Tag: Helped

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Business

Whistle-Blower Says Credit score Suisse Helped Purchasers Skip Taxes After Promising to Cease

Whistle-Blower Says Credit Suisse Helped Clients Skip Taxes After Promising to Stop

The Swiss bank also hired Mr. Wray, then a partner at King & Spalding in Washington, who served as head of the Department of Justice’s crime department and oversaw the Enron task force. (Mr. Wray became director of the FBI three years after negotiating the final plea for Credit Suisse.)

“It is a mystery to me why, under the agreement, the US government did not require the bank to spit out some names of US customers with secret Swiss bank accounts,” said Carl Levin, then a senator in Michigan who was leading an investigation into Offshore Tax Avoidance said after the 2014 opposition agreement.

In the interview, Mr Neiman, the whistleblower’s attorney, said that in July 2014, after the plea deal was signed and Credit Suisse awaited his final conviction, he told officials from the Justice Department’s tax department and federal prosecutors who was on worked on the case that his client had information that the bank was still camouflaging money held by some US account holders. He gave them a name in particular – Dan Horsky, the retired economics professor who lived in Rochester, NY

The tip was checked out. The following year, federal agents arrested Mr. Horsky, who had amassed a fortune of $ 200 million and hidden with the help of Credit Suisse bankers using offshore shell companies, court documents show. The deal lasted several months after the bank signed its pleading agreement.

It is unclear why the Justice Department failed to notify the court and change the terms of its settlement with Credit Suisse based on information from the whistleblower – either prior to Credit Suisse’s final conviction or after Mr Horsky’s case became public. At the time of the conviction, lawyers on both sides told the court that they had no information that could affect the agreement.

Officials with authority to make the decision to review the Credit Suisse case for possible violations in 2014 and 2015 – including James Cole, who was then assistant attorney general, and Dana Boente, the US attorney at Eastern District of Virginia – did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2015, Mr Horsky pleaded guilty to defrauding the US government and said he would work with prosecutors. In 2017 he was sentenced to seven months in prison. Some details of his conviction have been sealed, and a federal judge denied a request from Bloomberg News to lift the seal. The judge said he denied the application after consulting with the Justice Department and Mr Horsky’s lawyers.

Mr Neiman’s client could be amply rewarded if the prosecution imposed further fines on Credit Suisse. According to an IRS rule, whistleblowers can receive up to 30 percent of the amount of additional money the government receives. And, said Mr. Neiman, the whistleblower has more American account holder names than Mr. Horsky’s, although he wouldn’t say how many.

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Health

Fred Figa, Who Helped Expose a Drug’s Risks, Is Useless at 65

Fred Figa, Who Helped Expose a Drug’s Dangers, Is Dead at 65

This obituary is part of a series about people who died from the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

In late 1983, a member of the Neonatal Department at Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, had a question for Fred Figa, a young pharmacist who was part of the hospital department that researched the safety of new drugs.

A pharmaceutical company unveiled a new vitamin E injection that is marketed under the brand name E-Ferol as a nutritional supplement for premature babies. It seemed harmless enough. Should you buy it?

Mr. Figamade made a series of phone calls and found that the injection had indeed not been verified by the Food and Drug Administration. No, he replied. Wait a moment. Then he alerted federal investigators.

His diligence would save the lives of innumerable babies.

Mr Figa and investigators had encountered a deadly product safety crisis and scandal. Officials backed by Mr. Figa’s persistent research later found that the FDA had failed to take protective measures regarding the side effects of E-Ferol in light-weight newborns – side effects that resulted in the death of 38 infants from organ failure in hospitals in the area led the country.

Mr. Figa became a star witness in Congressional hearings that forced e-Ferol distributor O’Neal, Jones & Feldman Pharmaceuticals to withdraw him from the market in mid-1984.

“He wouldn’t let go of it. He was the kind of person who would follow something to the nth degree, ”said his wife Janice Russell Figa, who was pregnant when Mr. Figa started calling hospitals across the country to map the pattern of problems.

Mr. Figa, who served for decades as an internal legal advisor to the compliance departments of pharmaceutical companies, died on February 16 in a Morristown, New Jersey hospital near his home in Randolph. He was 65 years old. The cause was complications from the coronavirus, his family said.

Together with his wife, two daughters, Elise and Stefanie, survive; a son, Paul; three sisters, Perla Kimball, Felicia Pehrson and Heidi Wolf; and a brother, Romek.

Updated

March 12, 2021, 11:55 a.m. ET

Solomon Fred Figa was born on October 20, 1955 in Portland, Maine, to Jewish refugees who fled the Holocaust: Paul Figa, who started a leather shoe store specializing in moccasins, and Karola (Holzman) Figa, a seamstress. Fred was one of six children.

He graduated from Northeastern University in Boston in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacy.

Uncovering the problems with E-Ferol, he attended night classes at the law school at George Mason University in Washington and worked part-time for the FDA, which helped him with his investigation. (He graduated from law school in 1986.)

Mr Figa never sought the limelight. At first he refused to testify or speak to reporters, confused that just paying attention to the details of his work – an emphasis learned from tooling and sewing leather in his father’s business – would attract attention.

He was always on the lookout for lurking dangers. His daughter Elise said in a telephone interview that as a teenager she appeared in a community production of “Peter Pan” as Liza, the maid. This role required that she simulate the flight with the wires suspended.

Her father asked to inspect the machine. The director obliges, then Mr. Figa said they were a couple of pirates in the choir for a short time.

