New York City

Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted of Defrauding FTX Customers

A US jury found him guilty on all counts of fraud, embezzlement and criminal conspiracy. The 31-year-old former cryptocurrency mogul could face decades in prison.

A federal jury in New York has convicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange.

The 31-year-old former billionaire was accused of stealing billions from FTX customers and investors in one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.

Bankman-Fried, who will be sentenced at a later date, faces up to 110 years in prison.

Once regarded as the poster boy for the crypto industry and estimated to be worth $26 billion (€24.4 billion) by Fortune magazine, he is now known for pulling off the biggest financial scam since Bernard Madoff.

“His crimes caught up to him. His crimes have been exposed,” assistant US attorney Danielle Sassoon told the jury before they began deliberations. She added that Bankman-Fried turned his customers’ accounts into his “personal piggy bank,” with up to $14 billion disappearing.

Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, said in a statement they “respect the jury’s decision. But we are very disappointed with the result.”

“Mr. Bankman-Fried maintains his innocence and will continue to vigorously fight the charges against him,” he said.

What else happened during the trial?

The verdict came after a month-long trial in which prosecutors argued the defendant had acted out of sheer greed, spending the money on investments, real estate, and promotions for his cryptocurrency exchange.

During the court case, three of Bankman-Fried’s former top executives pleaded guilty to fraud charges and testified against him.

The biggest witness against Bankman-Fried was his on-again-off-again girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who told the jury that they had stolen “around $14 billion” from clients of FTX before it collapsed.

The cryptocurrency exchange founder admitted to making “a number of small mistakes and a number of larger mistakes” while running the now-bankrupt exchange.

The biggest mistake, he said, was failing to implement a dedicated risk management team.

“We thought that we might be able to build the best product on the market,” Bankman-Fried said. “It turned out basically the opposite of that. A lot of people got hurt, customers, employees, and the company ended up in bankruptcy.”

However, he denied defrauding anyone or taking customers’ funds. He had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Biggest crypto bust

FTX, which had been among the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups after traders pulled billions from the platform in a matter of three days.

Bankman-Fried resigned as FTX’s chief executive officer the same day as the bankruptcy filing.

In a series of interviews and public appearances in late November and December of last year, Bankman-Fried acknowledged risk management failures but said he did not commit fraud while running the company.

Sam Bankman-Fried, known in the crypto community as “S.B.F.,” founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019 after launching the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research in 2017. Prior to his involvement in the cryptocurrency sector, he worked as a trader on Wall Street.

This story was originally published on DW.

‘Forbes’, India and Pandora’s Pandemic Box

In a year the GDP contracted 7.7%, as we brace for another round of ‘reverse’ migrations and as farmers wait unheeded at the gates of Delhi, Indian billionaires reached record levels of wealth.

The ranks of Indian dollar billionaires swelled from 102 to 140 in 12 months, if the Forbes 2021 list is to be believed (and when it comes to billionaires and their wealth, Forbes is mostly to be believed). Their combined wealth, it notes, has “nearly doubled to $596 billion” in just the past year.

This means 140 individuals, or 0.000014% of the population, had a cumulative worth equivalent to 22.7% (or well over a fifth) of our Gross Domestic Product of $ 2.62 trillion, bringing, as they always do, that whole other meaning to the word ‘gross.’

Most major Indian dailies carried the Forbes pronouncement in that approving tone they reserve for such feats – omitting to mention what the Oracle of Pelf says in a more upfront and honest way.

“Another COVID-19 wave,” says Forbes in the first paragraph of its report on this country, “is sweeping across India and total cases now exceed 12 million. But the country’s stock market has shrugged off its pandemic funk to scale new peaks; the benchmark Sensex is up 75% from a year ago. The total number of Indian billionaires rose to 140 from 102 last year; their combined wealth has nearly doubled to $596 billion.”

Also read: Wealth of Indian Billionaires Rose by Over a Third During the COVID-19 Lockdown

Yup, that combined wealth of these 140 plutocrats went up by 90.4% – in a year when GDP contracted by 7.7%. And the news of these achievements comes in as we watch a second wave of migrant labourers – once again in numbers too large and dispersed to seriously enumerate – leaving the cities for their villages. The resultant job losses won’t do the GDP any good. But mercifully, shouldn’t harm our billionaires too much. We have Forbes’ assurance on that.

Migrant workers at Thane railway station to board outstation trains for their native place, amid the rise in Covid-19 cases across the country, in Thane, Thursday, April 15, 2021. Photo: PTI

Besides, billionaire wealth seems to work in inverse logic to COVID-19. The greater the concentration, the less the chance of any super-spreader effect.

“Prosperity rules at the very top,” says Forbes.

“The three richest Indians alone have added just over $100 billion between them.” The total wealth of those three – $153.5 billion – accounts for over 25% of the combined wealth of Club 140. The wealth of just the top two, Ambani ($84.5 billion) and Adani ($50.5 billion), is far greater than the gross state domestic product of either Punjab ($85.5 billion) or Haryana ($101 billion).

In the pandemic year, Ambani added $47.7 (Rs.3.57 trillion) to his wealth – that is, Rs. 1.13 lakh every single second on average – more than the average monthly income (Rs.18,059) of 6 Punjab agricultural households (average size 5.24 persons) put together.

