Tag: Families

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9/11 households, survivors ask Biden to not attend memorial occasions over Saudi docs

9/11 families, survivors ask Biden not to attend memorial events over Saudi docs

Nearly 1,800 9/11 survivors, victims’ family members and first responders are telling President Joe Biden that he should skip memorial events this year unless he declassifies U.S. documents detailing Saudi Arabia’s role in the deadly attacks. 

Next month will mark 20 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans at the World Trade Center in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

The group argued that Biden has failed to fulfill his campaign promise to release as much information as possible on the attacks and has ignored their numerous letters and requests that called on him to do so. 

“Twenty years later, there is simply no reason — unmerited claims of ‘national security’ or otherwise — to keep this information secret,” the group said in their statement. 

“But if President Biden reneges on his commitment and sides with the Saudi government, we would be compelled to publicly stand in objection to any participation by his administration in any memorial ceremony of 9/11,” the group said.

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that its Office of Public Engagement and National Security Council staff have met with 9/11 victims’ family members to discuss their requests for documents and “hear their thoughts on policy priorities,” NBC News reported Friday.

In his campaign promise, Biden pledged to direct his Department of Justice to examine cases where the disclosure of FBI information related to the 9/11 attacks is recommended. He said that releasing such information would be “narrowly tailored” to protect against the risk of harm to national security. 

“I intend to be a President for all Americans, and will hear all of their voices,” Biden said. “The 9/11 Families are right to seek full truth and accountability.”

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The group said they had “great hopes” that Biden would diverge from previous administrations and said they were disappointed that he did not live up to his words after his inauguration.

They said that since the 9/11 Commission investigation concluded, in 2004, there has been investigative evidence found “implicating Saudi government officials” in supporting the attacks. 

The 9/11 Commission found it likely that Saudi government-funded charities supported the attacks but did not find any evidence of direct funding from the government, according to NBC News. 

The group particularly called for the release of FBI documents from a 2016 investigation of Saudi Arabia. They said they believe the documents would reveal whether any individuals associated with al Qaeda, the group that carried out the terrorist attacks, received assistance or financing from the Saudi Arabian government. 

Fifteen of the 19 attackers in the 9/11 attacks were Saudi citizens, and mastermind Osama Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, but the country’s government has denied allegations that it was involved.

Multiple presidential administrations have cited “security concerns” in their reasoning for withholding documents related to the terrorist attacks, the group’s statement said. 

Most recently, the Trump administration invoked the state secrets privilege in 2019 to justify keeping documents classified, according to NBC News.

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Health

Mourning Households Search Solace From the ‘Grief Purgatory’ of Covid-19

Mourning Families Seek Solace From the ‘Grief Purgatory’ of Covid-19

“For us Native Americans we need to be together, eat, share stories, and pray so that our loved ones who are dead can reach out to the Creator,” said Robert Gill, a funeral director from Buffalo, Minnesota, and a resident of the Sisseton tribe of the Wahpeton Oyate.

Mr Gill said he kept some bodies for months to give people an opportunity to organize a larger funeral. When these gatherings finally take place, attendees will be served “liquor platters” – with ancestral favorite dishes such as fried ribs, aronia jam and fried buffalo.

Many families use the extended planning periods to create detailed reminders.

Frederick Harris, a Vietnam War veteran, loved Smirnoff vodka with grapefruit juice and Motown music, so daughter Nicole Elizabeth, 34, will serve and play at his memorial ceremony in Hadley, Massachusetts later that year.

“It’s daunting to plan because I want to be fun and be able to share memories with so many people,” she said. “But I hope it will bring me some peace, because for many of us it was just that limbo.”

About 60 people attended church in June to honor the father of Mrs. Zimmerman-Selvidge. Those present passed a microphone over the benches and exchanged memories of him.

Finally it was his daughter’s turn. Mrs. Zimmermann-Selvidge sighed. “He loved us all so much,” she said, then paused.

Her father’s urn was on a table in front of her. In her purse was a letter she had forced herself to receive after his death.

It started with words that were sometimes too painful to say out loud, “I miss you”.

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World News

‘They Have My Sister’: As Uyghurs Communicate Out, China Targets Their Households

‘They Have My Sister’: As Uyghurs Speak Out, China Targets Their Families

She was a gifted agricultural scientist educated at prestigious universities in Shanghai and Tokyo. She said she wanted to help farmers in poor areas, like her hometown in Xinjiang, in western China. But because of her uncle’s activism for China’s oppressed Muslim Uyghurs, her family and friends said, the Chinese state made her a security target.

At first they took away her father. Then they pressed her to return home from Japan. Last year, at age 30, Mihriay Erkin, the scientist, died in Xinjiang, under mysterious circumstances.

The government confirmed Ms. Erkin’s death but attributed it to an illness. Her uncle, Abduweli Ayup, the activist, believes she died in state custody.

Mr. Ayup says his niece was only the latest in his family to come under pressure from the authorities. His two siblings had already been detained and imprisoned. All three were targeted in retaliation for his efforts to expose the plight of the Uyghurs, he said.

