Archives for April 2021

Ex-White House adviser charged in $200K theft from schools

NEW YORK (AP) — The founder of a national charter school network who once served as a White House adviser under President Barack Obama was arrested Tuesday on charges alleging he stole over $200,000 from the network and used it to get a better interest rate on a multimillion-dollar apartment.

Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep, was arrested in Manhattan on wire fraud, money laundering and false statement charges.

Attorney Michael Yaeger said Andrew, 42, will plead not guilty to the charges, though no plea was required Tuesday, when Andrew was released on $500,000 bail after an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court.

U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a release that Andrew stole $218,000 “from the very same schools he helped create.”

She said he then used the money to obtain a better interest rate on a mortgage for a $2.3 million Manhattan apartment.

Andrew was a founder of Democracy Prep when it started in New York City in 2005. It later expanded across the United States, flourishing after its methods helped raise test scores for economically challenged children in Harlem.

According to a criminal complaint, Andrew left his role as a superintendent in his schools network in the spring of 2013 and began working in the United States Department of Education and as a senior adviser in the Office of Educational Technology at the White House until November 2016.

In a letter to parents of Democracy Prep schools, Chief Executive Officer Natasha Trivers wrote that financial safeguards put in place after she took her leadership role in February 2019 led to the discovery of Andrew’s unauthorized withdrawals.

She said Democracy Prep — with 6,500 students at 21 schools in New York; New Jersey; Las Vegas; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and San Antonio — alerted appropriate authorities and has continued to assist the investigation and prosecution.

Trivers said Andrew left the network in 2013 and his alleged “actions are a profound betrayal of all that we stand for and to you and your children, the scholars and families that we serve. To be clear, at no time did the alleged crimes pose any risk to our students, staff or operations in any way.”

She added: “The network’s finances remain strong, and at no time did any of the activity by Seth Andrew have any adverse effect on our scholars or the functioning of our schools.”

In court papers, authorities said Andrew tried to make it appear that the money he took from the schools came from a civic organization he controls.

They said he used the money to qualify for a half—percent interest rate reduction — the largest his bank allowed — on his purchase with his spouse of a Manhattan residence in August 2019.

The couple obtained a $1,776,000 mortgage with an interest rate of 2.5%, the complaint said.

“Today Andrew himself is learning one of life’s most basic lessons — what doesn’t belong to you is not yours for the taking,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., head of New York’s FBI office.

India grieves 200,000 dead with many more probably uncounted

NEW DELHI (AP) — Three days after his coronavirus symptoms appeared, Rajendra Karan struggled to breathe. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, his son drove him to a government hospital in Lucknow, the capital of India’s largest state.

But the hospital wouldn’t let him in without a registration slip from the district’s chief medical officer. By the time the son got it, his father had died in the car, just outside the hospital doors.

“My father would have been alive today if the hospital had just admitted him instead of waiting for a piece of paper,” Rohitas Karan said.

Stories of deaths tangled in bureaucracy and breakdowns have become dismally common in India, where deaths on Wednesday officially surged past 200,000. But the true death toll is believed to be far higher.

In India, mortality data was poor even before the pandemic, with most people dying at home and their deaths often going unregistered. The practice is particularly prevalent in rural areas, where the virus is now spreading fast.

This is partly why this nation of nearly 1.4 billion has recorded fewer deaths than Brazil and Mexico, which have smaller populations and fewer confirmed COVID-19 cases.

While determining exact numbers in a pandemic is difficult, experts say an overreliance on official data that didn’t reflect the true extent of infections contributed to authorities being blindsided by a huge surge in recent weeks.

“People who could have been saved are dying now,” said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University. Menon said there has been “serious undercounting” of deaths in many states.

India had thought the worst was over when cases ebbed in September. But infections began increasing in February, and on Wednesday, 362,757 new confirmed cases, a global record, pushed the country’s total past 17.9 million, second only to the U.S.

Local media have reported discrepancies between official state tallies of the dead and actual numbers of bodies in crematoriums and burial grounds. Many crematoriums have spilled over into parking lots and other empty spaces as blazing funeral pyres light up the night sky.