“He went to the costume place and got a fake earring and a removable tattoo with a large scar on his cheek and he just had the best time,” Ms. Figa said.

“So he’d be a pirate for about a month every weekend, then he’d go to work as a pharmaceutical lawyer on Monday.”

Categories
Politics

Democrats’ Huge Tent Helped Them Win. Now It Threatens Biden’s Agenda.

Democrats’ Big Tent Helped Them Win. Now It Threatens Biden’s Agenda.

Mr Sanders targeted the latest news that a moderate think tank, Third Way, was working on a project to put the Democrats at the center of the mid-term election. He said topics such as reducing student debt, raising the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour and tackling climate change were “political winners”.

The American working class today – white, black, Latin American – hurts. They want us to respond vigorously, ”he said. “If we do that, I think they will reward us in 2022. If we fail, Republicans can go around and say, ‘Hey, you gave these people the House, the Senate, and the White House and they didn’t do anything for you,’ We’re not going to do well in 2022. ‘

Still, the anchoring of moderate senators – and the current respect for the president – is a challenge for activists hoping to sway the administration. And while progressive elected officials are confident Mr Biden will end up on their side, a growing chorus of activists awaits him to act more immediately.

K Trainor, a student activist who has worked with progressive groups to convert students to Democrats, said Mr Biden’s response at City Hall was deeply disappointing. She said that if the government didn’t deliver for young voters, it would be more difficult to convince them to stand in future elections.

“I think a lot of people in my generation ask, ‘Where’s the guts?'” Said Ms. Trainor. “It feels like they’re backtracking and we’re not even 100 days in.”

Rev. William J. Barber II, a co-chair of the Campaign of the Poor who organized the West Virginia workers’ meeting with Mr. Manchin, said the debate reflected an ugly underbelly of democratic politics. While poor and low-income workers, especially those who are racial minorities or young people, form the core of the democratic base, the politics that matter most to them have often been sacrificed on the basis of political calculations.

You are the human cost of the big tent, he said.

“Democrats ran on it, they put it on their platform and they said this has to be done,” said Dr. Barber. “It would be the ultimate task and betrayal to come here and have the power to do it and then retire.”

Categories
Entertainment

Johnny Pacheco, Who Helped Carry Salsa to the World, Dies at 85

Johnny Pacheco, Who Helped Bring Salsa to the World, Dies at 85

Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican Republic-born band leader and co-founder of the record label that made salsa music a worldwide sensation, died on Monday in Teaneck, New Jersey. He was 85 years old.

His wife Maria Elena Pacheco, known as Cuqui, confirmed the death at the Holy Name Medical Center. Mr. Pacheco lived in Fort Lee, NJ

Fania Records, which he founded with Jerry Masucci in 1964, signed the hottest talents in Latin American music of the 1960s and 1970s, including Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe and Rubén Blades. Mr. Pacheco, a talented flautist, went on and off the stage as the songwriter, arranger and leader of Fania All Stars, the first super group of salsa.

From the beginning he worked with young musicians who brought jazz, rhythm and blues, funk and other styles into traditional Afro-Cuban music.

In the 1970s, Fania, sometimes referred to as the Motown of Salsa, was a powerhouse of Latin American music, and the Fania All Stars toured the world. The label spawned burning creative collaborations, such as those between Mr. Colón, a trombonist and composer, and Mr. Blades, a socially conscious lyricist and singer; and to cultivate heroes like Mr. Lavoe, the Puerto Rican singer who fought drug addiction and died of AIDS complications at the age of 46.

Fania broke up in the mid-1980s due to royalty litigation, and in 2005, Emusica, a Miami company, bought the Fania catalog and began releasing remastered versions of its classic recordings.

Juan Azarías Pacheco Knipping was born on March 25, 1935 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. His father, Rafael Azarias Pacheco, was a well-known band leader and clarinetist. His mother, Octavia Knipping Rochet, was the granddaughter of a French colonist and the great-granddaughter of a German merchant who married a Dominican woman who was born to Spanish colonists.

The family moved to New York when Johnny was 11 years old. He studied drums at Juilliard School and worked in Latin American bands before founding his own, Pacheco y Su Charanga, in 1960.

The band signed with Alegre Records and their first album sold more than 100,000 copies in the first year. According to its official website, it became one of the best-selling Latin albums of its time. Mr. Pacheco’s career started with the introduction of a new dance craze called Pachanga. He became an international star and toured the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Fania Records was born from an unlikely partnership between Mr. Pacheco and Mr. Masucci, a former police officer who became a lawyer and fell in love with Latin music while visiting Cuba.

From its humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx – where releases were sold out of the trunk of cars – Fania brought an urban sensibility to Latin American music. In New York, the music had taken on the name “Salsa” (Spanish for sauce, as in hot sauce) and the Fania label began using it as part of their marketing.

Under the direction of Mr. Pacheco, the artists built a new sound based on traditional clave rhythms and the Cuban Son (or Son Cubano) genre, but faster and more aggressive. Much of the lyrics – about racism, cultural pride, and the turbulent politics of the era – were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.

In this sense, salsa was “native American music that is just as much a part of the indigenous music landscape as jazz, rock or hip-hop,” wrote Jody Rosen in 2006 in the New York Times on the occasion of the new edition of the Fania master tapes – after years of being in Schimmel a warehouse in Hudson, NY

Recognition…Fania

Mr. Pacheco teamed up with Ms. Cruz in the early 1970s. Their first album, “Celia & Johnny”, was a strong mix of heavy salsa with infectious choruses and virtuoso performances. Thanks to Ms. Cruz’s vocal skills and Mr. Pacheco’s big band directing, it soon went gold, and its first track, the fast-paced “Quimbara,” helped drive Ms. Cruz’s career to Queen of Salsa status to lead.