“People are not only suffering there, they are not only being indoctrinated there, not only being tortured, they are actually dying,” said Mr. Ayup, who now lives in Norway. “And the Chinese government is using this death, using these threats to make us silent, to make us lose our hope.”

As Beijing has intensified its repression in Xinjiang in recent years, more Uyghurs living overseas have felt compelled to speak out about mass internment camps and other abuses against their families back home. Their testimonies have added to a growing body of evidence of China’s crackdown, which some have called a genocide, prompting foreign governments to impose sanctions.

Credit…Abduweli Ayup

Now the Chinese authorities are pushing back against overseas Uyghurs by targeting their relatives.

The Communist Party has long treated the relatives of dissidents as guilty by association and used them to pressure and punish outspoken family members. With the courts under the control of the authorities, there is little recourse to challenge such prosecutions. Liu Xia, the wife of Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, spent nearly eight years under house arrest after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Her younger brother, Liu Hui, served two years in prison for a fraud conviction she called retaliation.

But with the Uyghurs, the authorities seem to be applying this tactic with unusual, and increasing severity, placing some Uyghur activists’ relatives in prison for decades, or longer.

Dolkun Isa, the German-based president of the World Uyghur Congress, a Uyghur rights group, said he believes his older brother is in detention. He learned in late May that his younger brother, Hushtar, had been sentenced to life in prison. “It was connected to my activism, surely,” Mr. Isa said.

Radio Free Asia, a United States-funded broadcaster, says that more than 50 relatives of journalists on staff have been detained in Xinjiang, with some held in detention camps and others sentenced to prison. The journalists all work for the broadcaster’s Uyghur language service, which has in the past several years stood out for its reporting on the crackdown, exposing the existence of camps and publishing the first accounts of deaths and forced sterilizations.

The sister of Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur American activist, was sentenced in December to 20 years in prison for terrorism. The sister, Gulshan Abbas, and her aunt had been detained in 2018, days after Rushan Abbas spoke at an event in Washington denouncing the crackdown and widespread detention in Xinjiang.

“As retaliation against me because I made that public speech, as a tool to silence me, they abducted my sister,” Ms. Abbas said. “They have my sister as a hostage right now.”

At Beijing’s request, some countries have also sent more than 300 Uyghurs back to China since 2010, according to a study by the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, and the Uyghur Human Rights Project, nonprofits based in Washington, D.C. One Uyghur now fighting extradition is Idris Hasan, whom activists say has been detained in Morocco.

In the case of Ms. Erkin, the scientist, her uncle first drew the attention of the authorities in Xinjiang for trying to expand the use of the Uyghur language. The government regarded even the most moderate expression of ethnic identity as a threat and Mr. Ayup was arrested in 2013 and spent 15 months in prison. After he was released, he fled abroad, but his experience emboldened him to continue campaigning.

Back home, Mr. Ayup’s brother, Erkin Ayup, a local Communist Party official, knew that his own situation was precarious. In 2016, he told his daughter that a crackdown was unfolding, and he feared he could be caught up in it, according to Asami Nuru, a friend of Ms. Erkin’s in Tokyo.

The father and daughter devised a simple system to let Ms. Erkin know he was safe: he would send her a smiley face sticker on WeChat every morning.

“One day, he didn’t send the sticker,” Ms. Nuru said. “She called her mother and she learned her father was in a camp. She was very upset, and from then on she would cry every day.”

Mr. Ayup believes the authorities took his brother into custody in mid-2017.

In the years that followed, Ms. Erkin’s anxiety over her father’s situation bore down on her, and she even lost weight, Ms. Nuru said. She began to receive adamant messages from her mother, likely at the behest of the authorities, telling her to stop her uncle’s activism or return home.

Her family and friends say her decision to return to China in June 2019 was sudden. She left her suitcases in the house where she lived.

Ms. Erkin called Ms. Nuru from the airport and told her that she wanted to try to find her father, even though she knew he was still in detention. Ms. Nuru said she tried to persuade her against the idea.

“She told me, ‘I want to try to find my father, even if it means I might die,’” Ms. Nuru said.

Mr. Ayup says he believes that the authorities arrested Ms. Erkin in February 2020 to punish him after he helped international news outlets report on a leaked government document outlining how Uyghurs were tracked and chosen for detention.

The circumstances of Ms. Erkin’s death remain unclear.

Her death was first reported by Radio Free Asia, which cited a national security officer from Ms. Erkin’s hometown as saying she had died while in a detention center in the southern city of Kashgar. Mr. Ayup said he believed it was the same place where he himself had been beaten and sexually abused six years earlier.

Ms. Erkin’s family was given her body, Mr. Ayup said, but were told by security officials to not have guests at her funeral and to tell others she died at home.

In a statement to The New York Times, the Xinjiang government said that Ms. Erkin had returned from overseas in June 2019 to receive medical treatment. On Dec. 19, she died at a hospital in Kashgar of organ failure caused by severe anemia, according to the statement.

From the time she went to the hospital until her death, she had always been looked after by her uncle and younger brother, the government wrote.

Before she returned to China, Ms. Erkin seemed to be aware that her return could end tragically.

“We all leave alone, the only things that can accompany us are the Love of Allah and our smile,” she wrote in text messages to Mr. Ayup when he tried to dissuade her from going home.

