By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Photographs by Cornell Watson

Dec. 21, 2021

Since July, all but the most affluent families across the country have been receiving child tax credits as monthly cash payments — a first-of-its-kind policy jujitsu that converted a tax break, usually given out as a lump sum at the end of the financial year, into an additional income that expanded America’s safety net.

The program represented the first significant shift of American government support for families in decades. Since the 1990s, the child tax credit was available only to parents who were actively working or looking for work, making the United States an outlier among other developed countries where subsidies for children are common.

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, in addition to refashioning the tax credit into monthly checks, expanded the total amount parents and other caregivers received and stripped it of any work-related conditions, making more money available to more households.

The initiative, which was initially set to run for six months, has now wound down with the last of the checks sent out on Dec. 15.

Democrats had hoped to make the tax credits permanent as part of Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better plan. But this week, the administration’s vast domestic agenda was effectively blocked, at least for now, by the centrist Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who voted for the child tax credit expansion when it was first introduced but did not support its extension.

“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation,” Mr. Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday,” citing concerns that the Build Back Better plan would add to the national debt and rising inflation.

The argument echoed that of his Republican colleagues — Senator Lindsey Graham, the senior Senate Budget Committee Republican from South Carolina, described the administration’s plan as an “inflation bomb” — who were united in their opposition to the Build Back Better legislation.

Experts have noted that since the payments of up to $300 per child started landing in bank accounts, alongside other Covid-related relief, child poverty dropped to record lows.

In an October report by the Census Bureau, around half of the roughly 300,000 recipients surveyed reported using the money on food — an indication that the tax credit was also helping to bring down hunger and food insufficiency. Many recipients also reported spending the funds on child care and school supplies.

Interviews with four families revealed other day-to-day expenses they used the funds for — from doctor’s appointments to car repairs — and the joys of a little breathing room for households that may otherwise live paycheck to paycheck.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/well/family/child-tax-credit-families.html

Google also started offering additional stock grants to employees in parts of the company that seemed ripe for poaching, these people said. Google declined to comment.

Unlike Meta, which has embraced crypto, Google has been reluctant to jump into the movement. But Google employees saw crypto’s opportunities firsthand when Surojit Chatterjee, a vice president, left the company last year to become the chief product officer of Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

When Coinbase went public in April, Mr. Chatterjee’s stake in the company soared to more than $600 million in value. He had worked there for just 14 months.

Such vast amounts of crypto wealth have created a fear of missing out, or FOMO, among many techies — especially those whose friends bought Bitcoin several years ago and now are hugely wealthy.

“Back in 2017 or so, people were mostly in it for the investment opportunity,” said Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief executive of Mysten Labs, a start-up focused on building blockchain infrastructure projects. “Now it’s people actually wanting to build stuff.”

Mr. Cheng, 50, left Facebook in September after six years there, most recently working on Novi, its crypto effort. Of Mysten Labs’ roughly 20 employees, most of whom are scattered across San Francisco, London, New York and elsewhere, roughly 80 percent come from tech companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley-cryptocurrency-start-ups.html

Hobbs had one thing of interest, a girl named Frankie Marie Smith. She was only 17 and a beauty. Back in high school, Si Spiegel would never have thought he had a chance with a girl like that. But now he was a dashing lieutenant who flew a B-17.

Within weeks, they were married in Lovington, N.M. “Her father insisted we get married in an Evangelical church, the Church of God,” Mr. Spiegel said. When they parted, Frankie Marie gave him a photo he would carry during missions. Then he left New Mexico and went to meet his crew, a motley collection of “leftovers.”

“We had five Catholics, two Jews,” he said. “Catholics weren’t treated too well, either. We had a Mormon, too.” Mr. Spiegel said the only WASP was a ball-turret gunner who had gotten into trouble with the law in Chicago. “And a judge said, ‘You have two choices,’” he recalled. “‘You can go to jail or join the Army.’”