The two released more than 10 albums together; Mr. Pacheco was the producer on her last solo recording, “La Negra Tiene Tumbao”, which won the 2002 Grammy for Best Salsa Album.

Over the years, Mr. Pacheco has produced for several artists and performed around the world. He contributed to film scores, including one for The Mambo Kings, a 1992 film based on Oscar Hijuelos’ novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. “For the Jonathan Demme film” Something Wild ” he teamed up with David Byrne, the head of Talking Heads, one of his many eclectic partnerships.

Mr. Pacheco, who has received numerous awards and honors in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1998. He wrote more than 150 songs, many of which are now classics.

For many years he directed the Johnny Pacheco Latin Music and Jazz Festival at Lehman College in the Bronx, an annual event in association with the college (broadcast live in recent years) which brings together hundreds of talented young musicians studying music in New York City schools provide the stage.

In addition to this woman, Mr. Pacheco’s survivors include two daughters, Norma and Joanne; and two sons, Elis and Phillip.

The salsa phenomenon that Mr. Pacheco created reached new heights on August 23, 1973 with a sold out volcano show at Yankee Stadium, where the Fania All Stars got 40,000 fans to a musical frenzy led by Mr. Pacheco, his was rhinestone-studded white shirt, bathed in sweat. The concert cemented the legendary stature of the band and his own.

Recognition…Fania Records

In 1975 Fania released the long-awaited double album “Live at Yankee Stadium”, which despite the name also contained material from a show at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Puerto Rico, which had a much better sound quality. The album earned the Fania All Stars their first Grammy nomination for Best Latin Recording.

In 2004, it was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Michael Levenson contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Politics

A Yr of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by Washington

A Year of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by Washington

Even so, Mrs. Stewart worked happiest in solitude.

Ms. Stewart was a night nurse until 2019 and lived in Grand Rapids with her sister. Her sister fell behind with the rent and insisted that they move in with her mother, who is five hours away in rural Ossineke. Mrs. Stewart succumbed reluctantly. “We all depend on each other, which is good, except that we don’t get along,” she said.

With four children and conflicting parenting styles, the trailer turned out to be crowded and tense. When Mrs. Stewart found work as a gas station cashier – $ 10 an hour, 20 hours a week – she welcomed the escape as much as the payment.

The coronavirus hit a few weeks later.

When the virus spread in early March, President Donald J. Trump insisted it did not pose a threat. “Jobs are booming, incomes are rising,” he tweeted. For the next week, Disneyland and Broadway were padlocked, and the stock market posted its worst daily loss in decades.

While the need for action in Washington was clear, the risks of an impasse were great. Liberal Democrats controlled the House, Conservative Republicans held the Senate, and Mr Trump ridiculed the House Speaker as “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi. However, within a few weeks they agreed on a $ 2.2 trillion plan.

One surprise was how much it did for the poor, a class not known for its political clout. Even the poorest families fully qualified for stimulus payments – $ 1,200 for adults, $ 500 for children (some Republicans had suggested giving them less) – and at the urging of the Democrats, Congress significantly expanded unemployment benefits .

The existing program was filled with gaps: it only comprised around a quarter of the unemployed and replaced less than half of their lost wages. Congress expanded coverage, temporarily adding part-time workers, independent contractors, and other people who are normally excluded. And for four months everyone on unemployment benefits was given a big bonus: $ 600 a week.

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Entertainment

How 4 Tet Helped Madlib Make One thing Completely New: A Solo Album

How Four Tet Helped Madlib Make Something Totally New: A Solo Album

Madlib has been an elusive yet prolific figure in hip-hop for nearly three decades. His reputation has been shaped by collaborations, alter ego and the relentless creation of new music. So much new music.

There is music in honor of the composer Weldon Irvine. Music remixing the Blue Note Records catalog. Music inspired by India. Music inspired by film scores. Music for mainstream stars like Kanye West and Erykah Badu. Music for underground stars like MF Doom and Freddie Gibbs. An immeasurable amount of music in his personal archives that few other people have ever heard.

But until this week, Southern California-born artist Otis Jackson Jr. had never released a traditional solo album. “Sound Ancestors,” due Friday, tries to sum up its enormous influences and production approaches into a unique listening experience. And while Madlib had little interest in such a project (“I didn’t really think about it,” he said) someone else did and helped bring it to life: Kieran Hebden, the British musician who records as Four Tet.

“I didn’t see it as if I wanted to imprint my sound on his in any way,” said Hebden, 43, who arranged, edited and mastered Sound Ancestors with hundreds of files that Madlib gave him for the past few years had sent years. “It was more, I want to do the things I like best as best as possible.”

Madlib, 47, doesn’t do many interviews, and when he does, they rarely shed light on his philosophy of making music. He’s not dismissive or dismissive, it is just clear that conversations are not where he wants to use his energy. When we spoke from his Los Angeles home, it was on his wife’s cell phone. He got rid of his device years ago when too many people tried to reach him.

Growing up in Oxnard, California, a town surrounded by strawberry farms between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Madlib got his first production credits on tracks for the rap party animals Tha Alkaholiks in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t until 2000 when he released the album “The Unseen” as Quasimoto that he attracted wider attention. Quasimoto had his own personality: he was a furry monster with a protruding snout, known for his unbound ID and open voice.

