Tag: Finding

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Health

Elizabeth Holmes’ attorneys involved about discovering unbiased jurors

Elizabeth Holmes' attorneys concerned about finding unbiased jurors

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (center) and her lawyer are leaving the court on June 15, 2021. Holmes is due to stand trial later this year on wire fraud and other charges.

CNBC

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was given permission to breastfeed her newborn on Tuesday during the pauses in her upcoming fraud trial. Judge Edward Davila said there will be a designated “rest room” for Holmes to look after their child, who is due to be born next month.

Holmes is charged with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy related to her now-defunct healthcare tech start-up Theranos. She pleaded not guilty.

The Holmes trial, which has been postponed several times due to the Covid-19 pandemic and her pregnancy, will be one of the most well-known criminal fraud cases in Silicon Valley history.

The children’s shelter for Holmes came when the judge reduced their proposed 45-page jury form with 112 questions to a 20-page draft.

Kevin Downey, a Holmes attorney, objected to the judge’s simplified questionnaire, saying, “If the jury has a bias, they can’t decide that. We can’t allow the jury to assess their own bias without basic questions cure that. “

Three hundred potential jurors from Northern California will be asked to fill out a questionnaire on August 19th and 20th. The personal jury selection and voir dire (jury survey) will take place on August 31st.

The Holmes questionnaire asks potential jurors how often they read, see, or hear certain journalists and news outlets, including CNBC.

“I know the defense is primarily concerned with media coverage,” said Davila. “You are suggesting that it was derogatory to Miss Holmes and that we must do something to secure a fair jury for her – and that is what I am trying to do.”

Suggested that we put the more difficult questions first, Davila added, “There’s a concept of questionnaire fatigue. At some point, there is less questionnaire return and it actually becomes less accurate the longer it takes.”

Davila said he would not allow any prospective judges to be questioned in detail, but assured the legal teams, “If we bring the jury in on both sides, they may be surprised, perhaps delighted, that many of them won’t know about this case.” . That is a reality of life. “

Prosecutors have described Holmes’ proposed questionnaire as “unnecessarily profoundly intrusive”.

“If anyone reads any of the 46 publications or networks that the defense is trying to identify, it doesn’t tell us anything about what they know about Theranos,” said Kelly Volkar, US assistant attorney. “Even once you’ve read a story, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you kept it or retained any kind of bias or prejudice about that one article.”

When Holmes entered the courthouse, she refused to answer questions from CNBC.

The two legal teams will review the judge’s questionnaire and he will make a final decision in the coming weeks.

Danny Cevallos, a legal analyst for NBC News, said it would be difficult to find an impartial jury to hear about the case, but claims to be impartial, “This juror could be a stealth juror – someone who’s one Has an ax to grind, but hides it to get into the jury. “

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Business

As Diners Return, Eating places Face a New Hurdle: Discovering Staff

As Diners Return, Restaurants Face a New Hurdle: Finding Workers

MIAMI – All Day, a downtown café and restaurant, got the year off to a good start. January was the busiest month since the pandemic began. “It was like turning on a light switch,” said Camila Ramos, an owner.

Business was so good that All Day employees were almost on the brink of crisis, said Ms. Ramos. When she struggled to hire reinforcements to help the increasing traffic, she had to make a counterintuitive decision: she closed all day for the month of February.

“I couldn’t find any people to hire,” she said outside her café last weekend, which reopened on March 1st. “I just wanted some time to reset operations.”

Ms. Ramos discovered early on what full-service restaurant owners across the country are now experiencing: an ongoing labor shortage amid a boom in business as mild outdoor dining weather spreads across the country, along with reduced Covid restrictions, they came to South Florida early and can now be felt in the USA

“I don’t think anything like this ever happened,” said Katie Button, the cook and co-owner of two restaurants in Asheville, NC.

