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of Information Law, NY Pub Off Law Sec 84 et seq.
A Hempstead Town contractor facing scrutiny from federal law enforcement has paid more than $1 million over 10 yearsto Joseph Cairo, chairman of the Nassau County Republican Committee, and Cairo's son for legal and project management work at the beachside recreation complex the contractor runs, according to records and interviews.
Butch Yamali, whose company, Dover Gourmet Corp., operates the town-owned Malibu Beach Park,said in an interview that he paid $1,160,000 to Cairo and his son, Joseph Michael Cairo, for work related to the popular Lido Beach facility. Hempstead provided Newsday with invoices for the work dating from 2009 to 2018 following a Freedom of Information request.
The records show Yamali's work at Malibu has been a steady source of income forthe senior Cairo, who political experts say wields vast influence over jobs and the Republican agenda in the Hempstead and Nassau governments.
Newsday reported in July that Dover had not paid Hempstead rent on Malibu for seven months, accumulating a balance of $378,000 in unpaid fees as of April, when town Parks Commissioner Daniel Lino and then-Comptroller Kevin Conroy extended the contract without Supervisor Laura Gillen'sknowledge or town board approval. Gillen, a Democrat, criticizedthe extension as a “sweetheart deal” and called for Lino to resign. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York subpoenaed the town for records on Dover. Conroy retired Aug. 26, citing health issues.
Cairo said in an interview that he worked for Yamali in his capacity as a private attorney. Cairo, a former Hempstead councilman, said he was not involved in the contract extension, is not on retainer this year and has had only minimal communication with town officials regarding Dover's work at the facility.
“There may have been some correspondence [with town officials], but certainly the correspondence dwindled, so to speak, over the years, and there has been none recently,” Cairo said.
Joseph Michael Cairo, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
The coverage for May is the same as it would be if OTB was still open. I’d like to know how many union members have ANY time left. There is no benevolence on OTB’s part. OTB got $197,000 in March from the market origin credits.
From: Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 7:50 PM To: Subject: Fwd: OTB Medical Coverage for May 2020
-----Original Message-----
From: Laura Campione <lcicedout@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thu, Apr 30, 2020 05:12 PM
Subject: OTB Medical Coverage
reading ratner ej the lancet p106jan 14, 1978
shaywitz cannot count to teo nor explain the interactions of two bacteria and their effect on the human bodymduprs. sadly mark sltschule md of harvard is no longer alive to try to educate him.
mrs j edward spike jr , the patient in the lancet supra, rests peacefully in mount auburn cemetery with her husband. ratner came to boston after harvard et all could not make her better.
In 1918, an influenza pandemic ravaged the globe, infecting more than 500 million people and killing more than 50 million. Yet while the virus weakened the afflicted, it was a later bacterial infection in the lungs that was ultimately responsible for most of the deaths. Bacteria existed on the planet 3.5 billion years before us and apparently haven’t quite forgiven us for arriving.
As we learn from Muhammad H. Zaman’s timely “Biography of Resistance,” bacteria are devious one-cell organisms whose battles with each other over the millennia have led them to develop a remarkable range of weapons in the quest for survival. They are a source of potent antibiotics, what one might call natural poisons, to be directed at a foe. Indeed, many powerful medicines, such as streptomycin and erythromycin, are derived from bacteria. Yet bacteria have also evolved powerful mechanisms to resist attack—tightening their borders, for instance, or expelling a toxin. Each time we develop an effective drug, Mr. Zaman shows through a series of 35 loosely linked vignettes, the targeted bacteria figure out a way to beat it back—to resist.
Bacterial resistance turns out to be pervasive and unconfined to the modern era of manufactured drugs. It can be found in microbes recovered from the far reaches of remote caves and in the gut flora (microbiome) of people who have lived entirely apart from Western civilization and its expansive pharmacopeia, like the Yanomami of South America and aboriginal populations in Australia.
Though resistance may be perennial, bacterial exposure to modern antibiotics accelerates its development. As Mr. Zaman reminds us, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, warned of this escalating warfare in his 1945 Nobel Prize address: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.” If prescribed antibiotics aren’t taken for the proper length of time, or if the drug quality is poor (a particular problem in less affluent countries), or if the medicine is taken reflexively rather than when needed (a common dilemma for American pediatricians confronted by anxious parents demanding treatment for a child’s viral illness)—then, in each case, bacteria are given a chance to refine their defenses.