“That was a bit of an explosion in my peer group,” said Nigel Godrich, the producer known for decades of working with Radiohead. “It was clearly someone on the outside doing something really, really different and flashy and really exciting.” Years later, after they were all friends, Godrich said he and Thom Yorke turned to Madlib to rap on one of the Radiohead singer’s solo albums. He politely declined.

Madlib’s next breakthrough came when he released back-to-back collaborations with two other cult rap heroes. He co-founded “Champion Sound” with Detroit-born producer J Dilla Jaylib in 2003 and switched phrases as they pounded each other over the beat. And in 2004 he teamed up with hip-hop mischievous super villain MF Doom for “Madvillainy”, which has long been considered the enduring testimony of two rap geniuses.

After Dilla’s death in 2006, Madlib decided to quit rapping. “I just had nothing more to say,” he said. “I didn’t like rapping at all. I did it because sometimes I had to. “

In the 2010s he found a reliable partner in Freddie Gibbs and in 2015 produced “No More Parties in LA” with Kanye West to create a nimble piece of dingy funk that inspired a multitude of t-shirts and hashtags. Amid all of these projects, Madlib regularly released instrumental collections, usually as part of his “Beat Konducta” series of more than 30 tracks, each of which rarely lasted longer than two minutes.

With “Sound Ancestors” Hebden hoped to create a Madlib album that would bring all the years of work together but be more accessible. He wanted to deliver an immersive journey, similar to what the capricious Scottish duo Boards of Canada could do or what the adventurous German label ECM Records would have brought out in the 1970s.

Although Madlib is hip-hop oriented and Hebden focuses his sound on electronic dance music, they cite many of the same types of older records as influences. They are both deep lovers of English psychedelic rock, free jazz, and other far more esoteric micro-genres. “We all collect the same things,” said Madlib. “He’s a little more out there than me. He collects nature and bug sound records. I will get there. “

When they first met, Hebden was already a fan of Madlib’s creations. “He’s able to turn elements that other people can’t into something so cool, beautiful and undeniable,” he said. “It kind of flows out of him.”

The connection between Madlib and Hebden dates back to 2001, when artists from indie rap label Stones Throw came to DJ in London and Hebden introduced himself outside the venue to Eothen Alapatt, the label manager known as Egon. The two stayed in contact and developed a deep friendship over the years, to which Madlib quickly became a part.

“He’s more like a brother,” Madlib said of Hebden now.

Hebden always wanted to hear an instrumental Madlib album and realized that he had to look after it himself. Alapatt, who had worked with Madlib on a new label, Madlib Invazion, began sending material that Hebden used to create a 15-minute proof of concept. In 2019, he received final approval from Madlib for a Mediterranean-style dinner in London.

Madlib has always been reluctant to let other people touch his mark; Hebden was one of the few exceptions. In 2005, Stones Throw released an EP with Four Tet remixes of songs from “Madvillainy”, which contained completely new beats by Hebden, which were constructed as an opportunity to experiment with Doom’s a cappellas. For Sound Ancestors, Hebden decided that although he could change and manipulate the material Madlib had sent him, he wouldn’t create new sounds.

Madlib and Alapatt provided hundreds of files: unreleased or unfinished beats, as well as live instruments that Madlib had recorded during studio sessions with musicians. “I wanted him to be free to do what he wanted,” said Madlib. “I trust that he will do what he feels.”

When the pandemic came and all touring opportunities ended, Hebden settled in his home in the Catskill Mountains of New York to focus on completing the album. He sent skeleton versions to Madlib, who told him if there were certain parts that he didn’t like or included parts that he saved for another project.

Aside from its ability to find obscure loops, Madlib’s music is unpredictable due to its harrowing beat shifts and weird sample drift. He never lets the listener get too deeply into a groove, and Hebden was careful to preserve some of that mess. “I’ve tried to get the best of both worlds by having these moments that are very universal for everyone to get their heads around and also shocking moments,” Hebden said. “I didn’t mean to water things down or make anything too polite.”

The first single, “Road of the Lonely Ones,” is a melancholy exploration consisting mostly of segments from a break-up song by the Philadelphia R&B group The Ethics from the 1960s. It aches with heartbreak and turns the group’s question into an ex-lover: “Where did I go wrong?” into something much more existential. “Two for 2 – for Dilla” is no less sentimental, even if the song structure is less traditional. Soulful Fragments warp, ricochet and bleed through, reminiscent of the masterpieces of Madlib’s deceased friend and colleague.

“It’s very much what you’re hoping for,” said Godrich of the album. “It’s a relief to hear.”

After “Sound Ancestors” Madlib hopes to release a new album through Madlib Invazion every month. He casually mentioned collections he put together based on both calypso and industrial music, material he recorded with Brazilian artists, and an indie rock album made with jazz-funk maniac Thundercat.

On the other hand, he has had numerous rumored projects over the years that never materialized, including a collaboration with Mac Miller, a Black Star reunion album and a sequel to “Madvillainy”. But why be trapped in the past when there is always something new?

Categories
Politics

How Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher in a Democratic Senate

How Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher in a Democratic Senate

The dog was very busy.

He starred in a political ad that had to show the candidate’s good-natured warmth. But the ad also had to stave off an onslaught of racially motivated attacks without directly embroiling them, and to convey to white voters in Georgia that the black pastor who ran the Ebenezer Baptist Church could represent them.

Of course, Alvin the Beagle couldn’t have known about it when he was walking with Rev. Raphael Warnock last fall when a film crew was recording their time together in a neighborhood outside of Atlanta.

