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      in Elections

      Biotech Exec Gets 7 Years in Prison for False Claims About Rapid Covid-19 Test

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      Prosecutors said Keith Berman falsely claimed he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds. His lawyer said he had put “genuine effort” into developing such a test.The former chief executive of a biotechnology company who, during the early days of the pandemic, falsely claimed that he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for securities fraud, federal prosecutors said.From February 2020 to December 2020, the former executive, Keith Berman, 70, of Westlake Village, Calif., engaged in a scheme to defraud people into investing in his company, Decision Diagnostics Corporation, by claiming the test could detect Covid using a finger prick sample of blood, prosecutors said.In March and April 2020, Mr. Berman issued 12 “false and misleading” news releases describing the rapid Covid test, which his company called GenViro, prosecutors wrote. Decision Diagnostics’ stock price jumped by more than 1,500 percent during the period, prosecutors said.In reality, prosecutors said, Mr. Berman had “privately confided in a friend the test could not actually detect Covid-19.”Prosecutors accused Mr. Berman, the sole director of the publicly traded medical device company, of capitalizing on people’s fears about the pandemic in an effort to resuscitate the company’s fortunes.Mr. Berman’s scheme resulted in about $28 million in investor losses, prosecutors said. Mr. Berman was indicted in December 2020, and he pleaded guilty in December 2023 to securities fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an official proceeding.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Xavier Becerra reportedly mulls cabinet exit to run for California governor

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      Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, is reportedly considering leaving his post to run for California governor.Becerra has discussed in private conversations his desire to leave Washington in November and join an already crowded field of candidates to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor, Politico reported, citing anonymous sources.Becerra’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.If he enters the 2026 governor’s race, Becerra will be facing off against several fellow Democrats and colleagues, including the lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, former California senate president pro tempore Toni Atkins and state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond. The current California attorney general, Rob Bonta, is also expected to announce a run.Before taking his post as health and human services secretary, Becerra was California’s attorney general. He is the first Latino to hold both posts. Before that, he served in the US House of Representatives for 26 years. In the Biden administration, he had a role overseeing the Covid-19 response, including the vaccine rollout.Becerra’s critics have decried his lack of public health training and experience; he is an attorney by training and a longtime politician who helped pass the Affordable Care Act into law. But he has nonetheless carved out a role in defending and promoting the administration’s policies to lower drug prices and protect the right to abortion.In recent weeks, he has made visits across the country highlighting the Biden administration’s reproductive rights agenda before the 2024 election.“No woman today should fear [not having] access to the care that she needs. President Biden has made that clear,” Becerra told supporters in Florida last week. He characterized the Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban as “medical apartheid”.Becerra sidestepped questions about a gubernatorial run. “It’s a blessing to hear that someone is saying that I’m running for governor because I don’t know who they are,” he told Politico. “I am secretary of HHS and, by law, I have to be secretary of HHS and nothing else. So I’m gonna do my job as best I can. It’s a thrill – I think my mom would be happy to hear that someone thinks I can run for governor as well.” More

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      in Elections

      Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over a Fatal Crash Involving Autopilot

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      A Tesla driver’s family had sought damages for the 2018 crash, which happened while the carmaker’s driver-assistance software was in use.Tesla on Monday settled a lawsuit that blamed the automaker’s driver-assistance software for the death of a California man in 2018, averting a trial that would have focused attention on the company’s technology several months before it plans to unveil a self-driving taxi.The trial stemming from the death of Wei Lun Huang, an Apple software engineer who went by Walter, was scheduled to start Monday with jury selection. The case was one of the most prominent involving Tesla’s Autopilot software, attracting significant public attention and prompting an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.Terms of the settlement with Mr. Huang’s children and other members of his family were not disclosed, and Tesla filed court documents seeking to prevent them from being made public.Testimony in the trial would have put Tesla’s autonomous driving software under close scrutiny, further fueling a debate about whether the technology makes cars safer or exposes drivers and others to serious injury or death.Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has said the company’s self-driving software will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Investors have used his claims to justify the company’s lofty stock market valuation. Tesla is worth more than any other carmaker even though its shares have plunged in recent months.Mr. Musk said on X last week that Tesla would introduce a self-driving taxi, Robotaxi, in August. If Tesla has in fact perfected a vehicle that can ferry passengers without a driver — which many analysts doubt — the development will help answer criticism that the company has been slow to follow up its Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle with new products.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      How California’s Fire Season Might Shape Up This Year