A staff shortage doesn’t seem intuitive in a pandemic-ravaged company with mass layoffs and an alarming number of permanent closings. It is just as the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a $ 28.6 billion grant for small restaurants, bars, and restaurant groups, prepares for applications and diners who have been eating at home for a year are increasingly feeling vaccine-free.

Restaurant employment has increased every month this year, according to the National Restaurant Association, but full-service restaurant headcounts were still 20 percent, or 1.1 million jobs, lower in February than a year ago. (Employment in fast-service restaurants and fast-service restaurants decreased by only 6 percent over the same period.)

Full service restaurant owners and chefs say the number one reason staff stays stubbornly low is because there are simply many more vacancies than available labor.

Hugh Acheson, a head chef with restaurants in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, is the food and drink manager at the new Effie Sandestin Hotel in Miramar Beach, Florida. Around the time it opened in February, there was an online job site advertising more than 300 line cooking openings in the same area. “And these listings had been around for about two months,” he said.

The Pinch of Workers even inspires social media memes. Chef Jeremy Fox recently posted jobs on Instagram at his three restaurants in Santa Monica, California. The ad includes a photo of Mr. Fox in an empty restaurant under the heading: “If you hire chefs, so does any restaurant.”

All Day’s new head chef, Madison McClaren, joked that she was considering posting on the Tinder dating site, “Responsible cook looking for the same thing.”

However, intense competition for workers is only one reason for the labor shortage.

Restaurateurs say many former employees choose not to re-enter the world of work when they can earn almost as much or more by collecting unemployment benefits.

“There are times when it’s more profitable not to work than to work, and you can’t really blame people for wanting to hold onto it for as long as possible,” Fox said.

Others have left the restaurant business to get better paying jobs in other areas, further narrowing the pool of potential applicants. Greg Wright, 34, said he decided not to return to his job as a sous-chef at Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn shortly after it closed last March. He has since moved to the Bay Area and started training as a computer programmer.

“For me it was, ‘Am I just sitting here on my hands and hoping to have a job in the next two, three, five years?'” Said Mr. Wright. “The answer was, ‘Absolutely not.'”

Liz Murray, director of human resources and communications for the company that owns Marlow & Sons, said employees left the company for a variety of reasons. Some moved from New York to their hometown – and stayed after finding work in restaurants there.

A spokeswoman for Crafted Hospitality, the company that runs chef Tom Colicchio’s restaurants, said 80 to 85 percent of the group’s kitchen staff have moved out of New York City.

Sean Xie is the chief financial officer and managing partner of a company that operates 13 Sichuan restaurant locations in Chengdu Taste and Mian in California, Nevada, Washington, Texas and Hawaii. In most of these states, he said, government support and competition from companies like Amazon make it difficult to compete for talent without raising salaries to levels its businesses cannot support.

“We might even close a store or two just because we don’t have staff,” said Mr. Xie. “We want to stay open and even expand.”

Erick Williams, the chef and owner of Virtue, a southern Chicago restaurant, said its 22-strong staff was about half the size of what it was before the pandemic. “People don’t even come for interviews these days,” he said.

If he can’t hire more help before the outdoor meal growth business grows, Mr. Williams said, “All of a sudden, you’re paying more overtime and you run the risk of burning your people out.”

The tight labor market has helped accelerate the changes that restaurant workers pushed for during the shutdowns, including higher wages and better working conditions. Ms. Button raised wages based on recommendations from One Fair Wage, a service worker advocacy group, and pays a $ 150 bonus to employees who transfer new hires and stay at work for more than 90 days.

The starting wage for kitchen workers at Mr. Acheson’s Atlanta restaurants is $ 14-15 an hour, up from $ 12 prior to the pandemic. “People are going to be walking down the street to make more money – and they should be,” he said.

Mike Traud, program director for the food and hotel management department at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said intense competition for talent makes this a good time for people to get into the restaurant business. He said this is particularly true of the northeast, where restaurants on the coast are setting for the tourism season.

“You have more influence,” he said, “and there are more ways to get into upstairs kitchens.”