Pulling a Mr. Warnock in a puffer vest for an idealized suburban stroll – bright sunshine, picket fence, an American flag – Alvin appeared in several of Mr. Warnock’s commercials fighting his Republican opponent in the recent Georgia Senate runoff .

Perhaps at its most famous spot, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, throws a plastic bag of Alvin’s feces in the trash and compares it to his rival’s increasingly caustic ads. The Beagle barks in agreement and when Mr. Warnock explains that “we” – he and Alvin – approve of the news, the dog licks its goatee healthy.

“The entire ad screams that I’m a black candidate who whites shouldn’t be afraid of,” said Hakeem Jefferson, a Stanford political science professor who studies race, stigma and politics in America.

On Wednesday, Mr Warnock became the first black Senator from Georgia after the Democrats swept both Senate seats in the runoff elections. The double victories gave President Biden and his chances of implementing his agenda, democratic control over the chamber and an enormous boost.

While there isn’t a single factor responsible for such narrow victories – Mr Warnock won by less than 100,000 out of around 4.5 million votes and the other new Democratic Senator, Jon Ossoff, won by even fewer – there is a bipartisan agreement That the Beagle played an outsize role in breaking the clutter in two competitions that broke every Senate spending record.

“The puppy ad got people talking,” said Brian C. Robinson, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. “It made it harder to caricature him because they humanized him.”

At the end of the campaign, the helpers from Warnock saw that their internal surveys showed dog warnings, supporters lifted their own puppies at solidarity rallies and put home-made beagle-themed signs in the front gardens. They even started selling Puppies 4 Warnock merchandise.

All of this would probably surprise Alvin. After all, he wasn’t even Mr. Warnock’s dog.

Before the November 3 election, two Republicans, Senator Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins, bled each other in a race to the right as they pledged allegiance to President Trump.

Mr. Warnock found himself on a glide path to the drains, and had the rare opportunity to do months of uninterrupted introductory advertising about himself.

The 51-year-old pastor had taken for granted on camera, and his campaign would film him speaking directly to audiences in much of his ads. But the Warnock team also knew that the pastor’s two decades of sometimes fiery rhetoric in the pulpit would lead to potentially devastating attacks.

Racial politics was inevitable. In addition to being a black candidate, Mr. Warnock was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., and political scientists and strategists emphasized that he faced Mrs. Loeffler with a unique challenge: against a white woman in the South.

“He knew he would be perceived as a highly raced candidate,” said Andra Gillespie, professor of political science at Emory University in Georgia and author of several books on race and politics. A key question for his campaign was she said, “Can you be racially transcendent and the pastor of arguably the most prominent black church in America?”

The Beagle spots were the brainchild of Adam Magnus, the lead admaker of the Warnock campaign, who wanted to use humor to find a way to vaccinate Mr. Warnock against explicit and implicit attacks. First he had to call the pastor. “I want to make sure you like dogs,” he recalled.

Mr. Warnock said he did – he had previously owned dogs (Comet, Cupid, and Brenal – all mutt), though not currently – and was playing a game for a puppy-themed commercial. Next, Mr Magnus had to cast a star pooch that he eventually found from a Georgia supporter whose name the campaign refused to reveal.

There has been some discussion that the Beagle – the type of breed that “we psychologically associate with whites,” as Dr. Jefferson put it – another subtle but deliberate effort was to explode racial stereotypes. Mr. Magnus said the reality was more mundane: “The dog had to be very cute, relatable, and he had to be able to hold the dog.”

A take of Alvin in Mr. Warnock’s arms would be the punchline.

“Get ready, Georgia, the negative attacks are coming,” the contestant said, predicting cutting back on everything from eating pizza with a knife and fork to hating puppies.

“And by the way, I love puppies,” he added, rocking Alvin.

It was Mr. Warnock’s opening ad of the drains, and it immediately went viral online.

Mr Warnock is not the first candidate to proclaim love for puppies in a preventive act of political self-defense. In 2006, another black candidate running for the Maryland Senate, Michael Steele, a Republican, showed an ad with his own saying essentially exactly the same thing.

Mr Steele, who said he was “honored by the tribute” in the Warnock spot, said his campaign had not consciously considered racial prejudice in creating his ad, but he saw clear efforts by Mr Warnock’s campaign to address racial prejudice disarm. “He’s making a statement in response to the president that black people are coming into your neighborhood,” said Steele. “We already live there.”

The Warnock team knew that getting to the Senate would require a complex and fragile multiracial coalition. The party needed to simultaneously mobilize black voters on a turnout close to that of a presidential election, while also targeting suburban white voters who split from the GOP last November to make Mr Biden the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 who won the state.

There is a rough rule of thumb for Georgia Democrats to win: you need 30 percent of the electorate to be black and about 30 percent of the white vote to win.

“If you are trying to make history in the South, and if you are trying to elect an African American pastor for an election that you know you need white voters, you must be doing all you can with your resources to get promotional strategy making white voters comfortable, ”said Chip Lake, a Georgia Republican strategist who is white and has worked for Mr. Collins.

Or as Jessica Byrd, a Black Democrat strategist in Georgia put it, “I don’t think I’ve spent a day in the past five years not thinking about how white people will see black candidates.”

Dr. Gillespie and other political scientists refer to efforts to make black candidates more acceptable to white voters “deracialization,” and Alvin the Beagle is a case study of its success.

“The point of deracialization is not to wake up black voters,” said Dr. Gillespie. “It’s supposed to reassure white voters.” In Mr. Warnock’s case, she did not avoid dealing directly with racial justice, as some previous candidates did. He simply and deftly added a suburban puppy.