Also read: It’s Time for a Solidarity Tax

Ambani’s total wealth alone almost equals the GSDP of the state of Punjab. And that’s before the new farm laws take full effect. Once they do, it will swell even more. Meanwhile, do remember that the monthly average per capita income of the Punjab farmer is roughly Rs 3,450 (NSS 70th Round).

Many newspapers simply carried (or modified) a PTI report that does not anywhere make the juxtapositions or connections that the Forbes story does. The words COVID-19 or coronavirus or pandemic are absent in the PTI story. Nor does it, or any other story, emphasise as the Forbes report does, that “Two of the ten richest Indians get their wealth from healthcare, a sector that’s enjoying a pandemic boost around the world.”

The word ‘healthcare’ does not appear in the PTI or most other stories. Even though Forbes places 24 of our 140 dollar billionaires in the ‘healthcare’ industry.

Within those 24 Indian healthcare billionaires in the Forbes list, the top 10 together added $24.9 billion to their wealth in the pandemic year (Rs 5 billion every day on average), boosting their combined worth by 75% to $58.3 billion (Rs 4.3 trillion).

Remember that stuff about COVID-19 being the great leveller?

Also read: Hunger Haunts Millions in Brazil as Billionaires Roll in Cash Amid COVID Pandemic

Our Make-in-India-Rake-it-in-Anywhere moneybags are right up there on Forbes Peak. Just two places away from the top. Batting on 140-not-out, India now has the third highest number of billionaires in the world after the United States and China. There was a time when pretenders like Germany and Russia would nose past us on those lists. But they’ve been shown their place this year.

The $596 billion combined wealth of the Indian moneybags, by the way, is roughly Rs. 44.5 trillion. That is equal to a little more than 75 Rafael deals. India has no wealth tax. But if we did, and we levied it at a modest 10%, it would raise Rs. 4.45 trillion – on which we could run the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme for six years, just retaining the current annual allocation of RS. 73,000 crores (for 2021-22). That could generate almost 16.8 billion persondays of work in rural India in the next six years.

As the second wave of migrants flee the cities and towns – in their saddening but fully justified vote of no confidence in us as a society – we could need those workdays in the MGNREGS more than ever before.

Labourers at an MGNREGA construction site in Navsari on Monday. Photo: PTI

The wondrous 140 did have a little bit of help from their friends. Massive tax reductions for corporates, racing along at break-neck speed for over two decades – accelerated even faster from August 2019.

Consider that in the pandemic year, not a paisa’s concession was made to farmers by way of guaranteed MSP; that ordinances were passed allowing workers to be made to do 12 hours labour daily (in some states with no overtime payment for the additional four hours); and ever more natural resources and public wealth were handed over to the corporate super rich. A pandemic year during which food grain ‘buffer stocks’ at one point reached 104 million tonnes. But all that people were ‘granted’ – was 5 kilograms of wheat or rice, and 1 kg of pulses free for six months. That too, only for those covered by the National Food Security Act, which excludes a significant proportion of the needy. This, in a year when hundreds of millions of Indians were hungrier than they’d been in decades.

The wealth “surge,” as Forbes calls it, has been worldwide. “A new billionaire was minted every 17 hours on average over the past year. Altogether, the world’s wealthiest are $5 trillion richer than a year ago.” India’s richest accounted for nearly 12% of that new $5 trillion. Which, back home, also means that of all sectors, inequality remained unchallenged as the fastest growing one.

Such a wealth “surge” usually rides on a misery surge. And it isn’t just about pandemics. Disasters are a fabulous business. There is always money to be made in the misery of the many. Unlike what Forbes believes, our guys did not “shake off the pandemic funk” – they rode its tidal wave superbly. Forbes is right that healthcare is enjoying that “pandemic boost around the world.” But these boosts and surges could happen with other sectors, depending on the catastrophe involved.

Barely a week after the tsunami in December 2004, there was a stock market boom all around – including in the countries worst affected by it. Millions of homes, boats, and all kinds of assets of the poor had been destroyed. Indonesia, which lost well over 100,000 lives to the tsunami, saw the Jakarta Composite Index break every earlier record and reach an all-time high. Ditto, our own Sensex. Back then, it was the scent of the reconstruction dollar and rupee driving a giant boom in construction and related sectors.

Also read: A Long Look at Exactly Why and How India Failed Its Migrant Workers

This time, ‘healthcare’ and tech (especially software services) among other sectors, did well for themselves. India’s top 10 tech tycoons in the list together added $22.8 billion in 12 months (or Rs 4.6 billion on average every day), to reach a combined wealth of $52.4 billion (Rs 3.9 trillion). That’s an increase of 77%. And yes, online education – even as tens of millions of poor students in mainly government schools were excluded from any kind of education – did bring benefits to some. Byju Raveendran added 39% to his own wealth to arrive at a net worth of $2.5 billion (Rs 187 billion).

I think it’s fair to say we showed the rest of the world its place. Err…we were shown our place too, on the UN Human Development Index – rank 131 in 189 countries. With El Salvador, Tajikistan, Cabo Verde, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bhutan and Namibia all ahead of us.

I guess we must await the results of a high-level probe into an obvious global conspiracy to shove us down a rung compared to the previous year. Watch this space.