However, many people may be reluctant to start or resume work in the restaurant because some studies have health risks to customer care, especially indoors. Many restaurateurs are also concerned that resuming food indoors too quickly could lead to a further increase in Covid infections. (This week the Aspen Institute’s Food and Society Program released a set of safety guidelines it worked with other industry groups to help diners and restaurant staff continue to follow them.)

Some restaurants, like All Day in Miami, still only serve outdoors, even as restrictions on indoor eating relax because of concerns about unvaccinated employees and customers – and because opening more tables only leaves the already overworked staff heavier burdened.

In Miami, the battle for restaurant workers is unlikely to end anytime soon. New York restaurant operators like the Major Food Group are rushing to open locations in South Florida where the population is booming.

Macchialina, a popular Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, had to close for a day in January due to a staff shortage. Chef Niven Patel owns two restaurants in Coral Gables and is opening another one this summer. “Finding people is our top priority in our meetings each week,” he said.

Ms. Ramos said she was glad market forces pushed her to make changes that she wanted to make to create a better job in her all-day coffee shop. “Before that happens, we have to pay what we can afford,” she said. “Now we have to recharge what is needed.”

But even with higher salaries, the 32-year-old Ms. Ramos has started looking for potential applicants from her customers. One new employee is a former real estate agent. Another was a day trader.

“I usually need at least three years of experience, with zero exceptions,” said Ms. Ramos. “Now I think, ‘You have been here a couple of times? I will train you. ‘”

Tejal Rao and Rachel Wharton contributed to the coverage.

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Health

Discovering a Foothold for Nordic Snowboarding in Rural Alaska

Finding a Foothold for Nordic Skiing in Rural Alaska

It was minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and a lot of the kids were wearing jeans. You forgot to bring snow pants again. But they still wanted to go skiing, and that’s why we were there, so we took them to ski – even if some of the less appropriately dressed kids returned early.

I was in Nulato, a Koyukon-Athabascan village of a few hundred people on the Lower Yukon River in Alaska’s western interior. I volunteered as a ski trainer with a program called Skiku – a playful portmanteau of the Inupiaq word for ice, Siku, and the English word ski.

Skiku’s goal is to create, or in some cases continue a tradition of Nordic skiing in rural Alaska, both as a healthy pastime and as a means of transportation.

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, dozens of villages participated in the program, most of which were visited by a group of trainers each spring. (The ski equipment stays all year round.)

I’ve been on the program since 2015 when I first traveled from my home in Fairbanks to the Inupiat village of Noorvik on Alaska’s west coast. I had never been to an Alaskan village before, most of which were Alaskan.

It’s not uncommon for white urban Alaskans like me not to have been to the smaller villages of the state. Most of the villages are inaccessible by road and most people do not leave without a specific reason.

In recent years it has been unexpectedly satisfying to see the sport prevail in the community. Some of the younger children – for whom seven years is literally a lifetime – have never known a world without annual visits from Skiku.

The best skiing at Nulato was on a snowmobile trail near the school that made a 1.6 km loop. We drove the same lap over and over again. The other coaches and I took turns at the end of the pack as we found it impossible to stay warm while skiing with the slowest kids.

The trail went into a wetland area before going back through the forest and it was good for skiing in every way. Although Nulato has a well-developed road network with little traffic, the roads are icy and unforgiving for the children who inevitably fall down. Snowmobile trails generally make for much better skiing.

The streets don’t go that far either, as all streets in Nulato are local – that is, there are no streets in or out of town. The only way to reach the village is by river or by air.

Although I visited six villages as a volunteer ski trainer, the photos shown here are from Nulato in 2020, Arctic Village in 2018 and two trips to Kaktovik in 2018 and 2019.

The trips to Arctic Village and Kaktovik were part of a separate (and unspecified) program set up by one of Skiku’s founders, Lars Flora, a two-time Winter Olympic player. Lars’ program is slightly different from Skiku; It includes skijoring – being pulled on skis by mushing dogs, which is as fun as it sounds – and kite skiing. But the general idea is the same.