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      It’s been a rainy winter, but that won’t necessarily mean fewer wildfires.Firefighters battling the Happy Camp Complex fire in August 2023.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesLuckily for us, the 2023 fire season in California was exceptionally mild.Wildland fires burned roughly 325,000 acres and damaged 70 buildings across the state last year, making the fire season one of the least destructive in the past decade and a significant departure from some terrible recent fire years.Nearly eight times as many acres — more than 2.5 million in all — burned in 2021, for example, as well as 3,500 structures. And the year before that was California’s worst on record, with 4.3 million acres burned.So what kind of fire season are we in for this year?Like 2023, this year has been a wet one. State officials announced on Tuesday that the depth of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada stood at 110 percent of the average for this time of year, an encouraging sign that the state would have plenty of water in the months ahead.After the wet winter, vegetation in the state isn’t as parched as it would be during a drought, so wildfire activity is likely to be pretty low in the spring and early summer, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an online briefing this week.But the year probably won’t stay as quiet as 2023 was. This year’s wet weather hasn’t been as extreme as last year’s — some inland cities, like Fresno and South Lake Tahoe, actually received less rain than usual this year — so plants and soil are more likely to dry out over the rest of this year than they were last year. “I would be somewhat surprised if this year was not significantly more active,” Swain said.Last summer was the coolest in California in more than a decade. Then the storm system that had been Hurricane Hilary dumped so much rain on Southern California in August — typically the peak of fire season — that it effectively ended the season there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      California Highway 1 Collapse Leaves 2,000 Tourists Stranded

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      Many stayed in temporary shelters, hotels and campgrounds overnight on Saturday, while some slept in their cars. A portion of scenic Highway 1 in the Big Sur area of California collapsed Saturday stranding about 2,000 motorists, mostly tourists, overnight.Officials with the California Department of Transportation said on Sunday that a section of the southbound highway located in the Central Coast, would remain closed to the public while crews worked on the affected areas. Large chunks of the road fell into the ocean. The highway, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway, features stretches of rocky cliffs, lush mountains, panoramic beaches and coastal redwood forests.There were no reported injuries. Caltrans, the agency, did not give an estimate of when it expected to fully reopen the highway. Officials did not say what led to the collapse, but torrential rain battered the area near Rocky Creek Bridge, which is about 17 miles south of Monterey. Kevin Drabinski, a spokesman for Caltrans, said the officials determined that the damage was severe enough to close the highway for motorists Saturday afternoon.“Caltrans became aware that we had lost portion of the southbound lane and that necessitated a full closure of Highway 1,” Mr. Drabinski said. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      California Faces Heavy Rain and Flooding From Coastal Storm