P. Sainath is founder editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India.

Chart: Beijing Displaces New York To Become The Billionaire Capital

Beijing is in the top spot with 100 individuals worth a billion dollars or more, narrowly ahead of New York’s 99.

For the first time in seven years, New York City has lost its title as the world’s billionaire capital. In 2020, the Big Apple was displaced by Beijing which recorded a net gain of 33 billionaires. Beijing is now in top spot with 100 individuals worth a billion dollars or more, narrowly ahead of New York’s 99.

The findings come from the 2021 Forbes World’s Billionaires list which shows that a quarter of its 2,755 members live in just 10 cities with more than 10% resident in just four Chinese metropolises. Along with Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou also make the list of the world’s top-10 billionaire capitals. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is also present on the list and it comes third with 80 billionaires.

Even though New York is in second place, the collective worth of its billionaire population amounts to $560.5 billion, beating Beijing’s collective $484.3 billion. Zhang Yiming is the richest resident in the Chinese capital with a net worth of $35.6 billion while Michael Bloomberg is New York’s wealthiest inhabitant with a $59 billion fortune.

You will find more infographics at Statista.

US Seeks to Revive Nuclear Deal With Iran, Says Ready For Talks

Iran began breaching the deal in 2019, about a year after former President Trump withdrew and reimposed US economic sanctions on Iran.

Paris/Washington: The United States on Thursday said it was ready to talk to Iran about both nations returning to a 2015 agreement that aimed to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, seeking to revive a deal that Washington itself abandoned nearly three years ago.

The move reflects the change in US administration, with US secretary of state Antony Blinken stressing President Joe Biden’s position that Washington would return to the accord formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Tehran came into full compliance with the deal.

Iran reacted coolly to the idea, put forward by Blinken during a video meeting with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany – a group known as the E3 – gathered in Paris. “If Iran comes back into strict compliance with its commitments under the JCPOA, the United States will do the same and is prepared to engage in discussions with Iran toward that end,” a joint statement from the four nations said.

Iran began breaching the deal in 2019, about a year after former US President Donald Trump withdrew and reimposed US economic sanctions, and has accelerated its breaches in recent months.

Also read: US-Iran Relations: Biden May Avert Risk of Conflict but Long Term Plan Remains Unclear

A US official told Reuters that Washington would respond positively to any European Union invitation to talks between Iran and the six major powers who negotiated the original agreement: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. “We are ready to show up if such a meeting were to take place,” the official told Reuters, after a senior EU official floated the idea of convening such talks. It is unclear whether any talks might occur, let alone when or where.

Responding to the four nations’ statement, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Washington should make the first move. “Instead of sophistry & putting onus on Iran, E3/EU must abide by own commitments & demand an end to Trump’s legacy of #EconomicTerrorism against Iran,” Zarif said in a tweet. “Our remedial measures are a response to US/E3 violations. Remove the cause if you fear the effect,” he continued. “We’ll follow ACTION w/ [with] action.”

Zarif has previously signalled an openness to talks with Washington and the other parties over reviving the deal.

The US official also hinted there could be a way to bridge the impasse over who should go first in returning to the deal – the United States, by relaxing its economic sanctions, or Iran, by adhering to limits on its atomic program. “I don’t think that the issue of sequencing will be the obstacle that prevents … us from getting there,” he said, saying a greater challenge may be defining what constitutes compliance.

Also read: US Lawyers Write to President Biden on Farmers’ Protests, Modi Govt’s Repressive Tactics

Uranium enrichment

A French diplomatic source said Washington’s shift marked an opening for Iran, but the path ahead was fraught with obstacles.

Tehran has set a deadline of next week for Biden to begin reversing sanctions imposed by Trump or says it will take its biggest step yet to breach the deal – banning short-notice inspections by the UN nuclear watchdog.

Britain, France, Germany and the United States called on Iran to refrain from that step and repeated their concerns over Iran’s recent actions to produce both uranium enriched up to 20% and uranium metal. “We remain in a precarious situation,” said the French source, adding that if Iran ignored these warnings there would likely be “an extremely firm reaction”.

Refining uranium to high levels of fissile purity is a potential pathway to nuclear bombs, though Iran has long said its enrichment programme is for peaceful energy purposes only.

Also read: Will They or Won’t They? US Leaves Issue of Sanctions on India Under CAATSA Open-Ended

US officials have offered some conciliatory gestures toward Iran such as relaxing the travel restrictions on diplomats in its mission to the United Nations that the Trump administration imposed in 2019, which had confined them to a small section of New York City. The US official told Reuters the Biden administration has had no contact with Iran apart from notifying their UN mission of the easing of travel restrictions.

The United States has also withdrawn a Trump administration assertion that all UN sanctions had been reimposed on Iran in September, according to a US letter to the United Nations Security Council seen by Reuters.

(Reuters)

US COVID Deaths Top 250,000 as New York City Schools Halt in-Person Classes

Nearly 79,000 COVID-19 patients were reported in US hospitals as of Wednesday, the highest number yet for a single day, up from about 75,000 on Tuesday.

New York: The US death toll from COVID-19 surpassed a grim new milestone of 250,000 lives lost on Wednesday, as NewYork City‘s public school system, the nation’s largest, called a halt to in-classroom instruction, citing a jump in coronavirus infection rates.