India’s daily deaths, which have nearly tripled in the past three weeks, also reflect a shattered and underfunded health care system. Hospitals are scrambling for more oxygen, beds, ventilators and ambulances, while families marshal their own resources in the absence of a functioning system.

Jitender Singh Shunty runs an ambulance service in New Delhi transporting COVID-19 victims’ bodies to a temporary crematorium in a parking lot. He said those who die at home are generally unaccounted for in state tallies, while the number of bodies has increased from 10 to nearly 50 daily.

“When I go home, my clothes smell of burnt flesh. I have never seen so many dead bodies in my life,” Shunty said.

Burial grounds are also filling up fast. The capital’s largest Muslim graveyard is running out of space, said Mohammad Shameem, the head gravedigger, noting he was now burying nearly 40 bodies a day.

In southern Telangana state too, doctors and activists are contesting the official death counts.

On April 23, the state said 33 people had died of COVID-19. But between 80 to 100 people died in just two hospitals in the state’s capital, Hyderabad, the day before. It is unclear whether all were due to the virus, but experts say COVID-19 deaths across India aren’t being listed as such.

Instead, many are attributed to underlying conditions despite national guidelines asking states to record all suspected COVID-19 deaths, even if the patient wasn’t tested for the virus.

For instance, New Delhi officially recorded 4,000 COVID-19 deaths by Aug. 31, but this didn’t include suspected deaths, according to data accessed by The Associated Press under a right-to-information request. Fatalities have since more than tripled to over 14,500. Officials didn’t respond to queries on whether suspected deaths are now being included.

In Lucknow, officials said 39 people died of the virus in the city on Tuesday. But Suresh Chandra, who operates its Bhaisakhund electric crematorium, said his team had cremated 58 COVID-19 bodies by Tuesday evening, and 28 more were cremated at a nearby crematorium the same day.

Ajay Dwivedi, a government official in Lucknow, acknowledged more bodies were being cremated but said they included corpses from other districts.

Last year, the Indian government used low death and case counts to declare victory against the coronavirus. In October, a month after cases started to ebb, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India was saving more lives than richer countries. In January he boasted at the World Economic Forum that India’s success was incomparable.

At the heart of these statements was dubious data that shaped policy decisions.

Information about where people were getting infected and dying could have helped India better prepare for the current surge, said Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto who has studied deaths in India.

Accurate data would have allowed experts to map the virus more clearly, identifying hotspots, driving vaccinations and strengthening public health resources, he said.

“You can’t walk out of a pandemic without data,” he said.

But even when reliable data is available, it hasn’t always been heeded. With infections already rising in March, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan declared India was nearing the “endgame.” When daily cases were in the hundreds of thousands, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and other political parties were holding massive election rallies, drawing thousands of maskless supporters.

The government also allowed a Hindu festival drawing hundreds of thousands to the banks of the Ganges River to go ahead despite warnings from experts that a devastating surge was starting.

Many were already convinced COVID-19 wasn’t very lethal since the death toll seemed low.

India’s health ministry did not respond to queries from AP, and ministers from Modi’s party deflected questions about death counts.

Manohar Lal Khattar, chief minister of Haryana state, told reporters Monday that the dead will never come back and that “there was no point in a debate over the number of deaths.”

The Indian Medical Association in February said 734 doctors had died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began. Days later, India’s health ministry put the number at 313.

“This is criminal,” said Dr. Harjit Singh Bhatti, president of the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum. “The government lied about the deaths of health workers first, and now they are lying about deaths of ordinary citizens.”

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Associated Press writers Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow, Omer Farooq in Hyderabad and Chonchui Ngashangva in New Delhi contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Late taxes another troubling sign for electric truck startup

CLEVELAND (AP) — The failure of an Ohio-based electric truck startup to pay $570,000 in real estate taxes due in early March is yet another troubling sign for a company that has been barraged by bad news this year.

Lordstown Motors Corp. stock has plummeted from nearly $31 a share on Feb. 11 to just over $10 on Tuesday in the wake of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry and the filing of four potential class-action lawsuits by investors who claim they have been defrauded.