The Arctic Village is at the foot of the Brooks Range, just outside the southern border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the Trump administration opened to fossil fuel development. Kaktovik is located on an island in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s north coast and within the confines of the Refuge.

The area around Kaktovik is called the coastal plain for a reason: in winter, when the sea is frozen over, Kaktovik is one of the few features on a blank, white canvas that is not interrupted even by the sea.

North Rope oil platforms are not visible from either village, but the effects of the oil money are very evident. Kaktovik is located in the North Slope Borough, which has high property tax revenues from its oil infrastructure in Prudhoe Bay, as well as other revenues from the oil industry. The school district is well funded and many of the residents are shareholders of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, an Alaska-based company that handles many profitable oil contracts.

Arctic Village, on the other hand, is not part of the North Slope Borough and does not benefit from oil development to the same extent. Unlike the shiny school in Kaktovik, it was difficult to find a toilet that worked in the school in Arctic Village.

(Tragically, Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik was destroyed by fire in February 2020. In rural Alaska, where schools serve as community centers for people of all ages, the loss of the school was enormous.)

Skiing at Arctic Village was second to none. Most locals only heat their homes with wood, which they collect from the many snowmobile trails that wind through the village and into the surrounding forest. And since the residents often drive older two-stroke machines that lack the strength to climb steep hills without running on them, the paths are all gentle and without abrupt curves on the slopes – ideal paths, in other words, for skiing.

Kaktovik is a more difficult place to promote skiing. The terrain is completely flat, and without any significant topography, skiing in the wind-hammered tundra outside the village is not that attractive. When we took the children outside, we often made jumps on mounds formed by the multi-story snowdrifts.

When I visited Kaktovik in early May 2019, we couldn’t ski outside for the first half of the week due to a relentless wind storm. When the wind finally subsided, the other coaches and I were walking in weak sunlight at 11 p.m. and were attacked by a polar bear.

The rest of the week was spent on a very limited schedule. When we were skiing, it was under the supervision of two village bear guards armed with weapons. (Kaktovik is a top polar bear spotting destination in late summer, but this troubled truce with the bears is creating increasing problems with encouraged bears coming into town.)

There is a lot of misunderstanding in the cities about rural Alaska. In the worst case, urban Alaskans often view the villages as desolate and uninviting places. But during my time as a ski instructor, I found exactly the opposite.

The tight social fabric in small towns is often found repeatedly. But in rural Alaska, it’s something that is felt in subtle ways – how the older children help the younger ones without a trace of resentment, or how all adults in the city are essentially custodians for all children.

During my time at Skiku, I understood my home state much better and improved my humiliatingly somber understanding of its physical and cultural geography. Sometimes I think that’s the real value of the program: to get us white urban Alaskans into the villages to see what life is really like there, we can stop doing apocryphal and reductive narratives. After all, without Skiku, it would be difficult for me to find a reason to spend a week in a different village every year.

But in the end my personal motives don’t matter, and the children don’t care if they teach me about their lives. They just love to ski.

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Business

Equities prone to develop, however discovering yield stays troublesome

Equities likely to grow, but finding yield remains difficult

krisanapong detraphiphat | Moment | Getty Images

The 2020 lows were a big contributor to a stock market that had a banner year after the March pandemic hit.

Low interest rates also annoyed investors seeking returns on bond purchases to diversify portfolios and reduce risk. While bond yields are likely to remain meager in 2021, much higher yields are available on alternative fixed income investments that individual investors typically overlook.

Many sectors of the market are poised to resume the growth fueled by the Fed’s rate cut last spring – a move whose effectiveness should not have been surprising given its track record. Conditions pointing to stock growth in 2021 include low interest rates, continuation of the Fed’s bond-buying program at current levels and the expected economic recovery related to coronavirus vaccinations. The introduction of vaccines appears to have been a factor in a partial rotation that showed signs of a start last summer, from some growth technology companies to value stocks, including industrials.