The decision to shutter schools and revert exclusively to at-home learning, starting on Thursday, came as state and local officials nationwide imposed restrictions on social and economic life to tamp down a surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalisations heading into winter.

But eight months after New York City emerged as the nation’s first major flashpoint of the epidemic – its hospitals besieged and streets virtually devoid of human activity – the epicentre of the public health crisis has shifted to the upper Midwest.

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, one of several states in the region dogged by the country’s highest case rates per capita, ordered all restaurants, bars, fitness centres and entertainment venues closed, and all youth sports cancelled, for four weeks.

More than 90% of hospitals’ intensive-care unit beds are already occupied in the eastern half of the state, Walz told an evening news briefing, adding: “We are at a dangerous point in this pandemic.”

The action by New York schools, announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio via Twitter, doubtless came as a relief to some teachers, many of whom have expressed fear of being placed at increased risk of exposure to the highly contagious respiratory virus.

But it will bring renewed hardship for working parents forced to make childcare arrangements once more.

“I could lose my job. … I am stuck between bills and my son, and it’s a hard choice. Really hard,” said Felix Franco, 30, a US Postal Service employee who has been on leave recovering from COVID-19 himself since spring and was planning to return to work in two weeks.

Franco, who said he had no one else lined up to care for his 6-year-old son during the school day, is already behind on his monthly car bill and racking up credit card debt.

New York City has seen a late-autumn resurgence of the virus after a summertime lull. Schools have been following a staggered, part-time system of classroom instruction since September, with 1.1 million students dividing their school week between in-person and online learning.

But de Blasio said all instruction would switch back to distance learning again because of the positive rate on coronavirus tests in the city rose to a seven-day average of 3%, the threshold for ceasing in-person classes.

Also read: COVID-19: Moderna Vaccine Is Second To Exceed Expectations

“We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19,” he said.

New York joins other large school districts in cities like Boston and Detroit that have recently cancelled in-person learning. Within the past week, the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas and is the fifth-largest in the United States, and Philadelphia’s public school system both postponed plans to return to in-person instruction.

Hospitalisations surging

As of Wednesday, COVID-19 had claimed at least 250,016 lives in the United States, which has documented about 11.5 million infections since the pandemic emerged, according to a Reuters tally of public healthcare data. The United States leads the world in both categories.

More than 1,400 of those victims perished during the past 24 hours.

Nearly 79,000 COVID-19 patients were reported in U.S. hospitals as of Wednesday, the highest number yet for a single day, up from about 75,000 on Tuesday, Reuters’ tally showed.

Health experts say greater social mixing and indoor gatherings during the holiday season, combined with colder weather, could accelerate the surge, threatening to overwhelm already strained healthcare systems.

NBC News reported on Wednesday that more than 900 Mayo Clinic personnel in Minnesota and Wisconsin had been diagnosed withCOVID-19 in the past two weeks – nearly a third of the cases among the medical centre’s Midwestern staff since March.

The Midwest has become the new U.S. epicentre of contagion, reporting almost a half-million cases during the week ending on Monday.

Students ride on a scooter after exiting school, following the announcement to close New York City public schools, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to rise, in Brooklyn, New York, US, November 18, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland, ordered residents on Wednesday to stay at home “to the greatest extent possible” through December 17, 2020, in response to “an unprecedented recent surge of severely ill patients requiring hospitalization.”

Government officials in at least 21 states, representing both sides of the U.S. political divide, have issued sweeping new public health mandates this month. Those range from stricter limits on social gatherings and non-essential businesses to new requirements for wearing masks in public places.

White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday called the wave of new restrictions an overreach by state and local officials.

Also read: COVID-19 Has Shown Why Latin America Needs Active Non-Alignment

“The American people know how to protect their health,” she told Fox News in an interview. “We don’t lose our freedom in this country. We make responsible health decisions as individuals.”

Public health experts were less sanguine.

“I’m the most concerned I’ve been since this pandemic started,” Dr Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told CNN on Wednesday.

Forty-one U.S. states have reported daily record increases in COVID-19 cases on November 20, 2020, have registered all-time highs in coronavirus-related deaths from day to day and 26 have reported peaks in hospitalisations, according to the Reuters tally.

In Washington, pressure for a fresh COVID-19 economic relief bill mounted in Congress. Senate Democrats also unveiled legislation to ramp up the national supply of personal protective equipment for healthcare and other frontline workers.

(Reuters)

#TyphoidMary – Now a Hashtag – Was a Maligned Immigrant Who Got a Bad Rap

#TyphoidMary is shorthand today for those who defy social distancing orders. The real Typhoid Mary is perhaps the most prominent example in the US of the unknowing disease carrier.

The country’s most notable healthy carrier of a deadly disease, Mary Mallon, is back – not in person, but as a hashtag: #TyphoidMary.

In the current pandemic, people may unknowingly harbour and spread the coronavirus before they feel sick, largely because it has an incubation period of between two and 14 days. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says that one in four people could be asymptomatic carriers, never showing symptoms even as they infect others.

But there are also those who, knowing they could be carriers, refuse to cover their mouths or practice social distancing. They include the spring breakers who crowded Florida beaches and the protesters gathering in some state capitals.

Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary, was until now the most prominent example in the US of the unknowing disease carrier. She spread typhoid fever to at least 53 people, causing three deaths between 1900 and 1915.