Given the popularity of the first Beagle ad, Mr Magnus knew he would be returning to Alvin. But how? It had to be humorous, he decided, and it had to repeat the theme of rejecting Ms. Loeffler’s attacks, including the misleading quotation of Mr. Warnock as “Damn America” ​​(he quoted someone else) and her attacking as a Marxist the “anti-American” Celebrated hatred “.

The second Alvin shoot on the scene where Americana leaked lasted about four hours. And at one point, Mr. Magnus crouched behind a tree trying to persuade Alvin to turn on the cue. And Alvin wasn’t asked to do more than his performance on camera: the bag that was thrown in the trash was full of gravel. .

They ran the ad right before Thanksgiving, including reserving the annual National Dog Show.

Online, the Beagle spot rose to three million views within hours and to five million in one day.

Republicans and Democrats in the state were amazed at the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. “I know a lot of people who didn’t vote for Raphael Warnock but didn’t like or despise him,” said Mr. Lake.

Dr. Jefferson, the Stanford professor, said Mr Warnock’s continued sympathy was all the more impressive now that “his opponent casts all this vitriolic – dare I say racist – criticism aimed at revealing his blackness and otherness towards the electorate Highlight Georgia. ” Mr. Warnock countered with “that cute little dog” and a landscape that evoked a “white aesthetic”.

However improbable it may be, said Dr. Jefferson, objects – buffer vests, picket fences, beagles, suburbs – have racial associations: “It’s the same as a pumpkin spice latte.”

When the campaign commissioned its next poll following this ad, it included an open-ended question to see what voters thought of Mr. Warnock. Mike Bocian, the pollster, made a word cloud of the answers and couldn’t believe the results.

“I saw ‘Puppy’ and I saw ‘Dog’ and I saw ‘Poop’,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

Alvin had broken through in the middle of the two most expensive Senate races in American history.

The race remained tied to internal polls until the end. But Mr Bocian couldn’t help but notice that Mr Warnock had taken a two-point lead after being tied in his previous poll. “You can never be sure of causality,” his voice fell silent.

On January 5th, Mr Warnock won by exactly two percentage points.

Democrats credited a number of factors when they swore in Mr. Warnock on Wednesday. Few believe that they would have won without years of grassroots organization from black leaders. Or without the Republican feud fueled by Mr. Trump.

Alvin appeared once in the final days of the race to pull Mr. Warnock across the finish line in a beige zip-up sweater. As they strolled through another suburb, more dogs of all breeds joined in.

“It was a symbol of how he had carried out his entire campaign,” said Lake. The Republican strategist, himself a proud dog lover, was stunned to learn that Alvin was not Mr. Warnock’s dog.

“You could have fooled me!” he cried. “It looked like he and this beagle had a bond!”

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Business

The Pandemic Helped Reverse Italy’s Mind Drain. However Can It Final?

The Pandemic Helped Reverse Italy’s Brain Drain. But Can It Last?

When the engineer Elena Parisi left Italy at the age of 22 to pursue a career Five years ago, in London, she joined the numerous talented Italians who had escaped a sluggish job market and a lack of opportunities at home to find work abroad.

But last year, when the coronavirus pandemic forced employees around the world to work from home, Ms. Parisi, like many of her compatriots, took the opportunity to really return to Italy.

Between the Zoom meetings and her other work for a recycling company in London, she took long walks on the beach near her family’s home in Palermo, Sicily, talking to vendors in the local market about recipes at dawn.

“The quality of life here is a thousand, a thousand times better,” said Ms. Parisi, who is now in Rome.

As with so many things, the virus has a well-known phenomenon – this time Italy’s longstanding brain drain. How much things are changing, and how permanent those changes will be, is a source of debate in the country. But something is clearly different.

According to the European Commission, Italy is one of the European countries, along with Romania and Poland, that send the most workers abroad. And the proportion of Italians living abroad with a university degree is higher than that of the Italian population.

Given the money the country spends on education, Italy’s brain drain costs the country an estimated 14 billion euros (about $ 17 billion) each year, according to Confindustria, Italy’s largest business association.

Italian lawmakers had long tried to win back talented workers with tax breaks, but a bleak job market, high unemployment, baroque bureaucracy, and narrow career opportunities continued to draw many Italian graduates abroad.

Then the virus seemed to do what years of incentives couldn’t.

Last year, the number of Italians between the ages of 18 and 34 returning home rose 20 percent year over year, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry.

The Italian government has welcomed the return of some of the country’s best and brightest countries as a silver lining to a pandemic brutal for Italy, calling the postponement a “great opportunity”. There is also a financial advantage as Italians who spend more than six months in the country have to pay their taxes there.

Paola Pisano, Italy’s Minister for Technological Innovation, said at a conference in October that Italy would have the chance to benefit from the skills and innovation that returning Italians bring with them.

She also said Italy must do its part to keep them there. For one thing, the country needs “a strong, diffuse, powerful and secure internet connection” so that those who have moved abroad can “return to their country and continue working for the company they worked for”.

A group of Italians formed an association called Southworking to encourage remote working from the less developed south of Italy in the hope that returning professionals would devote their free time and money to improving their hometowns.

“Your ideas, your volunteer work and your creativity stay on the land where you live,” said Elena Militello, the association’s president, who returned to Sicily from Luxembourg.

To encourage remote work, the association creates a network of cities with fast internet connections, an airport or train station nearby, and at least one common work area or library with good WiFi.

To map them, the association received help from Carmelo Ignaccolo, a graduate student in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned to Sicily after the coronavirus.

