Tag: Meant

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Health

For Small Gyms, Dealing with the Pandemic Meant Increasing

For Small Gyms, Handling the Pandemic Meant Expanding

This article is part of Owning the Future, a series on how small businesses across the country have been affected by the pandemic.

On the evening of March 14, 2020, Kari Saitowitz, owner of the Fhitting Room, a small or “boutique” fitness studio with three locations in Manhattan, returned from a dinner out, to find a disturbing message. A college friend who was a pulmonologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital had sent a text about the alarming number of cases of the new, contagious respiratory disease they were seeing.

“The message said, ‘Please take this seriously,’” Ms. Saitowitz recalled. “And he specifically said, ‘Kari, you will probably have to close the gym for a while.’”

The next morning, she received emails from two of her senior trainers, who had taught classes the previous day. They, too, were concerned, not only about their own safety, but also about their clients, some of whom were older.

“That was the tipping point,” she said. After convening a group of full- and part-time employees, including trainers and members of the cleaning staff, she decided to close the studio. That afternoon, she sent an email blast to the membership, saying that “for the health of our community,” she was temporarily closing the Fhitting Room.

The following day, March 16, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the closure of all gyms, restaurants, bars, theaters and casinos.

Now Ms. Saitowitz, like so many other small-business owners, faced another urgent decision: “‘How do I keep my business alive?’”

The key, she decided, was to figure out ways to continue delivering what her customers wanted — what they really wanted. “It’s more than just a workout,” she said. “People come here because of the conversation, the socialization, for the fun and motivation of a class.”

How could she replicate that when the gym was closed?

The answer, for Ms. Saitowitz and other boutique fitness gyms — a broad designation that includes Pilates and yoga studios, and facilities that focus on indoor cycling or, as is the case with the Fhitting Room (the name is a play on H.I.T., the acronym for high-intensity training), group fitness classes — was to quickly expand the way that their services could be provided; an approach that some in the industry are now calling “omnichannel.”

For Ms. Saitowitz, it meant ramping up the creation of an on-demand video library of workouts, switching live classes to Zoom and, in September, striking a partnership with the retailer Showfields to use a rooftop event space on its Bond Street building to hold socially distanced outdoor classes.

All of that has had an effect on its members. “Before the pandemic I was going maybe three times a week,” said Suzanne Bruderman of Manhattan, a Fhitting Room member since it opened six years ago. “Once the pandemic hit, all of my behaviors shifted and it basically became a five-day-a-week habit.”

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But all of these changes required more than a tutorial in Zoom; they necessitated a radical change in thinking in an industry that has been providing its product in essentially the same way since Vic Tanny’s first “health clubs” opened in the 1930s.

“Prior to the pandemic, clients had to visit a brick-and-mortar business to consume the product,” said Julian Barnes, chief executive of Boutique Fitness Solutions, an advisory firm to small gyms and fitness studios. The new multiple-channel approach “means meeting your client wherever he or she is,” he said. “If she wants to work out live, give her that ability to take a class live. If she wants to work out at 2 a.m., and pull up a video of her favorite class, give her the ability to do that. If she wants to work out outdoors, give her the ability for that.”

Mr. Barnes estimated that, before the pandemic, the United States had about 70,000 of these small gym and studios. “A lot of them were uprooted from their original business model,” said Tricia Murphy Madden, who is based in Seattle and is national education director for Savvier Fitness, a fitness product and education company. “What I’m seeing now is that if you’re still operating the way you did 16 months ago, you’re not going to survive.”

When gyms in Texas were ordered closed, Jess Hughes, founder and president of Citizen Pilates, was determined to keep her three Houston studios open. Using little more than an iPhone and a ring light, Ms. Hughes and some of her instructors began producing video workouts in the studio. The on-demand Citizen Virtual catalog now has over 100 at-home workouts accessible from any device with a paid subscription ($19 per month). She later expanded the offerings through a partnership with JetSweat, a fitness on-demand library with 28,000 monthly subscribers.