Mr. Spiegel has outlived all of his crew members but still holds their stories. His bombardier and first real friend in the service, Danny Shapiro, was later shot down on another plane and held as a prisoner of war for a year. Dale Tyler was the Mormon tail gunner from Utah who came from a family of 13. “Harold Bennett was my top turret gunner, from Massachusetts. Killed in a training accident on another plane. His chute never opened.”

They were assigned to the U.S. Eighth Air Force, and their base of operations would be in an English town called Eye, near the coast about 100 miles northeast of London.

Mr. Spiegel’s first flight in formation, at the age of 20, was a short mission over Belgium when the Germans were retreating. “We were bombing them to prevent blowing up a bridge,” he said. It was what airmen would call a “milk run” — a mission with little danger. “I thought, oh, this is great!”

Over the next year, Mr. Spiegel would carry out 35 missions, all of them in daylight, which conferred a strategic advantage but often resulted in significant casualties.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/nyregion/bomber-pilot-christmas-trees.html

That same year, Ms. Holmes was indicted on fraud charges. Her trial began on Sept. 8 after numerous delays.

Prosecutors called 29 witnesses, outlining six main areas of Ms. Holmes’s alleged deception, including lies about the abilities of Theranos’s technology, its work with the military and its business performance.

Former Theranos employees testified that the start-up’s technology regularly failed quality-control tests, returned inaccurate results and could perform only a dozen tests, rather than the hundreds that Ms. Holmes claimed. Doctors and patients spoke about how they had made medical decisions based on Theranos tests that turned out to be wrong.

Prosecutors also showed a set of Theranos validation reports that bore the logos of pharmaceutical companies that had neither prepared nor signed off on the conclusions therein. They showed letters to investors in which Ms. Holmes falsely claimed Theranos had military contracts and emails from employees that said the company hid device failures and removed abnormal blood test results.

In testimony, investors and pharmaceutical executives said that Ms. Holmes’s claims had led them to invest millions of dollars in Theranos or sign contracts with her company.

“The government spent a lot of time putting in evidence about not just one particular alleged misrepresentation, but several,” Mr. Melendres said. “If you line up three, four, five, a half-dozen misstatements, it gets harder for the jury to pull together on anything other than that there was an intentional scheme.”

The defense called only three witnesses and relied on Ms. Holmes to carry their case. Last month, she took the stand to paint herself as a well-meaning entrepreneur who was naïve and relied too much on those around her. She said she had been emotionally and physically abused by Ramesh Balwani, Theranos’s former chief operating officer and her former boyfriend.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/technology/closing-arguments-trial-elizabeth-holmes.html

Expertos en energía afirman que un gran aumento de la producción de litio boliviano mantendría bajos los precios de las baterías, lo que ayudaría al presidente de Estados Unidos Joe Biden, a alcanzar su objetivo de electrificar la mitad de los vehículos nuevos que se vendan en el país en 2030, frente al cuatro por ciento actual.

“La cantidad de litio que necesitamos en cualquiera de nuestros objetivos climáticos es increíble”, dijo Anna Shpitsberg, subsecretaria de Estado estadounidense para la transformación energética. “Todo el mundo está intentando construir sus cadenas de suministro y pensar en cómo ser estratégicos”.

Pero Washington tiene poca influencia en Bolivia, cuyos líderes llevan mucho tiempo en desacuerdo con el enfoque estadounidense sobre la política de drogas y Venezuela. Eso puede explicar por qué algunos ejecutivos del sector energético no creen que Bolivia vale la pena el riesgo.

“En Bolivia se han llevado a cabo proyectos durante 30 años y no se ha conseguido casi nada”, dijo Robert Mintak, director ejecutivo de Standard Lithium, una empresa minera que cotiza en bolsa con sede en Vancouver, Columbia Británica, al referirse a los esfuerzos de desarrollo del litio que se remontan a 1990. “Es un país sin salida al mar, sin infraestructuras, sin mano de obra, con riesgos políticos y sin protección de la propiedad intelectual. Así que, como promotor, elegiría otro lugar más seguro”.

Egan ve las probabilidades de manera diferente.

‘Tengo que participar’

Que Egan haya llegado hasta aquí es asombroso. Supo sobre el litio boliviano por mera casualidad, cuando él y un amigo recorrieron Sudamérica como turistas en 2018.