Among those industrials are infrastructure stocks that can benefit if Congress passes an infrastructure bill.

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Infrastructure legislation has been discussed for years, but could actually happen in 2021.

President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign included a $ 2 trillion infrastructure agenda, and some congressmen are now using the “i-word” because the deteriorating condition of the country’s roads and bridges is now critical. According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, Americans crossed structurally defective bridges 174 million times a day in 2018 alone – and little has been done to improve them since then.

Even if Congress fails to act, infrastructure inventories are already being boosted by rising spending on private infrastructure – ports, renewables, and communications equipment – which set a North American record of $ 226.5 billion in 2019, up from an all-time high in 2020.

Infrastructure companies are already benefiting. In the seven weeks between November 4 (the day after the election) and December 22, the Indxx US Infrastructure Development Index rose 8.04% – about 1 percentage point more than the S&P 500.

A new freeway under construction in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dan Reynolds Photography | Moment | Getty Images

Today, infrastructure also refers to IT / tech infrastructure, which also includes semiconductors. While growth in big tech stocks has recently flattened, the MVIS US Listed Semiconductor 25 Index rose 20.5% over the same seven-week period. Semiconductor companies, whose merchandise ranges from internet-connected fridges to electric cars, are deployed in data centers to handle the growing internet traffic caused by the 5G data tsunami.

Investors, who are likely to get good stock returns in 2021, will continue to be dismayed by the scarce returns on corporate and government bonds as they attempt to diversify their portfolios with uncorrelated investments to reduce risk.

However, they may be able to solve this problem with alternative forms of bonds and bond-like investments which, while currently advantageous, are likely to be under your radar. These include:

• Taxable municipal bond funds. Due to the Tax Cut and Employment Act of 2017, state and local governments and agencies are refinancing tax-free Muni bonds with taxable bonds – a scratch for some as Muni bonds are synonymous with “tax-free”.

To attract investors, some issuers pay substantial returns, resulting in fund returns of 5% to 6%. For many investors, this translates into an after-tax return of around 3.5%, compared to 2% on many tax-free Muni bonds or the taxable returns of 2% to 3% on high-quality corporate bonds. The interest rate risk of taxable munis is roughly the same as that of tax-free issues.

Some investors may be concerned about the solvency of issuers due to financial problems related to pandemics, but the federal government has a long history of bailing out local governments in dire straits.

• floating rate preference equity funds (also known as floating rate funds). As a kind of bond-stock hybrid, preferred stocks can serve as a viable, higher-paying alternative to bonds, but with less volatility than common stocks. With floating rate preferred stock funds, investors can get some protection against rising interest rates – an effective selling point, as interest rates can only go up. The current dividend yields of the funds range between 4% and 5%.

More recently, some companies have begun offering fixed to floating rate preferred stocks that offer a fixed rate of return for a specific term and then are floating at the applicable interest rates. Some newer issues have fixed rates of up to 4% which are later converted into floating rates tied to the London Interbank Offered Rate or 10 year government bonds. However, a different benchmark can be used for future issues.

As always, the devil is in the details: the length of the fixed term, the range of variability and the behavior of the reference interest rate. Active management is important in all preferred stock investments as managers can avoid the negative return problems inherent in the indices.

• Bank loans or senior loan funds. Investors with a little more risk tolerance might be interested in these fixed income funds that buy commercial loans. While borrowers may have sub-investment grade loans, this risk is offset by the loans’ senior debt status, which means that the fund holdings pay out ahead of other forms of debt and shareholders.

Some of these mutual funds pay more than 6% annually but may have redemption restrictions. Exchange traded funds in this category are less complicated, of course, but they pay less – around 4%. Again, active management helps as managers can avoid bad loans in indices.

Using these unconventional solutions may require some study, but individual investors learning their dynamics can achieve significantly higher returns than traditional fixed income vehicles while still having sufficient levels of comfort.