“I am very scared,” she admitted. “I hope I would be killed with a single bullet.”

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Politics

Month-to-month Funds to Households With Kids to Start

Monthly Payments to Families With Children to Begin

WASHINGTON — If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.

With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent.

But the program, created as part of the stimulus bill that Democrats passed over unified Republican opposition in March, expires in a year, and the rollout could help or hinder President Biden’s pledge to extend it.

Immediate challenges loom. The government is uncertain how to get the payments to millions of hard-to-reach families, a problem that could undermine its poverty-fighting goals. Opponents of the effort will be watching for delivery glitches, examples of waste or signs that the money erodes the desire of some parents to work.

While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.

“It’s the most transformative policy coming out of Washington since the days of F.D.R.,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. “America is dramatically behind its industrial peers in investing in our children. We have some of the highest child poverty rates, but even families that are not poor are struggling, as the cost of raising children goes higher and higher.”

Among America’s 74 million children, nearly nine in 10 will qualify for the new monthly payments — up to $250 a child, or $300 for those under six — which are scheduled to start on Thursday. Those payments, most of which will be sent to bank accounts through direct deposit, will total half of the year’s subsidy, with the rest to come as a tax refund next year.

Mr. Biden has proposed a four-year extension in a broader package he hopes to pass this fall, and congressional Democrats have vowed to make the program permanent. Like much of Mr. Biden’s agenda, the program’s fate may depend on whether Democrats can unite around the bigger package and advance it through the evenly divided Senate.

The unconditional payments — what critics call “welfare” — break with a quarter century of policy. Since President Bill Clinton signed a 1996 bill to “end welfare,” aid has gone almost entirely to parents who work. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, recently wrote that the new payments, with “no work required,” would resurrect a “failed welfare system,” and provide “free money” for criminals and addicts.

But compared to past aid debates, opposition has so far been muted. A few conservatives support children’s subsidies, which might boost falling birthrates and allow more parents to raise children full-time. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a larger child benefit, though he would finance it with by cutting other programs.

With Congress requiring payments to start just four months after the bill’s passage, the administration has scrambled to spread the word and assemble payment rosters.

Families that filed recent tax returns or received stimulus checks should get paid automatically. (Single parents with incomes up to $112,500 and married couples with incomes up to $150,000 are eligible for the full benefit.) But analysts say four to eight million low-income children may be missing from the lists, and drives are underway to get their parents to register online.

“Wherever you run into people — perfect strangers — just go on up and introduce yourself and tell them about the Child Tax Credit,” Vice President Kamala Harris said last month on what the White House called “Child Tax Credit Awareness Day.”

Among the needy, the program is eliciting a mixture of excitement, confusion and disbelief. Fresh EBT, a phone app for people who receive food stamps, found that 90 percent of its users knew of the benefit, but few understand how it works.

“Half say, ‘I’m really, really ready to get it,’’’ said Stacy Taylor, the head of policy and partnerships at Propel, the app’s creator. “The others are a mix of ‘I’m worried I haven’t taken the right steps’ or ‘I’m not sure I really believe it’s true.’”

Few places evoke need more than Lake Providence, La., a hamlet along the Mississippi River where roughly three-quarters of the children are poor, including those of Tammy Wilson, 50, a jobless nursing aide.

The $750 a month she should receive for three children will more than double a monthly income that consists only of food stamps and leaves her relying on a boyfriend. “I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “There’s no jobs here.”

While the money will help with rent, Ms. Wilson said, the biggest benefit would be the ability to send her children to activities like camps and school trips.

“Kids get to bullying, talking down on them — saying ‘Oh your mama don’t have money,’” she said. “They feel like it’s their fault.”

But in West Monroe, a 90-minute drive away, Levi Sullivan, another low-income parent, described the program as wasteful and counterproductive. Mr. Sullivan, a pipeline worker, has been jobless for more than a year but argued the payments would increase the national debt and reward indolence.

Updated 

July 12, 2021, 1:54 p.m. ET

“I’m a Christian believer — I rely on God more than I rely on the government,” he said.

With four children, Mr. Sullivan, who has gotten by on unemployment insurance, food stamps, and odd jobs, could collect $1,150 a month, but he is so skeptical of the program he went online to defer the payments and collect a lump sum next year. Otherwise, he fears that if he finds work he may have to pay the money back.

“Government assistance is a form of slavery,” he said. “Some people do need it, but then again, there’s some people that all they’re doing is living off the system.”

Progressives have sought a children’s income floor for at least a century. “No one can doubt that an adequate allowance should be granted for a mother who has children to care for,” wrote the economist and future Illinois senator Paul H. Douglas in 1925 as children’s benefits spread in Europe.

Four decades later, the Ford Foundation sponsored a conference to promote the idea in the United States. The meeting’s organizer, Eveline M. Burns, lamented the “shocking extent of childhood poverty” but acknowledged strong political opposition to the payments.

While hostility to unconditional cash aid peaked in the 1990s, multiple forces revived interest in children’s subsidies. Brain science showed the lasting impact of the formative years. Stagnant incomes brought worries about child-rearing costs into the middle class. More recently, racial protests have encouraged a broader look at social inequity.