Cuando llegaron al salar, un guía les explicó que estaban parados sobre la mayor reserva de litio del mundo. “Pensé: ‘No sé cómo voy a hacer esto, pero tengo que participar’”, dijo Egan.

Había probado suerte como agente deportivo y musical y dirigía un pequeño fondo de inversión en esa época. Había invertido en Tesla en 2013, cuando las acciones valían nueve dólares; ahora cada acción cotiza en alrededor de 975 dólares. (No quiso revelar cuántas acciones había comprado y cuántas tenía todavía).

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2021/12/16/espanol/litio-bolivia-energias-verdes.html

At first, the company doubled down. “Let the disease change its name,” a spokesperson for Ayds told Advertising Age in 1986. But by 1988, its chairman told The New York Times that sales of Ayds had fallen by more than 50 percent.

Hurricane Katrina had a similar impact on the popularity of the storm’s namesake. Following the 2005 storm, the number of Social Security card applications for babies named Katrina dropped precipitously, according to government data.

And the CBC reported in September that some people who share a first name with Osama bin Laden are still feeling the personal repercussions 20 years after 9/11.

In the case of Omicron, some are meeting the naming overlap with benign curiosity or humor.

Tara Singer, the president and chief executive of the Omicron Delta Kappa honors society said that she wasn’t concerned about the public relations impact of the Omicron variant on her organization. “Delta Air Lines weathered this well, so we will, too,” she said in a phone interview.

Delta Air Lines is recovering from a serious, pandemic-induced decline in business (as is the airline industry in general). Still, the Delta variant was a tricky subject at the company. A spokesperson for Delta told The Times that, internally, employees often refer to “the variant” rather than invoking the company name.

The airline also responded with a bit of humor. Henry Ting, the company’s chief health officer, wrote on Twitter: “We prefer to call it the B.1.617.2 variant since that is so much more simple to say and remember.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/style/delta-omicron-variant-greek-names.html

“You have to see chocolate as a condiment and not as a candy,” said Maria Martínez, the chef of Chocobar Cortés NYC, who was born in Brooklyn but raised in Quebradillas, in northwest Puerto Rico. Her mofongo at Café Ghia, a Bushwick, Brooklyn, restaurant that closed in 2017, regularly drew long lines every morning.

In a phone interview from his home in San Juan, Ignacio Cortés, Carlos’s father and the company’s chief executive, said Cortés chocolate has been available in the United States in scattered groceries and bodegas since 1951, and is now distributed in 20 states. “We are a reference for the first and second generations who came to New York,” he said, “a reference to what they left and what they long for.”

Pablo García Smith, who offers food tours of San Juan, said that Chocobar serves as “a generational bridge,” linking abuelas with young people and Instagram influencers. “The restaurants — in San Juan and now in New York — close the loop of nostalgia.” (Last summer, Cortés sold chocolate bars wrapped in comic strips of La Borinqueña, an Afro-Puerto Rican superhero created in 2016.)

The Mott Haven neighborhood has experienced a rush of development from within the community, or “gentefication,” from the Spanish word “gente” (people). Chocobar shares a block with the Lit. Bar, a wine bar and a much-needed bookstore; Beatstro, a hip-hop bistro that hosts break-dancing battles; Famous Nobodys, a streetwear boutique; and the Thinkubator, a job training nonprofit that’s about to open a cafe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/dining/chocobar-cortes-chocolate-nyc.html

“You have to see chocolate as a condiment and not as a candy,” said Maria Martínez, the chef of Chocobar Cortés NYC, who was born in Brooklyn but raised in Quebradillas, in northwest Puerto Rico. Her mofongo at Café Ghia, a Bushwick, Brooklyn, restaurant that closed in 2017, regularly drew long lines every morning.

In a phone interview from his home in San Juan, Ignacio Cortés, Carlos’s father and the company’s chief executive, said Cortés chocolate has been available in the United States in scattered groceries and bodegas since 1951, and is now distributed in 20 states. “We are a reference for the first and second generations who came to New York,” he said, “a reference to what they left and what they long for.”