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      Los Angeles had received one to two inches of rain as of Saturday morning. Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming were also expected to get significant precipitation this weekend.An unseasonably cold and vigorous storm system was cutting through the southwestern Pacific Coast this weekend, bringing rain, flash flooding and snow to parts of California and other states, forecasters said.The National Weather Service in San Diego had issued a flash flood warning on Saturday morning, cautioning the public about potential flooding in the southwestern part of the state.The storm was expected to continue moving along the coast and, eventually, inland.“This storm is going to have an impact all the way across the country, but right now the storm center is off the California coast,” said Bob Smerbeck, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “There’s going to be some flooding issues, mudslides and debris. People should keep their guard up.”The storm was coming off the coast of California and was expected to shift south and eastward on Saturday or Sunday, creating the risk of flash flooding in Southern California, said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md.Los Angeles had received one to two inches of rain as of Saturday morning, and in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, the rainfall amounts were two to four inches, Ms. Santorelli said.The Transverse Ranges and Sierra Nevada could get heavy snowfall, Ms. Santorelli said. Since this was a fairly cold system, significant snowfall was expected above 6,000 feet, with one to three feet of accumulation, and higher amounts possible above 7,500 feet.Windy conditions were expected to continue, including gusts of 50 to 60 miles per hour above 5,000 feet through Saturday morning, the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service wrote on Saturday.Strong winds, combined with the heavy snow, could produce short-term blizzard conditions in the mountain areas, forecasters said. Winter storm warnings were in effect for most of the mountains through Sunday evening.California is expected to dry out by Monday, Mr. Smerbeck said, but the storm will continue to move into Arizona over the weekend. Western Arizona was expected to experience heavy rain overnight on Saturday and into Sunday.Arizona was under a wind advisory from noon until 10 p.m. Saturday. The south-central and southwestern portions of Arizona could get a quarter of an inch of rain, according to the National Weather Service in Phoenix.The storm was also expected to bring significant precipitation to parts of Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. As of Saturday, AccuWeather was forecasting a foot of snow in Flagstaff, Ariz. More

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      in Elections

      Why Is Sean Combs the Subject of a Homeland Security Investigation?

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      The department has a division that often directs inquiries into sex trafficking allegations, like those cited in recent lawsuits against Mr. Combs.The raids of Sean Combs’s homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area this week raised a barrage of questions about the nature of the inquiry, which a federal official said was at least in part a human trafficking investigation.The government has said little about the basis for the search warrants, but the raids came after five civil lawsuits were filed against Mr. Combs in recent months that accused him of violating sex trafficking laws. In four of the suits women accused him of rape, and in one a man accused him of unwanted sexual contact. Mr. Combs, a hip-hop impresario known as Puff Daddy and Diddy who has been a high-profile figure in the music industry since the 1990s, has vehemently denied all of the allegations, calling them “sickening.” Officials have not publicly named him as a target of any prosecution.As the civil suits against Mr. Combs illustrate, the term human or sex trafficking has a broader meaning in the law than perhaps the more popularly understood image of organized crime and forced prostitution rings.“Traditionally you think of trafficking as a pimp who has a stable of victims and then is trafficking them in the traditional sense of the word, for money,” said Jim Cole, a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who oversaw human trafficking cases, “but there are lots of forms of trafficking.”The breadth of trafficking investigations has grown with the recent uptick in sexual abuse claims and the use of the internet by traffickers. Homeland Security Investigations often leads such criminal investigations, although the department is most commonly associated with immigration and transnational issues.In the current inquiry, federal investigators in New York have been interviewing potential witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Combs for several months, according to a person familiar with the interviews. Some of the questions involved the solicitation and transportation of prostitutes, as well as any payments or promises associated with sex acts, the person said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shohei Ohtani Is Home and Focused on Baseball. Dodgers Fans Are Relieved.

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      Los Angeles finally got a close look at baseball’s megastar on Thursday as a gambling situation involving his former interpreter took a back seat to opening day.The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an eight-foot stone lantern given as a gift to the Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki, who helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a good-will tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodger fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki’s, and for years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired schoolteacher who has been coming to Dodgers game since the 1960s. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”The monument is a homage to the team’s past, and also its present.In December, the Dodgers signed the world’s biggest baseball star, the two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history, $700 million over 10 years. For good measure, the team signed another Japanese superstar, the pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years. It was the most lucrative contract ever for a pitcher.On Thursday, as Los Angeles got a glimpse of its newest megastar, Ohtani’s impact was apparent before he even stepped on the field: New advertisements for Asian companies — an airline, a retail chain, yogurt drinks, skin care products — dotted the stadium. One local newscaster — in pregame coverage that began when most Angelenos were having breakfast, or stuck in traffic — compared Ohtani to Taylor Swift, saying that the Dodgers were baseball’s version of the Eras Tour. And a new addition to the stadium menu is a Japanese fried octopus fritter being promoted as one of Ohtani’s favorite dishes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More