But Mallon has long been unfairly characterised as knowingly spreading the deadly disease she carried. Her memory has been resurrected recently, largely on Twitter, as a shorthand description of those who intentionally infect others with the coronavirus, #TyphoidMary.

As the author of Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory, I can attest to the media’s past and continuing distortion of the Mary Mallon case. It’s unfair to Mallon to attach her name to such consciously bad behaviour.

Mary Mallon, the healthy carrier

Contrary to popular belief, Mallon never perceived herself to be contagious. During her famous trial of 1909, newspapers quoted her saying, “I was cook for Mr. Stebbins’ family and other families, and nobody fell sick while I was there.”

Like many people in her era, Mallon could not fathom that a healthy-looking person could transmit disease. Throughout her life, she swore her innocence, claiming that she had never had the disease.

The popular – and mistaken – beliefs about Mallon came primarily from media accounts during her life. But the mischaracterisation of Mallon continued long after.

Mallon unknowingly spread typhoid fever through the dishes she prepared, mostly for wealthy families in New York. In the summer of 1906, she cooked for the Warren family at their rental house at Long Island’s Oyster Bay. From August 26 through September 3, typhoid fever struck six out of 11 members of the household.

The homeowners hired George Soper, a self-proclaimed “sanitary engineer,” to investigate. He eventually traced the Oyster Bay outbreak to the new cook, along with typhoid at six of her other places of employment.

Soper’s discovery prompted the New York City Health Inspector Dr. Josephine Baker and the police department to take Mallon by force to a nearby hospital.

Against her will, she underwent multiple physical examinations that included stool samples, which revealed the Salmonella typhi bacteria. Mallon was then quarantined at North Brother Island, a refuge for those ill with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, for two years without a charge or trial.

Mallon hired attorney George O’Neill, who petitioned for her release on June 28, 1909. Before a judge, she testified that she was healthy and had never made others ill. The judge denied her request on the grounds that she was a threat to public health and ordered her to continue living isolated at North Brother Island.

Becoming ‘Typhoid Mary’

Approximately 400 other healthy carriers had also been identified in New York at the time of Mallon’s trial. Unlike Mallon, they were not arrested, tried and imprisoned for years.

It was Mallon’s status as a poor, Irish immigrant woman that made her susceptible to becoming the city’s scapegoat. Soper himself initially described her as “an Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single.” Newspapers treated Mallon as either a “germ receptacle” or as a wild animal to be contained. “Woman ‘Typhoid Factory’ Held As a Prisoner,” stated one headline. “Witch In N.Y.” read a Tacoma Times headline. The story included this description of Mallon: “Legendary witches of old used to build red fires…and brew deadly potions…But poor ‘Typhoid Mary’… requires no cauldron. She manufactures WITHIN HERSELF the evil potions which she spreads about.”

Facts about the case came from Soper and public health authorities to medical journals and newspapers, mentioning her ethnicity, appearance and marital status. Such characteristics were not identified in stories of other healthy carriers. Mallon was never interviewed and therefore did not get to give her perspective, other than in reprinted segments of a single letter to her attorney, in which she declared her innocence.

Government officials and the media justified Mallon’s loss of civil liberties by framing her as a particular danger to public health, more than other healthy carriers.

Her infamous nickname, coined at a 1908 medical conference and then repeated in an edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, shifted Mallon’s public persona from human incubator to villain – an image introduced in the New York American newspaper on June 20, 1909.

The headline “‘Typhoid Mary’: The Extraordinary Predicament of Mary Mallon, a Prisoner on New York’s Quarantine Hospital Island,” extended over a full-page drawing of a cook sautéing a cluster of skulls in her cast-iron skillet. This introduction forever cemented the misconception that Mallon’s disease transmission was murderously intentional.

From that point, news stories compared “Typhoid Sally,” “Diphtheria Mildred” and other healthy carriers to “Typhoid Mary.” While some were briefly detained at hospitals after unintentionally causing outbreaks, no one was treated as poorly as Mallon.

Perpetuating ‘Typhoid Mary’

Mallon was finally released in 1910. With a lack of options (and without an understanding of healthy carriers), Mallon began cooking again, this time at restaurants, hotels and, lastly, the Sloane Hospital for Women. When more than 20 cases of typhoid erupted at the hospital, authorities identified Mallon as the source.

On March 26, 1915, the New York City Department of Public Health escorted Mallon back to North Brother Island. She lived and worked at the hospital there until she died in 1938. There is no record of typhoid outbreaks during her stay.

Even after her final detention and death, newspapers and popular culture perpetuated the misconception that Mallon infected people intentionally, channeling her natural poison (typhoid) through the food she cooked. Books like Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America, television references and the eponymous comic book character have preserved this image of a villainous Mallon.

Across media platforms, “Typhoid Mary” is still casually applied to contemporary menaces of public health, ignoring the ethically dubious practice of blaming healthy carriers and Mary Mallon’s persecution as a poor immigrant at the turn of the 20th century.

Katherine A. Foss, Professor of Media Studies, Middle Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Only Sirens Puncture New York City’s Grudging Silence

As we watch the number of deaths rise, we can only bring ourselves to ask one question: why has this city been so badly impacted by the outbreak?

Washington Heights in Northern Manhattan has been our home for more than a decade now.