For the past few months, Mr Ignaccolo has been overseeing exams with the Mediterranean in the background of his zoom screen, teaching classes near his great-grandfather’s olive press, and escaping the heat by studying in a nearby Greek necropolis.

“I am 100 percent for an American professional life,” he said, “but I have a very Mediterranean lifestyle.”

Not only the south of Italy benefits from the return traffic.

Roberto Franzan, 26, a programmer who built a successful start-up in London before joining Google, returned to his home in Rome in March.

“You go to the bar and you can just start talking to just about anyone,” he said. “It worked great for me.” He said a number of interesting startups and tech companies had popped up in Italy and he could envision investing in the country.

“That moment has given us all along that getting back to your roots can be a good thing,” he said.

Italy’s business leaders have urged the government not to miss the opportunity.

“Coronavirus, the U-turn of the brain drain,” wrote Michel Martone, a former deputy labor minister, in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. He called on lawmakers to find a way to sustain the “extraordinary army of young people who have returned home in the face of the emergency”.

However, some experts say there aren’t really that many benefits to solidify.

While many Italians may have returned to the Tuscan countryside or Sicilian beaches, their thoughts still benefit American, British, Dutch, and other overseas businesses.

“Zoom isn’t going to solve Italy’s problems,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on labor and urban economics and is part of the Italian brain drain himself.

Brunello Rosa, a London economist who is another member of the diaspora, said returned Italians “produce an activity for a foreign entity – they create value abroad and income abroad.” He added that “the fact that they spend their salary in Italy doesn’t really make a difference.”

A more likely outcome, he said, is that the virus will lead to economic rubble and huge unemployment that will spark another wave of emigration once European countries lift their locks.

To really tackle the problem, Italy and others would need to undertake profound structural and cultural reforms that tighten bureaucracy and improve transparency, rather than relying on “people returning home because the food is bad abroad and the weather is bad “.

Mr. Ignaccolo, the MIT graduate student, plans to return to the US to pursue his academic career and the new company that programmer Mr. Franzan is starting will be based in Delaware.

The disadvantages of working in Italy are also of concern to Ms Parisi, who is concerned that her career advancement would be hampered in what she believes is an Italian business world with limited scope for younger workers. She admitted London’s lack of sun was dreary and British food bad for her skin, but said other things in life were important too.

“I am young, I am a woman and I am in a very high position,” she said, explaining that she would return to her job in London when her office reopened.

“It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I could both keep the job and live in Italy, ”she said of her time there. “But I always knew it would only be temporary.”

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Politics

The Suburbs Helped Elect Biden. Can They Give Democrats the Senate, Too?

The Suburbs Helped Elect Biden. Can They Give Democrats the Senate, Too?

DECATUR, Ga. – President Trump based his re-election on a very specific vision of the American suburb: a 2020 edition of Mayfield’s “Leave It to Beaver,” in which residents are white, reject minorities and prioritize their economic well-being any other concerns.

The bet lagged far behind. Mr Trump lost ground with suburban voters across the country. And especially in Georgia, where rapidly changing demographics have made it the country’s most racially diverse political battlefield, his pitch was at odds with reality.

From the inner suburbs around Atlanta to the traditionally conservative suburbs, Democrats benefited from two big changes: blacks, Latinos, and Asians moving to formerly white communities, and an increase in the number of white, highly educated moderates and conservatives who pissed off have become on Mr. Trump.

These factors helped make President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992. And the January Senate runoff election will see if those Biden voters supported his agenda or simply tried to remove a uniquely divisive incumbent.

Although Mr Trump will not be voting next month, he is very much involved in the race and, despite being chastised at the ballot box, has not moderated his message. The hope, to some extent, is that the pitch, which fell short with suburban voters last month, works when it comes to democratic scrutiny of the Senate.

“Quite simply, you will decide whether your children will grow up in a socialist country or if they will grow up in a free country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally on Saturday in Valdosta, Ga. “And I will tell you.” If you do, the socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism. You want to go into a communist form of government. “

Mr Trump stood up for Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, each with different political brands that could pose a challenge to the Democrats. It’s a challenge that Democrats are trying to tackle, especially among suburban voters, by putting Mr Trump in the spotlight.

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate who ended up about two percentage points behind Mr Perdue and sent his race to a runoff, makes this claim at almost every campaign freeze: if the Senate stays in Republican hands, it will block the change Georgia voted for when Mr. Biden chose it.

Carolyn Bourdeaux is the only Democrat to flip a house district this year. She won in the northeast suburbs of Atlanta and, like Mr. Biden, took on her background as an ideologically moderate, bipartisan deal-maker.

“The Biden effect was likely shared ticket voters,” she said.

Runoff elections, she said, are about turnout, not bipartisan voters kicking a president out.

“You get your people to vote,” she said. “One of the things you need is a real, robust base field operation.”

Ms. Bourdeaux’s victory – and Mr Biden’s – cracked a code for Democrats in the South and underscores the changed nature of the Atlanta suburban electorate that made the party successful. It was an effort initiated by neighborhood level organizers, accelerated by an unpopular president, and brought across the finish line due to changes in the inner suburbs of Atlanta and in the smaller towns of the state that showed significant fluctuations from Mr. Biden.

In Atlanta, which has long been known as the “Black Mecca” for its concentration of black wealth and political power, the proportion of white residents has grown steadily. In the suburbs, black residents who have moved outside and a diverse collection of newcomers have fueled democratic change. These include a growing Latino population, an influx of Americans from Asia, and graduate white voters who may have supported Mr Trump in 2016 but turned against him.