Pablo García Smith, who offers food tours of San Juan, said that Chocobar serves as “a generational bridge,” linking abuelas with young people and Instagram influencers. “The restaurants — in San Juan and now in New York — close the loop of nostalgia.” (Last summer, Cortés sold chocolate bars wrapped in comic strips of La Borinqueña, an Afro-Puerto Rican superhero created in 2016.)

The Mott Haven neighborhood has experienced a rush of development from within the community, or “gentefication,” from the Spanish word “gente” (people). Chocobar shares a block with the Lit. Bar, a wine bar and a much-needed bookstore; Beatstro, a hip-hop bistro that hosts break-dancing battles; Famous Nobodys, a streetwear boutique; and the Thinkubator, a job training nonprofit that’s about to open a cafe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/dining/chocobar-cortes-chocolate-nyc.html

Mrs. Procope’s reputation fell under a cloud when she, along with 17 other members of Adelphi’s trustees, were removed by the state Board of Regents in 1997 for failing to properly oversee spending by the university’s president. As chairwoman of the trustees, she was also accused of conflict of interest for handling the university’s insurance through her brokerage. She denied wrongdoing, contending that her company provided Adelphi free consulting, saved it money and provided superior service.

Ernesta Gertrude Forster was born on Feb. 9, 1923, in Brooklyn and was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her father, Clarence Forster, was born in Barbados and became a chief steward for Cunard Lines. He later owned real estate and was a postal worker. Her mother, Elvira (Lord) Forster, a homemaker, was born in St. Lucia, in the British West Indies. Her father was a son of Sam Lord, a notorious Barbadian buccaneer who died in 1844, relatives said.

Ernesta was a talented pianist who performed in a recital with other children at Carnegie Hall when she was 13. She graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music Art and Performing Arts) in Manhattan. Enrolling at Brooklyn College, she left after a year to marry Albin Bowman and handle the insurance for his real estate business. She also studied at the Pohs Institute of Insurance.

After Mr. Bowman died in 1952, she founded E.G. Bowman the following year.

She married John L. Procope, an advertising executive, whom she had met on a blind date, in 1953. He became publisher of The Amsterdam News and remained in the position until 1982, when he joined E.G. Bowman as chairman.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/business/ernesta-procope-dead.html

“We totally messed it up,” she said.

Ms. Holmes also conceded, after prodding, that whistle-blowers including the former Theranos employees Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung were right when they spoke up about problems in the start-up’s lab.

In other instances, Ms. Holmes pushed back, blaming a desire to protect Theranos’s trade secrets for her actions. She said she had not tried to “intimidate” John Carreyrou, the Journal reporter who exposed the company’s flaws, or Ms. Cheung and Mr. Shultz, who were sources for Mr. Carreyrou.

“We wanted to make sure our trade secrets weren’t disclosed,” she said.

In many cases, Ms. Holmes said, she simply didn’t remember. She didn’t recall joking about Mr. Carreyrou’s heritage, how many tests Theranos had run at the time of his article or what her salary was. Mr. Leach, the prosecutor, frequently pulled up text messages and emails to refresh her memory.

Abuse Accusations

Ms. Holmes closed her direct testimony with bombshell accusations of abuse against Ramesh Balwani, her boyfriend of more than a decade, who worked at Theranos and was indicted as a co-conspirator in fraud. Mr. Balwani, who goes by Sunny, was emotionally and physically abusive, she said.

Mr. Balwani frequently criticized her and controlled what she ate and her schedule, Ms. Holmes said. He kept her from members of her family because they were a distraction. And he told her to “kill” her old self to be reborn as a new, successful entrepreneur.

She also accused him of rape. “He would force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to because he would say that he wanted me to know he still loved me,” she said through tears.

Mr. Balwani left the company in 2016, after a regulatory inspection revealed major problems in Theranos’s lab. Around that time, Ms. Holmes moved out, she testified. “He wasn’t who I thought he was,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/article/elizabeth-holmes-trial-testimony.html