The company appeared to be primed for success last June during a showcase event at the massive former GM plant outside Youngstown, Ohio. Then-Vice President Mike Pence sat in the passenger seat of an Endurance prototype as it rolled onto a stage to hearty applause. Noisy, colorfully lit robots building nothing gyrated nearby.

The first drip of bad news came in January when an Endurance pickup truck prototype caught fire 10 minutes into its initial test drive in Michigan. A company spokesperson issued a statement afterward saying, “No one was hurt, and like all of our test findings, we do it to create a great product.”

Spokesperson Ryan Hallet said Tuesday the non-payment, initially reported by the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, was an “unfortunate administrative error” and that the company is in the process of paying the taxes and a 10% penalty of around $57,000.

Company officials announced in January it had received more than 100,000 pre-orders for the Endurance and production was scheduled to begin this September, which critics claim is untrue.

Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns acknowledged during an earnings call in March that the SEC was conducting an inquiry based on a lengthy and hyper-critical report by the investment firm Hindenburg Research, which holds a short position on Lordstown Motors stock.

The shareholder lawsuits filed in federal court in Youngstown are largely based on the Hindenburg Research report, which says Lordstown Motors has “no revenue and no sellable product” and has “misled investors on both its demand and production capabilities.”

The report and lawsuits say production of the Endurance is three to four years away based on information provided by a former employee.

Investors, business partners and former employees contend “the company’s orders are largely fictitious and used as a prop to raise capital and confer legitimacy,” one of the lawsuits claims.

A $735 million deal for 14,000 trucks the company announced earlier this year involved a purported buyer that doesn’t operate a vehicle fleet and is based out of a small apartment building in Texas, according to the Hindenburg report.

Vatican No 2 skips trip to Venezuela, cites pandemic

ROME (AP) — The Vatican No. 2 is skipping a planned trip to Venezuela this week because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s former ambassador to Caracas, had planned to celebrate the April 30 beatification of Jose Gregorio Hernandez, dubbed the “doctor of the poor.”

The Vatican said Wednesday that because of issues linked to the pandemic, Parolin wouldn’t make the trip.

His visit coincided with revived efforts by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government to court the Biden administration in hopes it will ease sanctions meant to isolate the socialist leader.

Defendant: Alleged threats against lawmakers were ‘blather’

NEW YORK (AP) — A man charged with threatening to kill members of Congress testified on Tuesday that his disturbing social media rants were the work of a stoned and wasted provocateur — not someone actually out for blood.

Brendan Hunt did not deny creating the posts. But he told jurors at his trial in federal court in Brooklyn he believed what he called “rhetoric” — often put together while “smoking weed” by bong and drinking beer — would never be taken seriously.

“I was really just letting off steam,” said Hunt, 37, of Queens. “It was really more online blather than anything else.”

His decision to testify on his own behalf came in a case where prosecutors have portrayed scenes of the siege at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as emblematic of his brand of extremism. He wasn’t there, but did post videos and other materials expressing support for the violent mob and calling for further mayhem.

Hunt — a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, avid comic book collector and an analyst for the New York court system — has pleaded not guilty to charges alleging, in part, that he called for the “public execution” of Democratic U.S. Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer. Prosecutors say it was part of a monthlong online campaign to urge violence against members of Congress that culminated with a Jan. 8 video titled: “Kill your senators. Slaughter them all.”

Defense attorneys have called the charges overblown and argued that there’s no proof that Hunt was a legitimate threat. He testified that he picked out the names of Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez and Schumer because of their high profiles as Democrats, and “wasn’t trying to target them in real life.”

During cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kessler confronted Hunt with profane racist and antisemitic texts he had written. Hunt claimed they were aimed at trying to get the attention of his father, and that they didn’t represent his real views.

“I wrote a lot of things I didn’t mean,” he said.

Earlier, while questioned by his lawyer, Hunt called himself “immature” and “very irresponsible.”

“I just feel terrible about how I expressed myself,” he added.

He said he now realizes, “It’s important to be responsible with our words.”

The trial, which began last week, has featured testimony from a Capitol Police officer about the mayhem on Jan. 6. Closing arguments were expected to begin as early as late Tuesday afternoon with jury deliberations starting Wednesday.

Archives for April 2021

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