Going online allowed them to expand beyond individual customers. “We also started doing virtual private corporate classes through Zoom,” Ms. Hughes said. These once-a-week classes allowed employees of a number of midsize Houston companies to stay in shape — and have shared experiences — while they worked remotely.

She also began offering branded apparel with slogans like “Citizen Strong,” which proved particularly popular when the studio reopened, with restrictions, in May. Moving all equipment six feet apart reduced her total capacity by 30 percent. (“We received zero rent relief from any of our landlords,” she added.) Yet Ms. Hughes has managed to increase her membership by 22 percent, mostly locally. “What I like to say is that we were brand consistent but socially distant,” she said.

Social distancing wasn’t enough for Matt Espeut, who was twice forced to close down his Fit Body Boot Camp gym in Providence when Rhode Island’s Covid cases surged. Like Ms. Saitowitz and Ms. Hughes, Mr. Espeut was determined to stay in business, and he felt offering new services was the way to do it. Because weight loss is a major part of his gym’s mission, he invested his Small Business Administration loan into the cost of a medical-grade body scan machine that measures body composition. “Now we can home in on people losing fat, and gaining muscle,” he said.

The $6,000 machine, the addition of nutritional counseling — including supplements sold in the gym and online — and offering many new, socially distanced classes enabled Mr. Espeut to achieve something he wouldn’t have thought possible a year ago: He has increased his gym membership by 15 percent, to 196 from 170.

He added one more thing after reopening in January: a new décor, including a fresh coat of paint and new floor mats. “I think people would like to forget 2020,” he said. “I wanted people to see right away that things are different.”

For many small gyms, they are — although the expansion into different channels is still a means to an end: Getting everyone back in the spaces that workout enthusiasts love to share.

“We didn’t panic at first,” recalled Lisa O’Rourke, an owner of Spin City, an indoor cycling studio in Massapequa Park, N.Y. “We had a healthy business going, and we thought it was going to be temporary.” As the lockdown extended into April, though, “the panic set in.” Ms. O’Rourke began offering members-only YouTube workouts featuring her instructors. Over the summer, that expanded to include outdoor classes in the parking lot.

Early in the lockdown, another thought occurred to Ms. O’Rourke as she surveyed her empty studio. “We had all these bikes sitting there doing nothing,” she said. “So, we decided to loan them to our members.” While some studios leased out their equipment — bikes, kettlebells and other equipment — Spin City offered the loaners for free.

“I had members offer us money,” she said. “But we turned them down. You know, they helped create our success, and during the pandemic, you felt bad for everybody. They didn’t need another expense.”

A year after the pandemic began, Spin City has gained a total of 50 members, on top of 275 to 300 members prepandemic. All the bikes are now back in the studio — albeit six feet farther apart. Ms. O’Rourke has speculated on what would have happened if she hadn’t opened these new channels.

“They would have all bought Pelotons,” she said with a laugh.

Categories
Politics

ICE Meant to Seize Drug Lords. Did It Snare Duped Seniors?

ICE Meant to Capture Drug Lords. Did It Snare Duped Seniors?

WASHINGTON — After two decades in the military, after earning two master’s degrees and navigating a successful career as a corporate coach, Victor Stemberger seemed ready for a peaceful retirement. But he had a new venture in the works.

Mr. Stemberger, of Virginia, had a $10 million inheritance waiting for him, according to men claiming to be affiliated with the Nigerian Ministry of Finance. Through a dizzying web of more than 160 emails over the course of a year, Mr. Stemberger, then 76, somehow grew convinced.

The final step to collect his millions was a good-will gesture: He needed to embark on a whirlwind tour to several countries, stopping first in São Paulo, Brazil, to pick up a small package of gifts for government officials.

With that parcel tucked away safely in his luggage, Mr. Stemberger got ready to board a flight to Spain, the next leg of his trip.