An existing program, the Child Tax Credit, did offer a children’s subsidy of up to $2,000 a child. But since it was only available to families with sufficient earnings, the poorest third of children failed to fully qualify. By removing that earnings requirement and raising the amount, Democrats temporarily converted a tax break into a children’s income guarantee.

Analysts at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy say the new benefits will cut child poverty by 45 percent, a reduction about four times greater than ever achieved in a single year.

“Even if it only happens for a year, that’s a big deal,” said Irwin Garfinkel, a professor at the Columbia School of Social Work. “If it becomes permanent, it’s of equal importance to the Social Security Act — it’s that big.”

Opponents warn that by aiding families that do not work, the policy reverses decades of success. Child poverty had fallen to a record low before the pandemic (about 12 percent in 2019), a drop of more than a third since 1990s.

“I’m surprised there hasn’t been more pushback from other conservatives,” said Scott Winship of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who argues that unconditional aid can cause the poor long-term harm by reducing the incentive to work and marry.

Getting the money to all eligible children may prove harder than it sounds. Some American children live with undocumented parents afraid to seek the aid. Others may live with relatives in unstable or shifting care.

Dozens of groups are trying to promote the program, including the Children’s Defense Fund, United Way and Common Sense Media, but many eligible families have already failed to collect stimulus checks, underscoring how difficult they are to reach. The legislation contained little money that could be used for outreach, leaving many groups trying to raise private donations to support their efforts.

The Rev. Starsky Wilson, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, praised the Biden administration for creating an online enrollment portal but warned, “we really need to be knocking on doors.”

Gene Sperling, the White House official overseeing the payments, said that even with some families hard to reach, deep cuts in poverty were assured.

“While we want to do everything possible to reach any missing children, the most dramatic impact on child poverty will happen automatically,” because the program will reach about 26 million children whose families are known but earned too little to fully benefit from the previous credit. “That will be huge.”

By delivering monthly payments, the program seeks to address the income swings that poor families frequently suffer. One unknown is how families will spend the money, with critics predicting waste and supporters saying parents know their children’s needs.

When Fresh EBT asked users about their spending plans, the answers differed from those about the stimulus checks. “We saw more responses specifically related to kids — school clothes, school supplies, a toddler bed,” Ms. Taylor said. “It tells me the framing of the benefit matters.”

There is evidence for that theory. When Britain renamed its “family allowance” a “child benefit” in the 1970s and paid mothers instead of fathers, families spent less on tobacco and men’s clothing and more on children’s clothing, pocket money, and toys.

“Calling something a child benefit frames the way families spend the money,” said Jane Waldfogel, a Columbia professor who studied the British program.

While the payments will greatly reduce poverty, most beneficiaries are not poor. Jennifer Werner and her husband had a household income of about $75,000 before she quit her job as a property manager in Las Vegas two years ago to care for her first child. Since then, she has used savings to extend her time as a stay-at-home mother.

Ms. Werner, 45, supports the one-year benefit but wants to see the results before deciding whether it should last. “When you have a child you realize they’re expensive — diapers, wipes, extra food,” she said. But she added “I don’t know where all that money’s coming from.”

She hopes the country can be fair both to taxpayers and to children whose parents work too hard to offer sufficient attention. “If the benefit helps parents nurture their kids, that would be a wonderful thing,” she said.

Categories
Health

How the Virus Unraveled Hispanic American Households

How the Virus Unraveled Hispanic American Families

To a wide circle of friends and family, Jesse Ruby was the go-to guy.

The father who would drop everything and drive across town if his sons needed a ride. The cousin who spent weekends helping relatives move. The partner who worked odd jobs on weekends with his girlfriend, Virginia Herrera, to help make ends meet for an extended household in San Jose, Calif.

“If he was your friend, or he considered you a friend or family, all you had to do is ask,” Ms. Herrera said. “You could depend on him. He was that person.” Then, in December, Mr. Ruby caught the coronavirus. He died six weeks later, at just 38 years old.

Across the United States, the pandemic has shattered families like Mr. Ruby’s. Hispanic American communities have been pummeled by a higher rate of infections than any other racial or ethnic group and have experienced hospitalizations and deaths at rates exceeded only by those among Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

But new research shows the coronavirus has also attacked Hispanic Americans in an especially insidious way: They were younger when they died.

They are much more likely than white Americans to have died of Covid-19 before age 65, often in the prime of life and at the height of their productive years. Indeed, a recent study of California deaths found that Hispanic Americans between the ages of 20 and 54 were 8.5 times more likely than white Americans in that age range to die of Covid-19.

“It matters how old you are when you die, because your role in society differs,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Her research has found that Hispanic Americans and Black people who died of Covid-19 lost three to four times as many years of potential life before the age of 65 as did whites who died.

The virus more often killed white Americans who were older. Their deaths were no less tragic, but they did not lead to the unraveling of income streams and support networks that was experienced in Hispanic American communities. These families experienced a very different pandemic.

“When you die young, you may be a critical breadwinner for your family,” Dr. Bassett said. “You may have dependent children. And we know that losing a parent is not good for children and has an impact on their future development and psychological well-being.”