PHOTO: WSJ
BIOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE
By Muhammad H. Zaman Harper Wave, 304 pages, $28.99
Part of Mr. Zaman’s “biography” of resistance is devoted to nonmicrobial actors: researchers in the laboratory, who are also inclined to do battle. Carl Friedländer locked horns with Albert Fraenkel in the 1880s as each identified different bacteria as the cause of pneumonia (both were right). Albert Schatz, an industrious postdoctoral scientist in the lab of prominent lab chief Selman Waksman, fought for a share of the credit for the discovery of streptomycin in the 1940s. (Waksman’s reply: “You were one of many cogs in a great wheel.”) The dynamic French Canadian Félix d’Herelle claimed credit, in the 1920s, for the discovery of bacteriophage, a virus that attacks bacteria. As it happens, Frederick Twort, an Englishman, had identified bacteriophage a few years before but lacked the resources to pursue his find—a reminder that, as Mr. Zaman says, “scientific enterprise, and research funds, [have] supported the hyperbolic and not the humble.”
While Mr. Zaman, a professor of biomedical engineering and international health at Boston University, covers some of the same ground that Paul de Kruif did in his lapidary “Microbe Hunters” (1926), de Kruif was hagiographic, and Mr. Zaman often points to feet of clay. He acknowledges the accomplishments of legends such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur but also notes their limitations. Koch’s unquestioned authority, for instance, led him in 1906 to implement a flawed treatment for sleeping sickness in Africa that would irreversibly blind one in five people who received it.
Even so, more than a few of Mr. Zaman’s portraits are admiring. A timely theme emerging from the history of resistance is the importance of measurement, robust testing and transparent analysis. Mr. Zaman describes Tore Midtvedt’s pioneering use of an early IBM mainframe, complete with punch cards, to inventory antibiotic resistance in Norway; Danish microbiologist Frank Møller Aarestrup’s analysis of latrines from international flights to compare global resistance rates; and U.S. Navy physician King Holmes’s doggedness in tracking down the source of resistant venereal disease among sailors docked in the Philippines. We come to recognize the value of—and need for—rapid, point-of-care tests, and we hear echoes of familiar tensions: A resistance mechanism originally isolated from a patient in India, and named after the city of origin, New Delhi, prompted an outcry from the Indian government in 2010.
As Mr. Zaman observes, drug companies played a critical role in the production of penicillin in World War II and for several decades invested heavily in antibiotic research. More recently, though, they have turned their attention to areas like oncology, driven by basic economics. “Companies investing in antibiotics,” Mr. Zaman explains, “are likely to lose money.” To offset this pipeline gap, a national-security-focused government organization partnered in 2016 with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health to spur antibiotics innovation. At the same time, some physicians—like Joanne Liu, the former president of Médecins Sans Frontières—worry about yoking antibiotics to national security and thus, in their view, weaponizing health care.
Antibiotic resistance is a global problem—a disease present in Karachi one day may arrive in Reno, Nev., the next—yet the same connectivity that has spread resistance has eased collaboration across borders. Mr. Zaman’s optimism—based on a “belief in human ingenuity, the vast reserves of natural treasures that are untapped, and the power of coming together”—is welcome, though not always easy to share. Still, his sense of urgency is irresistible.
Dr. Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.
and submit your essay on "value" to the US AAttorney for the EDNY
judges will include shargel, brafman, kadia, et al
Teamsters Local 707 President Suffolk County Legislator Kevin McCaffrey collects union dues from Nassau OTB, Nassau County Republican Committee Josepgh Cairo President who endorsed him at a union meeting.
If you do not pay dues you cannot vote on a contract, but the contract is amended without a vote all the time as a matter of course eithout a vote despite years of past practice.
Federal Investigators Looking at GM as Part of UAW Probe, while US Attorney for the EDNY looks at the antics of Suffolk County Legislator, Union Pension Trustee, Teamsters Local President 707,...
Investigators focused on GM’s dealings with UAW officials through joint training center
A worker on a GM assembly line in Lansing, Mich., on Feb. 21. Federal investigators’ interest in the auto maker is part of a sprawling investigation that has penetrated the UAW’s top ranks and has led to 13 convictions.
PHOTO: BILL PUGLIANO/GETTY IMAGES
By
Ben Foldy,
Nora Naughton and
Christina Rogers
Federal investigators probing corruption at the United Auto Workers union have also been looking at General Motors Co.GM -6.27%’s dealings with UAW officials, reflecting a newer front in the yearslong criminal investigation.
Agents have interviewed both current and former GM employees within the company’s labor relations department and raised questions about interactions between GM’s top bargainers and their counterparts at the UAW, say people with knowledge of the inquiry.