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Entertainment

Evaluation: Discovering Hope in an Unfinished Pam Tanowitz Premiere

Review: Finding Hope in an Unfinished Pam Tanowitz Premiere

On Saturday, the Joyce Theater broadcast a premiere by choreographer Pam Tanowitz, who started the program with the words: “It’s not really finished yet.”

This wasn’t a confession of negligence or an excuse for over-planning, though Ms. Tanowitz, who was one of New York’s most sought-after choreographers before the pandemic, has been remarkably busy lately, doing video dancing for both the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater.

Rather, Ms. Tanowitz’s words were self-explanatory in the manner of an artistic statement. The title of the new work is “Finally unfinished: Part 1”. This was the second half of the 35-minute event, which was available on request through December 26th, coupled with another recently published work, “Gustave Le Gray, No. 2”. ”

What we have here are parts, parts, versions, recycled matter. A program note shows that “Finally unfinished” is based on choreographic material from works that Ms. Tanowitz previously presented at Joyce. “Gustave Le Gray, No. 2” is related to “Gustave Le Gray, No. 1” which was created for the Miami City Ballet and the Dance Theater of Harlem last year (and slated for the City Ballet 2022 schedule) .

And there is already a “Finally Unfinished: Part 2”. It is a website, a “digital box of curiosities” (funnily designed by Jeremy Jacob like a cut-and-paste scrapbook with stop-motion animation) that brings together some of Ms. Tanowitz’s inspirations for dance.

The livestream event is also a kind of scrapbook. It’s an event in the Merce Cunningham sense of combining old pieces in a new order for a new occasion and space.

The “unfinished” deal with titles and texts is a view of the continuity of a choreographer’s life. For Ms. Tanowitz, the distinction between works is possibly less important than their common origin as filament that she and her employees keep turning. “It’s never finished for me,” she says, referring to each piece, but also the process and practice of dancing. At the moment, the humility of testifying is a sign of hope.

But if their work is one piece to them, that doesn’t mean the pieces are all the same. The first, “Gray, No. 2”, which is set on a Caroline Shaw score, which is itself a revision of a Chopin mazurka, is a highly ordered composition for four people that quietly absorbs in its changing configurations, with a dancer often swings to a new position The whole group moves. The work resists the buoyancy, a feeling of weight or fatigue, which the dancers eventually no longer resist and sink to the ground.

However, this is not the end of the program. Because the much wilder and fragmented “Finally unfinished” begins when a camera follows Melissa Toogood’s cool fire into the wings. Soon enough the dancers – seven of them now – will be walking into the aisles, seats and the balcony. And this theater, which was dark and empty for most of this year, is enlivened by elegant, eccentric, brilliant dance.

This is Joyce’s second experiment in live streaming. (The first, in which seven dancers at a time recorded Molissa Fenley’s grueling solo “State of Darkness,” was in October, and recordings are available until January 10th.) Not everything that distinguishes itself as cinematography is less of a work for the camera as a substitute for being in the theater. In fact, it is a love letter to what Joyce was and should become again.

In the score for “Endlich unfinished”, which lies between confusing and loud contributions by Dan Siegler and Ted Hearne, there is a recording of the stage manager’s instructions (“Go, Victor!”) And announcements during a Pam Tanowitz dance performance in 2014 at Joyce . (“Please turn off your electronic devices” is poignant when you hear about an electronic device that gives you the only access to the factory.)

The costumes that Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung designed for previous Tanowitz plays at Joyce are also related to the theater, reproducing the red curtain, chair upholstery, and less stylish carpeting. It’s all loving mockery that pokes fun at the Joyce’s frumpiness while respecting her story as an essential home for dance: the tactile, personal experience for which this digital version is a placeholder.

At the end of the performance, the dancers look out onto the stage from their seats to represent the missing audience. This captures in a picture what “Finally unfinished, Part 2” says in words: “This is not the end. Return to learn more. “

Pam Tanowitz dance

Available until December 26th, joyce.org.