Mr. Ruby and Ms. Herrera lived together in San Jose, Calif., where the extreme wealth of Silicon Valley’s high-tech elite contrasts with poverty and homelessness, and where working families double and triple up under the same roof, paying some of the highest rents in the country.

“It’s a tale of two cities,” said Jennifer Loving, chief executive officer of Destination: Home, a public-private partnership aiming to end homelessness in Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose. “We literally have Teslas sitting outside homeless encampments.”

Health is as polarized as wealth. An analysis of county death records by The New York Times provides a rare, granular look at who died of Covid-19 in a county of 1.9 million people — by age, sex, race and ethnicity, pre-existing health conditions and, importantly, where people lived.

The data show that people like Mr. Ruby and others in largely Hispanic neighborhoods, and in those areas where incomes are lower than the county median, were more likely to die at a younger age than those in high-income communities or in those where fewer Hispanic Americans were living.

The records were first obtained by Evan Low, a California Assembly member who advocated unsuccessfully for legislation requiring the state’s health department to collect and publicly report Covid-19 deaths by ZIP code.

“The goal is greater transparency about what has occurred during the pandemic,” Mr. Low said. “We need to know which neighborhoods have been most impacted. We want to understand precisely where people died of Covid, so we have data and facts to guide policy.”

Through the end of February, white residents were just as likely to die of Covid-19 as Hispanic residents, according to The Times’s analysis. But the white residents were much older, on average.

The median age at death was 86 for white Covid-19 patients, compared with 73 for Hispanic individuals. The analysis shows that while only 25 percent of the county’s population is Hispanic, 51 of the 68 residents under age 50 who died of Covid-19 through the end of February were Hispanic.

Only seven were white, though white residents make up nearly one-third of the county. Most of the others were of Asian or Pacific Islander backgrounds. (Asian-American residents had a much lower death rate, half that of white and Hispanic residents.)

Four San Jose ZIP codes with largely Hispanic populations — 95116, 95122, 95127 and 95020 — accounted for one in five of the Covid-19 deaths in Santa Clara County, even though they represented only one in eight of the county’s residents. Households in the four ZIP codes had incomes that were lower than the median in the county.

The patterns in Santa Clara County hint at a broader disparity throughout the nation. Hispanic Americans, who are more likely than white Americans to have jobs that cannot be done remotely and do not provide paid sick leave, are three times as likely as white Americans to be hospitalized with Covid-19 and more than twice as likely to die of it. Many lack health insurance.

Mr. Ruby was a charmer who could chat up anyone, the life of the party. Friends in school had nicknamed him Buddha, a reference to his happy-go-lucky nature and his chunky frame.

“He was all about having a good time,” said a cousin, Anthony Fernandez. “He would have you laughing within the first five minutes of talking to you.”

In 2011, when Ms. Herrera met Mr. Ruby, she was reluctant to get involved. He had just been released from a short stint in prison for a burglary involving beer. He had a scar on his stomach from a gunshot wound and a large, prominent tattoo of a Buddha on his forehead. She prevailed on him to remove it.

“I told him, ‘I’m not a pen pal,’” Ms. Herrera recalled. “‘I’m not going to write you in jail. You need to be out.’”

The relationship was stormy at first, but Mr. Ruby eventually became an integral, trusted part of Ms. Herrera’s extended family. He helped support two teenage sons from a previous relationship: Jesse Jr., 18, who plans to start attending community college in the fall, and Joseph, 16.

Mr. Ruby became a surrogate father to Ms. Herrera’s daughter, coaching her baseball team and watching movies with her when she was moping. He made a mean enchilada casserole, and took charge of the laundry and repairs around the house.

He even won over Ms. Herrera’s mother, Virginia Marquez, who thought he drank too much when she first met him but came to love Mr. Ruby.

“He was the person you could call,” she said. “He would drop what he was doing and go help.”

Ms. Herrera has felt the loss of Mr. Ruby in uncountable ways, but money has been a particular concern.

Shortly before he fell ill, Mr. Ruby had landed a steady job building walk-in coolers and freezers (Ms. Herrera said removing the Buddha tattoo had helped). The job paid well, he got to drive the company truck, and there was plenty of overtime.

For a brief while, “It felt like a weight was taken of our shoulders,” Ms. Herrera said. His abrupt death left her grieving — and panicked. “We went halves on everything, so I’ve struggled,” she said.

Researchers have long remarked on the social networks and expansive family ties that help explain why Hispanic Americans tend to be as healthy as, or healthier than, white Americans. Hispanic Americans have high rates of diabetes and obesity but live longer than white Americans, despite lower average incomes and educational levels and reduced access to health care.

But the phenomenon, called the Hispanic paradox, has not held up during the pandemic. A recent study in Health Affairs found that 70 percent of Covid-19 cases in California where race and ethnicity were known had struck Hispanic individuals, though that group makes up only 39 percent of the state population. Hispanic Americans also accounted for nearly half of the deaths from Covid-19 in the state.

“Covid-19 is so overwhelming that this previously known paradox, which is also called the healthy immigrant effect, is overwhelmed,” said Erika Garcia, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Southern California, whose study identified the discrepancies in death rates among younger adults in California.