Investigators have also subpoenaed records from the company’s now-closing employee training center, an entity GM had jointly operated with the UAW for decades, according to a training center email sent to staff in February and people familiar with the matter.
The investigators have requested documents related to financial transactions, charitable donations, vendor contracts and travel spending, according to some of the people and the email, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The subpoenas cover documents spanning from 2005 to July of 2019, the email specifies.
The Detroit-based training center, also known as the GM-UAW Center for Human Resources, is being shut down this year, after the company and union agreed to unwind it during contract talks last fall.
The center is a focus of the GM inquiry, with investigators looking at certain practices, such as payments the center made for travel and credit-card spending for UAW officials and allegations that relatives of union leaders were given preference for staff jobs, say people close to the investigation.
Federal authorities are trying to determine whether GM, in its dealings with UAW, violated U.S. labor law barring companies from providing union officials with items of value, some of these people say.
GM in a statement said the federal investigation “has made it clear that the [training center] and the people it served were victimized by corrupt former union officials” and said it has been cooperating with the government for nearly three years.
The UAW said in a statement it is cooperating with investigators and reiterated its recent efforts to reform, including stronger financial controls and the hiring of an ethics officer.
The training center, which included both GM executives and UAW leaders on its executive board, was also at the heart of a kickback scheme that resulted in several guilty pleas over allegations UAW officials shook down vendors in return for contracts.
Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in December, said: “Our primary focus is on any unlawful activities or wrongdoing, whether that’s by a corporate entity, a union or by individuals.”
Federal investigators’ interest in GM, details of which haven’t been previously reported, is part of a sprawling investigation that has penetrated the UAW’s top ranks and has led to 13 convictions for offenses ranging from bribery and money laundering to embezzlement of union dues. The investigation involves the Justice Department, Labor Department and the Internal Revenue Service.
Prosecutors earlier this year charged the union’s former president, Gary Jones, with a scheme to embezzle more than $1 million in worker dues. Mr. Jones declined to comment through his attorney.
The federal probe, first made public in 2017, had initially focused on misuse of funds for a similar employee-training center operated jointly by the UAW and rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles FCAU -3.58%NV.
Federal prosecutors say they uncovered evidence Fiat Chrysler tried to buy “labor peace” by spending the training center’s funds on union leaders in a scheme to keep labor leaders “fat, dumb and happy.”
That leg of the investigation has led to convictions of Fiat Chrysler’s former head of labor relations, as well as several UAW officials. Fiat Chrysler has said the misconduct was limited to a small group of people acting in their own interest.
Last fall, GM cited the investigation as a basis for filing its own civil racketeering lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler, alleging its crosstown rival gained a labor-cost advantage by bribing UAW officials for more favorable contract terms during bargaining.
GM’s lawsuit accuses Fiat Chrylser of using the alleged scheme, and its relationship with top UAW officials, to weaken GM’s position and press a merger of the two companies.
Fiat Chrysler has fought the lawsuit, which it called meritless.
Both GM and Fiat Chrysler established their training centers in the 1980s as nonprofits with a mission to train UAW factory workers for more technology-intensive jobs. Ford Motor Co.F -3.23%also created its own similar training center.
The centers were largely funded by the companies with each center amassing tens of millions of dollars in contributions in recent years through a formula determined by the collective bargaining agreements, tax documents show. UAW officials and company executives sat on the centers’ governing boards and operated the facility jointly.
GM’s training center has long been the best-funded of the Detroit car companies’, receiving an average of about $50 million annually over the past decade, according to recent tax documents.
Fiat Chrysler, like GM, is disbanding its training facilities, a decision agreed to during labor talks late last year. Ford’s center, known as the UAW-Ford National Programs Center, remains in operation.
The decision to shutter Fiat Chrysler and GM’s training centers is part of a larger effort to restructure joint programs with the companies to allow for more transparency and stronger financial controls, a UAW spokesman said.
Last year, federal prosecutors charged former UAW Vice President Joe Ashton and two aides with a kickback scheme involving the GM training center’s vendors. Prosecutors say Mr. Ashton and the aides demanded kickbacks in return for steering more than $10 million worth of contracts for providing backpacks, jackets and watches intended for GM workers.
Mr. Ashton, also a former GM board member, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering late last year.
Investigators are probing whether GM employees were aware of the kickback scheme, and to what extent training-center staff raised questions internally about certain vendor contracts, some of the people close to the investigation said.