“Standard protocol for dealing with government officials in this part of the world,” Mr. Stemberger assured his son, Vic, in an email. “No contraband — be sure of that.”

The next day, Vic Stemberger received a text from a Spanish number: “Your father is in prison.”

International criminals have long set their sights on older Americans, deceiving them with promises of money or romance and setting them up to unwittingly carry luggage filled with drugs or other contraband, hoping they will not raise flags in customs.

But Mr. Stemberger’s case shines a discomfiting light on a little-known program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement known as Operation Cocoon, which is devised to disrupt international drug trafficking rings.

Under the program, ICE officials share information with foreign law enforcement agencies when they learn about potential smuggling. But critics say the program does not do enough to warn unwitting drug mules that they are being duped; instead, U.S. officials in some cases are delivering vulnerable older Americans straight into the hands of investigators in foreign countries, where they can be locked up for years.

“If somebody from the U.S. government showed up at my father’s house and spoke to my dad and said, ‘Hey, look, we have reason to believe you’re being scammed,’ there’s 100 percent no doubt he would have dropped it,” Vic Stemberger said.

His father has been in a Spanish prison since the police arrested him as he got off a plane in Madrid nearly two years ago and found more than five pounds of cocaine sewn into jackets in his luggage, according to court documents.

A Spanish court sentenced him last year to seven and a half years in prison.

Since Operation Cocoon was created in 2013, information shared by ICE has led to more than 400 travelers being stopped by law enforcement at foreign airports, resulting in about 390 drug seizures. More than 180 of those stopped on suspicion of carrying narcotics were American citizens, and 70 percent of those were over age 60.

(Asked if the operation’s name, which is no longer used by ICE, is a reference to the 1985 movie “Cocoon,” about elderly people rejuvenated by aliens, an agency spokeswoman said she had “no background readily available.”)

It is not clear how many of the older Americans stopped overseas were duped by drug organizations and how many were intentionally smuggling narcotics. ICE could not provide data on the number of times the agency warned older Americans they were being targeted by criminal organizations.

Vic Stemberger firmly believes his father was tricked; he said cognitive issues from a brain aneurysm 15 years ago made his father vulnerable to the scheme.

The Trump administration informed some members of Congress last year that Mr. Stemberger was most likely arrested after ICE shared information with foreign authorities through Operation Cocoon, according to correspondence reviewed by The New York Times.

The correspondence suggests U.S. authorities became aware of Mr. Stemberger’s plans before he left, something Vic Stemberger believes amounted to a missed opportunity to save his father. John Eisert, the assistant director of investigative programs for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, said the agency generally became aware of such plans when it picked up on irregular travel, but declined to comment on Mr. Stemberger’s case.

But he emphasized the difficulty of detecting and warning older Americans that they were being targeted for illegal activity. Even when agents do reach out, the victims occasionally ignore the warning, and officers will at times find out someone has been coerced or fooled only after that person has been arrested, Mr. Eisert said.

“Imagine how many more there really are,” Mr. Eisert said. “And that’s the sad aspect when we speak about elder fraud abuse.”

But, he said, older people are not ICE’s target — if agents become aware they are being lured by criminal groups, and discover evidence they are unwitting, the agents are supposed to find a way to warn them before they step on the plane. ICE officials say they are focused on sharing information with overseas partners to secure the arrests of serious criminals and to build a case against international trafficking organizations, he added.

“If we ever had the information to intercept somebody before traveling overseas, that’s the first priority,” Mr. Eisert said.

Some senators — and family members of older Americans in prison — wonder if the interceptions are coming too late, or at all.

“We are concerned that in an attempt to interdict illicit contraband being moved by unsuspecting senior citizens, Operation Cocoon may have led D.H.S. to provide information about these unwitting Americans to foreign law enforcement partners who then arrested, prosecuted and jailed them abroad,” Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, wrote in letters to the Department of Homeland Security last year and again to the Biden administration last month.