Friends had said that this neighbourhood never sleeps as there are music and gatherings till late at night. While bars or clubs don’t define this part of Manhattan, this neighbourhood is the perfect example of families sprawling into the sidewalk as an extension of their small apartments to reclaim the city.

Sometimes, the residents in our previous apartment building would bring their chairs downstairs or sit on the massive staircase and catch up or occasionally play cards. Our parents, visiting from India, would do their yoga in the park and sit and read books on the bench. Barbecues would be set up on the sidewalk across the street and sometimes there even were TV screenings of a basketball game by a group of young men congregated on the next block.

Spanish music blared through the speakers at times as people danced in the square in the summer. Even when we never fully experience all that the city has to offer, the vibrancy, the subway, the parks and a feeling of being at home always keep us going. In the time of COVID-19, when social distancing is at its peak and the city labours under the constant rise in the number of infections and deaths, and we stepped out just once briefly in the last fortnight (as we teach remotely), we wonder if our city and neighbourhood will be transformed forever.

As we watch the staggering numbers of deaths and infections in New York City, and friends ask us if we can feel the virus inching closer, we can only bring ourselves to ask one question: why has this city been so badly impacted by the outbreak? The failure to deal with the outbreak will undoubtedly draw much scrutiny and hopefully multiple commissions of inquiry. But as residents of the city who have closely watched the unfolding of the government’s response, we can only share our initial impressions.

The political leadership both in New York City – Mayor Bill De Blasio – and New York State – Governor Andrew Cuomo – were caught completely unprepared as the virus ravaged the city and the adjoining areas like wildfire. Undoubtedly, the epic failure of the federal agencies and the Trump administration to roll out COVID-19 diagnostic tests when they were critically needed crippled the ability of all cities and states to identify and isolate the infected individuals – which was perhaps the best way to contain the virus.

Also read: Coronavirus and Anti-Asian Racism: How the Language of Disease Produces Hate and Violence

But NYC, one of the most densely populated cities struggled to decide when to shut down – the only tool available to contain the spread of the virus in the absence of widespread testing. By the second week of March, there were hundreds of novel coronavirus infections right outside NYC in New Rochelle but the mayor insisted on keeping the largest school district with 1.1 million students open, claiming that young people were not vulnerable to the virus.

The mayor also said that closing down schools would deprive students of low-income families of free food. However, the mayor ignored the fact that even if young people were asymptomatic or only showed mild symptoms, they could spread the virus in the larger population. It was only after several days of intense debate about the closure of schools that the mayor made the decision.

There were similar delays when it came to shutting down restaurants and bars in the city and ordering a statewide stay-at-home order that the governor preferred to call a “pause” lest it sounded too harsh. Looking back now at the first two weeks of March, it is very clear that political leadership in New York City and the state failed in responding to the pandemic in a timely manner that could have softened some of the serious blows that the city received.

While NYC leadership struggled to shut down the city, President Trump, for a while, assured Americans that the coronavirus was more like the seasonal flu that killed thousands of people every year. The New York City mayor and the state governor have now pooled all their energies and resources in to lead the effort in coordinate with the federal government.

Mukul Kesavan recently mentioned the inability of the US to pick one coherent policy from the experiences of the East Asian countries thanks to its narcissistic exceptionalism. Indeed Governor Cuomo in early March said, “I am not going to imprison anyone in the State of New York,” Cuomo said. “I am not going to do martial law in state of New York. That’s not going to happen.”

It was striking to hear such statements about NYC. The city has a history of extremely invasive policing practices. But of course, in those contexts, it is always people of colour who face the brunt of stop-and-frisk policies, fines for subway fare evasion and this is without even considering one of the most ill reputed prisons in Rikers Island, where coronavirus continues to spread amongst those incarcerated for minor offences.

Also read: Rethinking Education in the Age of the Coronavirus

The oft-repeated claim that democracies don’t police or track cell phone data belies the history of surveillance and targeting. Yet, even as we write this, New York Police Department officers are among the first responders impacted by this virus – seven officers have died and almost 2,000 have tested positive – as the state has failed to protect not only its citizens but also its first responders including paramedics, firefighters, and Metropolitan Transit Authority workers.

A person with a walker crosses 42nd Street in a mostly deserted Times Square following the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, March 23, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Carlo Allegri

The pandemic above all points to the fragility of the US health care system not only in terms of access but also its lack of emergency infrastructure to deal with an outbreak of this scale. The most severely impacted are of course the health care workers, including doctors and nurses, who lack the basic personal protective equipment (PPE) and the support they need to continue their relentless fight against the virus even as they live with the constant fear of getting infected themselves and further infecting their families.

As the time of writing, the death toll in NYC stood at 2,470 with 72,000 cases of infection. However, it is hard to measure the actual spread given the limited numbers of tests and many people staying asymptomatic or showing mild symptoms. The virus has ravaged the city: the blaring of ambulance sirens, no matter which part of the city you live in, has become a constant reminder of the outbreak.

A pandemic could be a great equaliser in terms of the danger it poses to the entire population but NYC has seen low income and immigrant neighbourhoods facing devastation at a much greater scale. The ‘epicentre of the epicentre’ of the COVID-19 outbreak is Elmhurst in Queens borough, the immigrant hub of NYC. Parts of Queens such as Astoria, Jackson Heights, Corona, and East Elmhurst have been most impacted.