The coronavirus spreads very quickly within households, and so close ties among extended households have emerged as detrimental factors for Hispanic Americans. A Health Affairs study also found that Hispanic Californians were eight times as likely as white residents to live in a “high exposure-risk household,” which scientists defined as one having one or more essential workers and fewer rooms than inhabitants.

“The stereotype is that Latino families care about family more, but it’s not really about that — it’s about the need to pool together resources,” said Zulema Valdez, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced. “There’s a whole web of a social safety net that the family is providing.”

A death creates a hole in the net. “They’re immediately one paycheck away from homelessness,” Dr. Valdez said.

“Everybody knows someone who has died, or multiple people who have died, and everyone is figuring out how to compensate for the roles and duties that are no longer being done by those people,” she added. “The hardship is extreme.”

Deaths of wage earners add to the hardships minority communities are already experiencing during the pandemic.

One in five Black and Hispanic Americans reported being behind on their rent or mortgage in April, compared with 7.5 percent of white Americans. One in five Black and Hispanic adults in households with children said they did not have enough to eat in the previous week, compared with 6.4 percent of white Americans, according to analyses of census surveys by Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Ms. Marquez’s husband, a Lyft driver, got what looked at first like a cold. He started having trouble breathing — and then a coronavirus test came back positive.

He was hospitalized on Thanksgiving Day. Ms. Marquez, the mother of Mr. Ruby’s girlfriend, canceled the festive meal she had planned for the family and told everyone to stay away. But Ms. Herrera and Mr. Ruby stopped by for a brief visit, and then the virus raced through the two households.

Five in Ms. Marquez’s household of nine were infected; aside from her husband, most had mild symptoms. In Ms. Herrera’s household of eight, all but two got sick. Mr. Ruby’s teenage boys, who did not live with them, also became ill.

On Dec. 4, Mr. Ruby’s fever spiked to 104 degrees, and he too struggled to breathe. His job’s private insurance hadn’t kicked in yet — he was on California’s Medicaid program, MediCal — and Ms. Herrera drove him to a hospital emergency room.

His weight, high blood pressure and diabetes all put Mr. Ruby at high risk for severe disease, but the hospital sent him home. Ms. Herrera is still tormented about that.

“I keep on replaying over and over,” she said. “What did I say, what did I do? Could I have done something different? Should I have turned the car around and went into the E.R. myself to say, ‘Why are you sending him home?’”

Mr. Ruby spent the next few days at home sleeping. He refused food, and Ms. Herrera, who was starting to recover from her own bout with the virus, tried to make sure he stayed hydrated.

When Mr. Fernandez, his cousin, texted to ask how he was, Mr. Ruby responded with one word: “Tired.”

On Dec. 8, Mr. Ruby’s skin began to turn blue, and Ms. Herrera called an ambulance. This time, the hospital admitted him. A few days later, Mr. Ruby seemed to rally. But then he took a turn for the worse and was told he would be placed on a ventilator.

He told Ms. Herrera on the phone that he was scared.

“I just kept reminding him, ‘You’re going to come home, you’re going to be OK, and when it’s time, we’ll laugh about this,’” she said. He died on Jan. 16.

The family’s grief metastasized into accusations and guilt. Some of Mr. Ruby’s family members blamed Ms. Herrera, saying she should have gotten him help sooner. Mr. Fernandez blames the hospital, saying E.R. physicians should never have sent Mr. Ruby home when he first sought help.

There was bickering over donations raised to help the family get through the crisis, and relationships have frayed. Life will never be the same for anyone in the extended family.

“Jesse always used to say, ‘Nothing can take me out,’” Ms. Herrera said. “I was waiting for him to come home and tell stories about how he beat Covid that he’d repeat over and over until he got on my nerves. I never had any doubt in my mind that he was going to come home.”

Susan Beachy contributed research.

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Health

How a Nursing Scarcity Impacts Households With Disabled Kids

How a Nursing Shortage Affects Families With Disabled Children

Many had placed their hopes on the Biden government’s infrastructure plan, which would allocate $ 400 billion to improve home and community care. But with the President and Republicans arguing over the scope and scope of the proposal, it is unclear whether that part will survive.

Parents, meanwhile, are increasingly carrying an inexorable burden alone.

A nurse who cares for a medically weak child at home has the same duties as in a hospital, but no emergency medical assistance. It’s a tightrope, and experts say prevailing wages don’t reflect the difficulty.

Federal guidelines allow state Medicaid programs to cover home care for eligible children regardless of their families’ income, as the price of 24/7 care would ruin almost anyone. But states generally pay nursing staff at much lower rates than they would for equivalent care in a hospital or other medical center.

“They’re effectively setting a benchmark for employee compensation that puts this area at a competitive disadvantage,” said Roger Noyes, a spokesman for the New York State Home Care Association. In return, government-approved home health insurers that provide nursing families with nurses pay meager salaries and rarely offer health insurance or other benefits to the nurses they employ.

Although home care is better suited to medically ill children, hospitals get about half of Medicaid spending on these cases, compared with 2 percent on home care, studies show.