Investigators from the Southern District of New York and the Drug and Enforcement Administration, in part hoping to lighten Mr. Stemberger’s sentence, told Spanish authorities in October 2019 that he appeared to have been “pressured, cajoled and subjected to a variety of deceptive and manipulative strategies to induce him to believe that he would receive millions of dollars in inheritance funds.”

“This scheme resulted in Stemberger’s arrest,” the investigators said in the document, which was reviewed by The Times.

This spring, a court in Spain upheld Mr. Stemberger’s sentence, rejecting his lawyer’s argument that cognitive issues from his aneurysm made him easily coerced. The judge was also skeptical that Mr. Stemberger was not aware that the jackets he was carrying contained drugs.

“Just by picking them up, he could perceive something abnormal in the touch of the garments,” Judge Javier Hernández Garcia wrote in the Supreme Court ruling. Mr. Stemberger’s service in both Vietnam and Korea “should have led him to doubt the legality of the products transported,” the judge wrote.

There have been cases where Americans caught up in scams overseas have been released.

J. Bryon Martin, a 77-year-old retired pastor from Maine, spent nearly a year in jail in Spain after authorities found more than three pounds of cocaine hidden in an envelope he picked up in South America. He said a woman he fell in love with online had asked him to pick up the package and bring it to her.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, pushed the State Department to work with Spanish authorities to secure Mr. Martin’s release on humanitarian grounds in 2016.

Ms. Collins said she was disappointed the State Department had not done more to secure the release of other seniors like Mr. Stemberger. “That’s one reason we have embassies and consulate services all over the world, to take care of American citizens who are being unjustly treated by the host government, and that certainly seems to have occurred in this case,” she said.”

But often, once someone is arrested on foreign soil, the cases languish.

Just a month after Mr. Stemberger’s arrest, the police found more than two pounds of cocaine in an envelope at the bottom of 82-year-old Primo Hufana’s suitcase in Madrid. The Trump administration also indicated to members of Congress that another American was arrested because of information shared by ICE. Mr. Hufana appears to be that American; his arrest date matches the one specified in the correspondence obtained by The Times.

Mr. Hufana, a Californian, often ranted to his children about business opportunities he found on the internet. His daughter, Veronica, said that years before Mr. Hufana’s arrest, law enforcement officials had warned him that he could be at risk after he sent a large sum of money in a wire transfer.

Even now, when Ms. Hufana calls her father, who is serving a seven-year sentence, he asks her to connect the Spanish court with the bank employees who recruited him, so they can tell authorities his arrest was a mistake.

“They brainwashed my dad,” she said of the scammers.

Mr. Hufana’s lawyer, Matthias E. Wiegner, said Spain had become a hot spot for apprehensions in part because it is a common transit hub.

Mr. Wiegner said narcotics organizations used to recruit young people vacationing in South America but had turned to less obvious targets. “You probably wouldn’t suspect a grandmother or grandfather of carrying 25 kilos of cocaine,” he said. “If you have a 25-year-old European surfer, it might raise a bit more suspicion.”

ICE insists that warning unwitting drug mules is part of Operation Cocoon “where appropriate.”

Ms. Collins, who has served as head of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, acknowledges that the job is tricky.

“ICE has an obligation to try and prevent seniors with cognitive difficulties or who simply have been duped from becoming further victimized by these international criminals, but it’s not always easy for ICE to do so,” Ms. Collins said. “There may be cases where ICE can’t be certain whether the person is an unwitting victim or is involved in a scheme in order to get money.”

Mr. Eisert also emphasized the difficulties facing investigators, who must pick up a pattern of “irregular travel” before they can intervene in an older American’s plans, or family and friends who come forward to report their elders.

In Mr. Stemberger’s case, such a pattern was obvious, his family and lawyers say.

Nine months before Mr. Stemberger was arrested, the scammers had lured him into another trip, which took him to Buenos Aires, then by ferry to Montevideo, Uruguay, and on to Madrid. His family members said they had no idea — Mr. Stemberger told his wife he was heading to Chicago.