These areas have a large population of low income, non-white immigrants that are employed in the service industries such as construction, domestic work, restaurant, and taxi. They are more likely to go out for work even while the city has put on pause given their economic precarity and the nature of their work.

The pandemic has shed a light on the deep inequality that defines this city. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, only one in five African American workers and roughly one in six Hispanic workers are able to work from home. Many of them work as grocery, home delivery, and restaurant delivery workers and are considered essential during the period of the shutdown reminding one of the privilege linked to social distancing.

Also read: Defoe’s Account of the Great Plague of 1665 Has Startling Parallels With Today

Even as ambulance sirens continue to be the only vehicles we hear on the eerily calm roads of our city, we remind ourselves of a very New York moment that was shared more recently about our neighbourhood. When a couple – Reilly Jennings and Amanda Wheeler – not wanting to wait until after the pandemic decided to get married to each other on the street while their friend officiated the wedding from a window much above and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was aptly mentioned.

Jinee Lokaneeta and Sangay Mishra teach Political Science at Drew University, New Jersey.

Humans Are Changing How City Rats Evolve

Cities often embark upon drastic and expensive eradication campaigns designed to rapidly rid the city of pests like rats. But are the surviving rats stronger or weaker than before?

It took only a few seconds to spot one. Then another. As I walked into the small park around noon, dozens of rats could be seen scurrying in every direction. They dashed in and out of burrows scattered around the planting beds. They scampered between the safety of shrub cover and the trash bins containing a smorgasbord for them to feed on. They leaped on and off the unoccupied benches encircling the park. The rats of Churchill Square had returned.

I study urban rats, but this tiny park in New York City – at the intersection of Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan – has been a side curiosity of mine. The first time I visited the square, I was just looking for a place to sit for a few minutes during a family excursion.

But an urban ecologist is never really off the clock in the city. I had never seen so many rats in such a small area. Rats are generally nocturnal, so the high activity during daylight probably meant the infestation was severe, which increases the risk of disease transmission to people, damages urban infrastructure and even takes a toll on the mental health of residents. The health, economic and social impacts of rat infestation can be significant.

Public enemy number one

While rats – Rattus norvegicus, to be specific – in New York City are not unfamiliar to residents, the Churchill Square rats had become too comfortable. Too established. Too numerous. The following year, rodent bait stations appeared around the park. The familiar black boxes are filled with edible bait containing rodent-killing compounds – rodenticides – that technicians can replace easily on a set schedule. It seemed to work remarkably well; there wasn’t a rat to be seen in Churchill Square during my visits that year.

Yet rats are superbly adapted to forage efficiently, breed often and produce enough progeny to repopulate quickly. So despite the millions of dollars spent annually to combat rats, their numbers appear to be increasing in cities around the world. Most rat populations also rebound quickly after a control campaign ends – a phenomenon known as the “boomerang effect.” Churchill Square is an example of this effect; when the rodenticide stations were removed, the rats returned.

They’re back, but they’re different

While the return of the rats is nearly assured, my colleagues and I recently found that the repopulating rats are fundamentally different than the rats present before lethal control was carried out.

For example, an intensive eradication campaign in 2015 in parts of Salvador, Brazil succeeded in cutting the rat population in half, but also led to a 90% reduction in the genetic variation contained within those populations. This included the loss of many of their rarest gene variants. A broad variety of genetic information is thought to be essential for organisms to respond to and remain viable in changing environments. In addition, because the survivors were more closely related to each other, there was also a greater risk of inbreeding among the remaining rats. All of these impacts observed in the Salvador rats constitute what scientists call a genetic bottleneck – and a particularly severe one by any standard.

Genetic bottlenecks are almost always considered in the context of vulnerable populations of conservation concern, not a notorious pest. And the overarching concern is usually long-term survival of the imperiled population. But, pest species like rats, mice, roaches and bed bugs are subject to repeated intentional attempts to deplete their populations through lethal control.

The problem is that there is rarely coordination between pest management staff working with cities or property owners, often with short timelines and insufficient budgets, and scientists interested in tracking the long-term viability of urban pest species.

Also read: Climate Change and an Extinct Mouse: Lessons for the Himalayas

As the environmental health coordinator for the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, Georgianna Silveira is on the front line of efforts to integrate pest management and policy decisions with a scientific perspective on long-term trends.

“Most of these partners are not thinking in the long-term for rat populations,” Silveira notes. “In a practical sense, it’s about putting out fires with quick solutions,” often because there is too little communication among residents, city agencies, pest management professionals and scientists about sustained goals.

Survival of the fittest super rats…

For the city rats that survive lethal control, there are two long-term outcomes that our research team is investigating now. The first, and most concerning, is tied closely to the idea of “survival of the fittest.”

A successful rat control campaign removes many, maybe even most, individuals from the population. The survivors are likely to have certain traits that make them more “fit” – able to avoid the onslaught of exposure to rodenticides, snap traps and other sources of mortality. These survivors then produce more baby rats, which inherit the same helpful traits.

If only the fittest rats make it through the control campaign, the survivors may be even better adapted to take advantage of the high-resource minefield of modern cities, leaving a new population of “super rats” to breed and repopulate. In fact, scientists have identified specific versions of some genes that render common rodenticides ineffective. These beneficial gene variants have been observed in some natural populations of rats regularly exposed to these poisons.

