Jessica Brooks

His fiancée applied for the show before the company started. Fields said he watched pre-recorded episodes that air on CNBC and made notes. And while he was quarantined in Las Vegas before meeting the sharks, he continued to study the process of his one-off pitch.

“All I could do was practice,” Fields said, adding that he was in “run mode” when he arrived. He put up a cast including the Cuban, the new owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Alex Rodriguez, CNBC employee Kevin O’Leary, and businesswoman Barbara Corcoran. After the pitch he got two investors – Cuban and Corcoran – who took over 25% of the company.

“I love the product,” Cuban told CNBC in an email. “I ordered one while the show was filming.”

Fields added, “It was great going through this and after knowing that these two believed in me as an entrepreneur and loved the product, that was more than enough validation to say the company was going to be special.”

Batteries not included

Shortly after recapping the show, Fields remembered more about GRIND’s process. He pointed to 2017 when he was recovering from four ACL surgeries, one of the more extreme injuries in sports, especially basketball. At this point, Fields knew that making it into the National Basketball Association was not achievable.

Fields said he learned to weld thanks to a friend and started working on the concept of the GRIND machine. He raised early investors, but no one provided money. So he started working at Raising Cane’s, a popular fast food chain and local car wash, and saved nearly $ 25,000.

Fields said he had become a “self-taught mechanical engineer,” paid $ 300 a month, and worked on prototypes and proof of concept in his garage.

“Just perfect the machine and make it great,” recalled Fields.

Even Rodriguez welcomed Fields’ persistence on social media. “I got a lot of love, but in the end he was out,” Fields said of Rodriguez.

Today the shooting machines are made in Idaho and Fields has eight employees, including four engineers. GRIND also has an NBA team deal with the San Antonio Spurs, who use the machine for their youth camps.

“We targeted the Spurs because they have the best and largest youth organization in the NBA,” Fields said. “It was strategic and we didn’t partner with them because they were around.”

GRIND is working on a battery that can be added to the machine. This was one of the problems Cubans faced before investing. The machine uses an extension cord for power supply. Fields noted that Cuban told him the product was not portable because it still needed an electrical outlet.

“Ultimately, we don’t want customers running around with 100-foot extension cords,” Fields said. “We want them to be ready and to worry that they will be better.”

Nike and Peloton ambitions

Fields enters a competitive exercise equipment market. The sector is projected to reach $ 89.2 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research. GRIND also competes with the technology sector as companies like Apple sell subscriptions to exercise and fitness training.

“The way I see it, there is only so much software can do to an individual,” Fields said. “There’s so much hardware can do to a consumer too. I’ve always believed it brings the best of both worlds.

“I believe our hardware solves a real problem that no software can ever figure out – you can get your shots made and missed, pass the ball automatically, and allow you to shoot more than a thousand shots an hour. No software can. ” “”

Fields says he wants to build GRIND as a combination of Nike and Peloton.

“It is a perfect time for us to change the world of basketball through interactive sports equipment,” said Fields. “I think the future is bright for us. We’re much more than a shooting machine company.”

And now the process continues.