For all his globe-trotting, Mr. Stemberger heard from no one in law enforcement, according to his family. “No welfare check. No phone call. No email,” Vic Stemberger said.

In his email exchanges with the scammers, Mr. Stemberger occasionally expressed concern that he was entering a fraudulent agreement, a finding U.S. investigators highlighted to Spanish authorities when arguing that Mr. Stemberger thought he was pursuing a legal business opportunity.

“You are aware of those risks due to the corruption in Africa, so my suspicion should not be a surprise to you,” Mr. Stemberger wrote to the men in June 2018, adding that he wanted to ensure no one he met overseas would demand money from him. “If these kinds of things occur, my time will have been wasted, and there could be other kinds of trouble in store for me.”

One of the men responded: “I don’t understand why you flair up at the slightest error or misjudgment. Nobody is perfect.” He accused Mr. Stemberger of being “full of rage.”

Mr. Stemberger’s wife waits by the telephone most days, unsure of when her husband might be able to use his daily phone call. He is now taking anti-depressants in prison. During one recent conversation, Mr. Stemberger told his son he felt “all alone.”

“No one speaks English or even tries to communicate with me,” he said.

Vic Stemberger said he asked his father to reflect on the ordeal that landed him in prison, potentially for the rest of his life.

“I always look for the downside in a business transaction, and I thought I had made sure that everything was right,” Mr. Stemberger replied. “I guess I was wrong.”

Raphael Minder contributed reporting.

Categories
Politics

Biden Indicators Order Meant to Make Voting Simpler

Biden Signs Order Meant to Make Voting Easier

WASHINGTON – President Biden signed an executive order on Sunday instructing the government to take steps to facilitate voting. This was the 56th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala.

The multi-part ordinance aims to harness the far-flung reach of federal agencies to help people register to vote and encourage Americans to vote on election day. In a speech for the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast on Sunday, Mr. Biden argued that despite the progress of the past half century, such measures are still necessary.

“The legacy of the Selma March is that nothing can stop a free people from exercising their most sacred power as citizens, but there are those who do anything to take that power away,” said Biden.

“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and let it count,” he said. “When you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let more people choose. “

The president’s actions stem from his predecessor’s month-long attack on the voting process during the 2020 election and the January 6 riot that erupted in the U.S. Capitol after that predecessor, Donald J. Trump, repeatedly attempted the Reverse election results.

The order of the executive is relatively limited. It urges federal officials to investigate and possibly expand access to voter registration materials, particularly for people with disabilities, incarcerated and other historically underserved groups.

In addition, a modernization of the federally operated website Vote.gov is ordered to ensure that the most up-to-date information on votes and elections is made available.

However, the ordinance does not directly address efforts by many Republican-led lawmakers to restrict voting, including measures that would reverse postal voting established in many states during the pandemic.

Mr Biden has said he supports HR 1, a sweeping law on electoral rights that was passed by Parliament last week. This would weaken restrictive state voter identification laws, require automatic voter registration, expand mail-in voting and early voting, make it more difficult to remove voters from the list, and restore the right to vote for ex-offenders.

This legislation faces a difficult challenge in the evenly divided Senate, where the Republican opposition makes it highly unlikely to win the support of the 60 senators required to send it to Mr Biden’s desk.

Meanwhile, a senior administration official said that Mr Biden’s order was intended to show that the president was doing what he could.

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Politics

Thousands and thousands Meant for Public Well being Threats Had been Diverted Elsewhere, Watchdog Says

Millions Meant for Public Health Threats Were Diverted Elsewhere, Watchdog Says

WASHINGTON – A federal guard has determined that the biomedical advanced research and development agency, which attracted national attention last year when the Trump administration fired its director, has been using as a “slush fund” to cover expenses for 10 years unrelated to its funding, becomes a core task of combating health threats such as Ebola, Zika and the coronavirus.