…or evolving into sickly rats

On the other hand, biologists know that there can be severe negative consequences for populations that lack genetic variation, similar to the risks of inbreeding in people.

Our data from Salvador suggests that rats can lose most of their genetic variation very quickly during a lethal control campaign. This variation is the key by which species can respond to changing environments through natural selection. And city environments can change rapidly.

So the second long-term outcome for rats subjected to repeated control programs could be a gradual reduction in survival, reproduction and other traits related to evolutionary fitness. This was observed in crows, where inbreeding was associated with lower survival and weaker immune function. Progressively weaker, more sickly rats is certainly the preferred scenario when dealing with persistent rat infestation.

So what will happen to the rats of Churchill Square, Salvador and other places where they are frequently targeted for lethal control? To understand if city rats are evolving toward the “super” or “sickly” set of traits, our research team is studying populations before and after rat control campaigns to determine how survival, reproduction and other beneficial traits change during intense control campaigns.

But it is immensely challenging to study these aspects of rat biology in wild populations, especially in urban environments. Genetic insights may provide the most practical way to assess the impacts of control efforts, including a way to measure these impacts in a standardised way for cities around the world. Regardless, we know that urban rat control needs to progress beyond just trying to poison them.

Comprehensive rodent control will need to focus on long-term and sustainable goals, reducing populations to tolerable numbers using varied tools like rodenticide, dry ice and even applying contraceptives to reduce fertility. And of course the low-tech – yet most effective – approach of reducing trash availability and installation of rodent-proof garbage cans must be included. Meanwhile, research will shed light onto what effect all of this money and effort is having on urban pests – is it eroding their viability, or turning the gears of evolution to create unintended super organisms?

Jonathan Richardson, Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Official Autopsy Concludes Epstein Death’s Was Suicide by Hanging

Epstein’s lawyers said they were “not satisfied” with the medical examiner’s conclusions and planned to carry out their own investigation, seeking prison videos taken around the time of his death.

New York: New York City’s chief medical examiner determined on Friday that suicide by hanging was the cause of death for financier Jeffrey Epstein, whose body was found six days ago in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The sparely worded official announcement detailing the autopsy conclusions rebutted a host of conspiracy theories – including one promoted by President Donald Trump – that had circulated on social media about the death of the well-connected former money manager.

Epstein, 66, was found unresponsive on Saturday in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), triggering investigations into the circumstances of his death. He was arrested on July 6 and pleaded not guilty to federal charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls as young as 14.

Also read: US Financier Jeffrey Epstein Charged With Sex Trafficking of Minor Girls

Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson said her determination of the cause of death came after a “careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings.”

“Cause: Hanging. Manner: Suicide,” the statement said, without providing supporting details for Sampson’s findings.

Details of the findings had been leaking into the news media over the past few days. Two law enforcement sources told Reuters on Thursday that Epstein’s neck had been broken in several places, confirming a Washington Post report that to some had raised questions about possible foul play.

Epstein, a registered sex offender who once counted Trump and former President Bill Clinton as friends, pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges of unlawfully paying a teenage girl for sex.

Also read: US Lawmakers Tlaib and Omar Barred From Visiting Israel

Epstein had been on suicide watch at the jail but was taken off prior to his death, a source who was not authorised to speak on the matter said previously. At the MCC, two jail guards are required to make separate checks on all prisoners every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not followed, the source added.

“It is indisputable that the authorities violated their own protocols,” Epstein’s lawyers Martin Weinberg, Reid Weingarten and Michael Miller said in a statement, describing conditions in the area he was held as, “harsh, even medieval.”

US Attorney General William Barr has criticised “serious irregularities” at the facility.

(Reuters)

Over 23 People Injured in New York City’s Bronx Apartment Fire

All of the injuries, which included adults and children, were non-life-threatening, according to the fire department of New York.

Firefighters are seen on a neighboring building as flames engulf an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, U.S., in this January 2, 2018 image by Dave Chan obtained from social media. Credit: Reuters/Dave Chan/Social Media

New York: At least 23 people, including one firefighter, were hurt on Tuesday morning after a fire tore through an apartment building in New York City’s Bronx borough, days after another blaze in the area killed 12 people, a fire department spokesman said.

All of the injuries, which included adults and children, were non-life-threatening, according to Daniel Nigro, commissioner of the fire department of New York.

“Our units arrived and were immediately faced with heavy fire. Numerous people were brought out of the building by the firefighters on scene,” Nigro said during a news conference. “They’ve all been transported and they will all be OK, thankfully.”

The seven-alarm fire broke out at about 5:30 am local time (1030 GMT) in a four-story brick structure with a furniture store on the ground floor, fire officials said on Twitter.

More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze in frigid temperatures as low as 13 Fahrenheit (minus 10.6 Celsius) for hours before getting it under control around 2 pm EST (1900 GMT).

The cause of the fire was yet to be determined.

Later on Tuesday, three firefighters suffered non-life threatening injuries as they battled a blaze in a three-story building in the borough of Brooklyn, local media reported.

Last Thursday, 12 people, including four children, were killed in the New York City’s deadliest blaze in a quarter of a century in another part of the Bronx less than two miles (three km) away. That fire was caused by a three-year-old boy playing with the burners of a kitchen stove in one of the apartments, officials said.