And Covid-19 created competing demands on care that further reduced the number of home care workers. In light of the pandemic, the state’s largest healthcare provider, Northwell Health, hired 40 percent more nurses in 2020 than the previous year, and hired 1,000 additional temporary nurses once the local hiring pool ran out.

Robert Pacella, the executive director of Caring Hands Home Care, the agency that oversees Henry’s case, noticed the change in January as nurses began reducing shift opportunities and decreasing new applicants.

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Health

As Restrictions Loosen, Households Journey Far and Spend Huge

As Restrictions Loosen, Families Travel Far and Spend Big

Properties geared towards large gatherings are feeling the gust of wind. At Woodloch, a family resort in Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains, multi-generation travel has always been the be-all and end-all. However, bookings for 2021 have already surpassed 2019 with currently 117 reservations (a total of 162 bookings were made in 2019). “Demand is stronger than ever,” said Rory O’Fee, Woodloch’s director of marketing.

Salamander Hotels & Resorts, which has five hotels in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica, has already booked 506 family reunions in 2021, which corresponds to a turnover of USD 2.47 million. There were only 368 events valued at around $ 1.31 million for the entire 2019 calendar year. According to Club Med, 16 percent of bookings in 2021 are cross-generational, compared with 3 percent in 2019.

Guided tours are also becoming increasingly popular with families looking to reunite: Guy Young, President of Insight Vacations, has launched several new small private group tours that can be booked for just 12 people and include a private bus and travel director, noting that extended families accounted for 20 percent of his business in March and April, compared to a prepandemic average of 8 percent. “When we came out of Covid and the families were separated for many months, the demand for multi-generation family travel increased significantly,” he said.

Mr Belcher hopes that his family’s reunification trip to Williamsburg, which will require nearly a nine-hour drive from his Livonia, Michigan home, will provide an opportunity to ease some of the tension that has built up over the past year. Mr Belcher and his wife Stephanie, a finance educator, have strictly dealt with the wearing of masks for themselves and their children, who are 9, 5 and nearly 6 months old. Other family members were more relaxed, which is one of the reasons they spent so many months apart. “I hope to make some memories after Covid and hopefully leave some of it behind,” Belcher said, noting that all adults attending the reunion will be vaccinated and as long as there are no more strangers in the room their children can like the adults are exposed at indoor family events. “Before all of this happened, we were a very close family.”

When you travel together, families also have the opportunity to reconnect offline after many months of Skype and screen time.

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Politics

Weak jobs report reveals want for enormous jobs and households payments: Biden

Weak jobs report shows need for massive jobs and families bills: Biden

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said Friday that lower-than-expected job growth in April shows that the U.S. economy is still struggling to recover from the Covid pandemic and that its massive bills for infrastructure and family support are now more than ever needed.

“This month’s job numbers show that we are on the right track,” said Biden. “But we still have a long way to go. My laser focus is on growing the country’s economy and creating jobs. My laser focus is on vaccination, and my laser focus is on one more thing: making sure that hard-working people are in this country will no longer be left out in the cold. “

Hours before Biden spoke, the Labor Department reported that the hiring slowed dramatically in April. The number of non-farm workers rose by 266,000, significantly less than expected, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.1% due to the increasing shortage of available labor.

Dow Jones estimated 1 million new jobs and an unemployment rate of 5.8%.

Many economists had expected even higher jobs in the face of signs that the US economy was coming back to life.

Biden said the slow pace of recovery helped disprove critics of the government’s Covid relief efforts.

“Some critics said we didn’t need the American bailout plan, this economy would only heal itself. I think today’s report only underscores the importance of the measures we are taking,” said the president. “Our efforts are starting to work, but the climb is steep and we still have a long way to go.”

The unexpectedly low job growth could bolster the Biden administration’s argument to Congress that the president’s $ 4 trillion plans for jobs and families are required for the U.S. economy to fully recover from the pandemic.

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, dubbed the American Employment Plan, would spend $ 2.3 trillion on rebuilding the country’s transportation infrastructure and create millions of jobs for workers without a college degree.

The second part of his national agenda, the American Families Plan, would provide an additional $ 1.8 trillion to fund universal preschool kindergarten to offer free community college to every American and subsidize childcare, among other things.

Biden intends to fund his stimulus packages by raising the corporate tax rate, raising taxes on the very rich, filling in loopholes, and increasing IRS enforcement.

And while the president is hoping to gain bipartisan support for the bills, Republicans in Congress have already said tax hikes are a red line they won’t cross.

Negotiations continue, however, and a group of Republican senators are expected to visit the White House in the coming days to meet with the president on possible areas of compromise.

The labor shortage debate

The weak recovery in jobs also reflects what many economists are referring to as multi-sector labor shortages.

“I think it’s as much about a lack of labor as it is a lack of labor demand,” Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former advisor to the Obama administration, told CNBC. “If you look at April, it seems like there were around 1.1 unemployed for every vacancy. So there are a lot of jobs out there, there just isn’t a lot of labor.”

Republicans and some employers have attributed the labor shortage to what they believe is overly generous unemployment benefits approved by Congress as part of the comprehensive pandemic relief package.

Specifically, they point to a $ 300 weekly unemployment bonus, over and above what states stipulate and which is slated to expire in September.