The 223-page report, issued Wednesday by the Office of Special Counsel, found the Department of Health and Human Services spent millions of taxpayers’ money earmarked for BARDA to fund vaccine research and pandemic preparedness into other government activities diverted and failed to inform Congress – a possible violation of federal law.

Unrelated activities included removal of office furniture, administrative expenses, news subscriptions, legal services, and the salaries of other department employees. According to the investigators, the diversion of funds was so widespread that the employees had a name for it: the “Bank of BARDA”.

The report focuses on the actions of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the official in the Department of Health who oversees and is responsible for the budget of BARDA. The assistant secretary is responsible for leading the federal response to pandemic threats such as the novel coronavirus. Its youngest resident was Dr. Robert Kadlec; President Biden has not named a successor.

“I am deeply concerned about the apparent misuse of millions of dollars in funds by ASPR dedicated to public health emergencies as our country is currently facing the Covid-19 pandemic,” wrote Henry J. Kerner, the special adviser, in a letter to Mr. Biden, using the acronym for the assistant secretary for preparedness and response.

“Equally worrying,” added Kerner, “is how widespread and well-known this practice has appeared to be for nearly a decade.”

The report does not specifically state how much money has been misused. But around $ 25 million was taken from BARDA programs and made available to the assistant secretary’s office only in fiscal 2019. For fiscal years 2007 through 2016, the assistant secretary reported no administrative expenses of $ 517.8 million.

It is also suggested that a Senator, Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, who drafted the legislation that created BARDA and is believed to be its supporter in Congress, has been embroiled in internal funding disputes. The whistleblower informed the investigators that at the behest of Mr Burr and his “pet project”, a “restrictive wording” had been added to the 2016 budget – an obvious reference to BARDA.

A spokesman for the senator had no comment.

BARDA was launched in 2006 by the Congress. Its mission is to fund novel research into vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and other “medical countermeasures” to combat natural and biological defense threats. It was relatively dark until Dr. Kadlec in April his director, Dr. Rick Bright, dismissed.

Dr. Bright said at the time that he was removed from his post and reassigned to a closer job at the National Institutes of Health after pushing for a rigorous review of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that President Donald J. Trump adopted as a coronavirus treatment The government had “put politics and cronyism before science”.

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Days later, he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal surveillance agency. He has since left the federal government and most recently advised Mr Biden about the coronavirus during the transition.

However, the report released on Wednesday is not an answer to Dr. Bright. Rather, it covers both the Obama and Trump administrations and emerged from an investigation into a complaint made by an unnamed whistleblower in 2018, the allegations of which were primarily Dr. Kadlec’s predecessor Dr. Nicole Lurie concerned. The whistleblower accused Dr. Lurie, “reported false information to Congress” in her monthly reports to lawyers.

Both Dr. Kadlec and Dr. Lurie have denied wrongdoing. In a brief interview on Wednesday, Dr. Lurie, she was not interviewed for the investigation. The results were previously reported by the Washington Post.

“We left the country stronger than we found it, including a pandemic playbook,” said Dr. Lurie about her time as head of the agency. “All spending was routinely made and approved through multiple layers of strict budget processes. No expenditure was made unilaterally. “

In a statement, Mr. Kerner urged Congress and the Department of Health “to take immediate action to ensure that public health emergency funding can no longer be used as a slush fund for unrelated expenses.”

The Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement it would review how the deputy secretary allocated money in fiscal 2015-2019 to see if any law had been broken.

A lawyer for Dr. Bright, Debra S. Katz, described the results as “outrage”. While the special adviser said last spring that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the removal of Dr. Bright was seeking repayment and was demanding his reinstatement, Ms. Katz said the investigation into his complaint is slow because the Trump administration has not cooperated. This complaint focused on Dr. Kadlec.

“These people used BARDA as their own piggy bank – both to manage contracts with their pals and to carry out any specific projects they wanted to detriment the public health and safety of Americans,” she said.