The result is a swing state in which the “typical” suburban voter can take many forms. There’s Kim Hall, a 56-year-old woman who moved from Texas to the suburb of Cobb County eight years ago and attended a rally for Mr. Ossoff in Kennesaw. And Ali Hossain, a 63-year-old doctor who brags about his children and takes care of the economy; He attended an event for Mr. Ossoff in Decatur. He is also a Bangladeshi immigrant who has started organizing for state and national candidates.

“Asian and South Asian – we’re growing up here,” said Hossain. “This time it was history. When I went to the early voting, I saw thousands of people in line. People have had enough of Trump. “

In Henry County, about 30 miles southeast of Atlanta, Mr. Biden improved his party’s performance nearly five-fold in 2016. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump by four percentage points. In 2020, Mr. Biden won with more than 20 points.

Michael Burns, chairman of the Henry County Democratic Party, said he expected interest to decline from the general election to the runoff election. Instead, he has been overwhelmed by investment by national groups and more local organizers than he knows how to handle.

For the runoff election, “we had to turn away volunteers,” said Mr. Burns.

This is part of a bigger shift, said Robert Silverstein, a Democratic political strategist who has worked on several races in Georgia. Some believe that suburban voters are generally temperate and white, and not members of the party’s diverse base or progressives. Mr Silverstein said that in order for the Democrats to win the runoff elections in January and keep winning in places like Georgia, they need to both recharge and convince.

He noted that in 1992, when Bill Clinton ran the state, more affluent suburbs in Atlanta were “blood red”. Today, he said, the coalitions are very different.

Still, the patchwork quilt that made the Democratic Coalition possible in 2020 is nascent and fragile, and could be defeated by an energetic Republican electorate. Both Democratic Senate candidates must perform better in November when Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock defeated a divided Republican field and Mr. Ossoff ran tightly behind Mr. Biden.

Republicans are confident that their grassroots will emerge and that the prospect of a unified democratic government under Mr Biden would put off some conservatives who fear fiscal and cultural change.

The location of their campaign events is an indication of their priorities: Republicans have largely stayed away from metropolitan Atlanta to focus on increasing voter turnout in more rural parts of the state. Both candidates met with President Trump in Valdosta on Saturday. The city, which is near Florida and has a large military and naval community, is three hours geographically from Atlanta, but even further in terms of pace and culture.

Democrats hope Mr Trump’s involvement will spark a backlash that will help them cement voting in the suburbs. Last week, in a steady stream of public events, Mr Ossoff hammered Republicans’ response to the coronavirus pandemic against Asian American voters in Decatur, a town in DeKalb County near Atlanta. During an event near a local university in Cobb County, another changing suburban area, he called Mr. Perdue a coward for refusing to debate him and also criticized Ms. Loeffler.

“We run like Bonnie and Clyde against political corruption in America,” said Ossoff.

Some Georgia Republicans have privately voiced discomfort at Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue, who have teamed up closely with Mr. Trump and have all but given up contact with the moderate center in favor of an all-base turnout strategy.

Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster in Georgia, said the erosion of Republicans in the inner suburbs – and to a lesser extent in the Conservative suburbs – had weakened the advantage Republicans had in runoff elections in the past. While white evangelicals and religious conservatives remain a core of the Republican base and make up a portion of the suburban electorate, some Republicans fear that such themed voters could be deterred by Senators’ willingness to delve into Trump-induced conspiracy theories, misinformation.

Mr Ayres said both sides had hurdles to overcome before January. Republicans have a president who sows discord within their party, and Democrats need to mobilize communities that normally held non-presidential elections. You cannot rely on the same coalition that emerged in November.

“Are they now permanent democratic voters? No, not at all, ”he said. “They are in transition and have been deterred in large part by the behavior of the president.”

Both the Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party of State and outside groups have struggled daily to register and mobilize voters – again. Democrats have also taken note of polls showing Mr Ossoff is worse off than Dr Perdue against Mr Perdue. Warnock against Mrs. Loeffler.

Few expect the decline to be significant enough that the parties will end up sharing the Senate seats. Far more likely are two Democratic victories or two Republican wins, a contest that depends on whether Liberals can compete with a energetic Conservative electorate that has often been insurmountable in low-turnout elections in the state.

“In any case, the demographics are changing. And the whites, the better educated voters in Fulton and Cobb counties, turned very quickly against Trump, ”said Democratic strategist Silverstein. “As a democratic agent, I hope it stays that way. But that’s the challenge here. There are still plenty of Republicans in these suburbs. “

Last week in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta, a “Stop the Steal” protest underscored the state’s chaotic political landscape and sent a mixed message to voters in the suburbs.

“We’re not going to vote on any other machine made by China on January 5th,” said L. Lin Wood, the attorney who has become a conservative hero in recent weeks by exposing the president’s unsubstantiated claims Electoral fraud repeated. He urged Mr. Perdue and Mrs. Loeffler to be more determined to overturn the election.

At Mr Ossoff’s event in Kennesaw, some of his supporters found statements such as Mr Wood’s concern and a sign that every part of their state – the cities, suburbs and rural areas – is changing in ways that show that Georgians are are further apart than ever before.

Tamekia Bell, a 39-year-old who had returned to the northwestern suburb of Smyrna after years in the Washington area, said it was up to voters who delivered for Mr Biden in November to deliver again.

“We feel that hope,” said Ms. Bell. “It won’t mean anything if Biden comes in there and can’t do anything.”