“I told you weeks ago that every day in Florida I hear from small businesses that they can’t hire people because the government is paying them to keep them out of work,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio tweeted Friday.

Biden rejected this argument. “Today’s report is a refutation of the talk that Americans just don’t want to work,” he said.

“This report shows that there is a much bigger problem: our economy still has 8 million fewer jobs than when this pandemic started.”

The president also said the impact of unemployment benefits on labor markets was “not measurable”.

Census data gathered over the past few weeks suggests that daycare and school closings have forced millions of Americans to stay home and look after children or monitor online learning.

According to a household impulse census poll conducted in late March, 6.3 million people said they were not working because they had to look after a child who was not in school or daycare. Another 2.1 million cared for an elderly person.

Another 4.1 million Americans said they were not working due to concerns about getting or spreading Covid.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.

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Health

Covid Pandemic Forces Households to Rethink Nursing Dwelling Care

Covid Pandemic Forces Families to Rethink Nursing Home Care

Even before the pandemic began 14 months ago, nursing homes had become the source of rampant, antibiotic-resistant infections. The facilities also faced systemic problems, such as the high turnover of nursing home staff and the game of the federal government’s rating system, which made it difficult for families to judge the quality of the homes.

For years, federal health officials and some insurers have been trying to encourage more home care, and the pandemic has created a sense of urgency.

“It really changed the paradigm of how older adults want to live,” said Dr. Sarita Mohanty, the executive director of the SCAN Foundation, a nonprofit group that addresses issues older adults face. The vast majority of these adults would prefer to stay home in old age, she said.

“What happened is a welcome kind of market correction for nursing homes,” said Tony Chicotel, an attorney for California Attorneys for San Francisco Nursing Home Reform. Some families, he said, “eventually agreed to a nursing home without thinking too much about it.” But after many families tried to provide home care during the pandemic, they found that leaving an elderly relative at home was a viable alternative.

Nursing homes grew out of the poor houses in England and America caring for the poor. In the United States, the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 provided money to states that care for the elderly. Thirty years later, the Medicaid program expanded funding and made nursing homes a central part of elderly care, said Terry Fulmer, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation, an advocacy group for older adults. “If you pay the nursing homes, go there,” said Dr. Fulmer.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that some programs to fund home care began, and nursing home residents across the country slowly began to decline, with occupancy falling to about 80 percent in recent years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Politics

What’s in Biden’s $1.eight trillion American Households Plan

What's in Biden's $1.8 trillion American Families Plan

President Joe Biden will propose $ 1.8 trillion in new expenses and tax credits to Congress on Wednesday for children, students and families, senior administrators said.

Biden will unveil the massive new package less than a month after the White House released a sweeping proposal to spend more than $ 2 trillion on infrastructure and other projects over an eight-year period. Together, the plans include the Biden administration’s vision to overtake the U.S. economy as the nation seeks to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and look beyond.

The new proposal, which includes about $ 1 trillion in investments and $ 800 billion in tax credits over a decade, will be partially offset in 15 years by an increase in taxes paid by the richest Americans, the said White House.

Here are some of the requirements of the new plan:

  • $ 225 billion for quality childcare and ensuring families pay only a fraction of their income for childcare services, based on a sliding scale
  • $ 225 billion to establish a national comprehensive paid family and sick leave program
  • $ 200 billion for a free universal preschool for all 3 and 4 year olds offered through a national partnership with states
  • $ 109 billion to ensure a two-year free community college for all students
  • Approximately $ 85 billion for Pell Grants and increase the maximum award for low-income students by approximately $ 1,400
  • A $ 62 billion scholarship program to increase student retention and graduation rates
  • A $ 39 billion program that engages students from families with incomes less than $ 125,000 who are attending a four-year historically black college or university, tribal college, or minority university or institution, are enrolled, receive subsidized tuition for two years
  • $ 45 billion to meet the nutritional needs of children, including by expanding access to the summer EBT program, which helps some low-income families and children purchase groceries outside of the school year
  • $ 200 billion to make the $ 1.9 trillion Covid stimulus deployment permanent and lower health insurance premiums for those who buy their own coverage
  • The child tax credit expansion, which was included in the Covid relief bill, has been extended to 2025 and is permanently fully refunded
  • The recent expansion of the child and dependent care tax credit make it permanent
  • Earning the Childless Employee Tax Credit Permanently

“These are investments that we as a country cannot afford,” a senior administrator said on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday evening.

CNBC policy

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To fund the programs and tax breaks, the proposal would partially reverse key elements of the 2017 Tax Cut Act, the major legislative achievement of former President Donald Trump’s first year in office.

The Biden government’s new spending plan would raise the highest income tax rate for the richest Americans to 39.6%. This rate has been reduced to 37% under the 2017 Act for married couples with taxable income greater than $ 600,000.

The plan would also aim to close a number of tax loopholes and raise taxes on capital gains to 39.6% for households making more than $ 1 million.

The Biden government claims that under the new plan, no one earning $ 400,000 a year or less will see their taxes rise.

Biden will detail the plan on Wednesday evening during a face-to-face address to a joint congressional session, which will also set out his administration’s broader legislative priorities. The event takes place on the eve of Biden’s 100th day in office.