Trump's " Mad Dog " was once considered a stock market villain - Fortune

Donald Trump's new pick for secretary of the U.S. Army may be most famous for owning the Florida Panthers, the hockey team is not what made Vincent Viola rich.
Viola, whom Trump selected Monday for the Army's top post, has a net worth of $2.3 billion, according to Bloomberg. Much of that wealth has come from Virtu Financial (VIRT, +1.94%), the high-frequency trading firm that Viola, 60, founded in 2008 and took public last year: Viola still owns nearly 58% of Virtu, according to the company, which has a market cap of about $2.2 billion.
Indeed, as Virtu filed for an initial public offering in March 2014, The Wall Street Journal declared that Viola was set to become the high-frequency trading industry's very first billionaire upon the IPO.
But there was a problem: It was a terrible time to be a high-frequency trading billionaire.
Trump Foundation
Donald Trump Plans to Shutter His Charitable Foundation, Report Says
Just weeks after Virtu filed for its IPO, author Michael Lewis released his book Flash Boys, which lifted the veil on the secretive world of high-speed trading but also vilified it and argued that such split-second traders had rigged the market against average-Joe investors. Mentioned in a footnote in Lewis' book,Virtu's claim to fame—that in its 5.5 years of trading, it made money every single day except one—was quickly used against the company by critics who accused it of cheating. By mid-April, Virtu was forced to postpone its IPO indefinitely.
A year later, though, Viola's company renewed its plans, thanks in part to an endorsement by Flash Boys protagonist and CEO of IEX Brad Katsuyama, who afterwards called Virtu one of the "good high-frequency traders." Virtu went public in April 2015.
So far, though, Virtu's stock has performed poorly, down 16% since its IPO and more than 30% this year alone. Though Viola has refused a salary for the last three years at Virtu—his contract provides for base pay of $1—he made more than $8.2 million in option awards in 2015, according to the company's most recent proxy. Viola also controls more than 93% of the voting power of Virtu's outstanding common stock.
Before he started Virtu, Viola, a graduate of West Point military academy who served in the Army's 101st Airborne Division, was a floor trader and pioneer of electronic trading. He went on to lead the New York Mercantile Exchange (known as Nymex for short) as chairman through the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 until 2004, during which time he reportedly tried to acquire rival Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, -0.80%). That obviously didn't happen: In 2008, Nymex was acquired by CME Group, the leading futures exchange specializing in commodities. By the end of this year, CME Group has promised to close its Nymex trading floors for good, offering strictly electronic trading.
So with a background like that, what does the secretary of the Army do? According to the Department of Defense's job description for the current person in that role, Eric Fanning, the secretary of the Army "has statutory responsibility for all matters relating to the United States Army: manpower, personnel, reserve affairs, installations, environmental issues, weapons systems and equipment acquisition, communications, and financial management."
While high-speed trigger-pulling ability may not be an official job requirement, it probably doesn't hurt, either.Update: A previous version of this article said that Viola owns more than 68% of the Class A common stock of Virtu Financial, as stated in the company's most recent proxy filing. The article has been updated to reflect a comment from Virtu about the percentage of its total stock owned by Viola.

How hospitals, nursing homes keep lethal ‘superbug’ outbreaks secrets - Reuters

ROSWELL, New Mexico – The outbreak started in January 2014.

That’s when a resident of the Casa Maria nursing home here was diagnosed with Clostridium difficile, a highly contagious and potentially deadly “superbug” that plagues hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities.

By the end of February, six more Casa Maria residents were suffering from the infection, characterized by fever, abdominal cramps and violent diarrhea.

Under New Mexico regulations, healthcare facilities must report a suspected outbreak of C. difficile to the state Health Department within 24 hours.

But Casa Maria staff did not contact authorities until March 4, 2014, according to the Health Department report on its investigation of the outbreak, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. By then, nine of the nursing home’s 86 residents had active infections.

Still, Casa Maria downplayed the emergency. The employee who contacted the authorities asked for information on how to handle “a few cases of C. difficile,” according to the report, but “stated it was not an outbreak.” When a Health Department staffer called Casa Maria the next day to follow up, the nursing home again denied it had an outbreak.

By June, the outbreak was over. Fifteen residents had been infected, and eight were dead. The public was never informed — until now.

Superbug gallery: A most unwanted list

“The medical profession should have been able to pick up that it was C. diff and notified the community,” said Ernie Lopez, manager of a local fast-food restaurant.

His mother, Della Baker, entered Casa Maria in December 2013, after three hospital stays for severe diarrhea and a stroke that had paralyzed her left side and rendered her mute.

Several weeks after Baker arrived at Casa Maria, nurses told Lopez that his mother’s unrelenting diarrhea was caused by C. difficile.

New Mexico health officials, citing privacy laws, declined to say whether Baker caught the infection at Casa Maria or was one of several infected patients that investigators found had been transferred to the nursing home from five other healthcare facilities in New Mexico and Texas.

Baker died on March 17, 2014, age 95.

The outbreak and the way it was handled expose what a Reuters investigation found to be dangerous flaws in U.S. efforts to control the spread of superbug infections. An examination of cases across the country reveals a system that protects the healthcare facilities where superbugs thrive, while leaving patients, their families and the broader public ignorant of potentially deadly threats.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are sickened and tens of thousands die from infections by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and C. difficile, a pathogen linked to long-term antibiotic use. Timely reporting of outbreaks of these infections is essential to stopping the spread of disease and saving lives, public health experts and patient advocates say.

Yet the United States lacks a unified nationwide system for reporting and tracking outbreaks. Instead, a patchwork of state laws and guidelines, inconsistently applied, tracks clusters of the deadly infections that the federal government 15 years ago labeled a grave threat to public health.

IN THE DARK: Della Baker was one of eight people who died during an outbreak of superbug infections at Casa Maria nursing home in Roswell, New Mexico, in 2014. REUTERS/Handout

As a result, the United States has no way to count the deadly spikes in infections that hit the nation. Reuters, drawing on reports from 29 state health departments, has assembled one of the most comprehensive counts yet - identifying at least 300 superbug outbreaks around the nation from 2011 to 2016. The number of people affected was impossible to determine because many reports didn’t include a count of the infected or the dead.

PROTECTIVE SECRECY

To get an idea of how the states are handling the problem, Reuters filed public-records requests with all 50 states to obtain data and details on reported outbreaks of superbug infections in healthcare facilities over the past five years.

In all, 29 states provided at least some information on individual outbreaks. Many of the rest said they either had no outbreaks during the period or were barred by law from releasing the information. Reuters filled in gaps by asking states for additional information and scouring academic literature.

Most states require that hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities report suspected outbreaks of infectious disease, drug-resistant or otherwise, within one business day or less of identifying the problem so that health officials can intervene to halt their spread.

But while they require that outbreaks be reported, most states do not provide an explicit definition of the term. Instead, they leave it to the healthcare providers to determine when they are experiencing an increase in a particular infection beyond the usual number. That approach assumes that medical practitioners will know what’s normal in their facilities and gives them wide latitude in deciding when, or even whether, to report.

Dr Susan Huang, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, said the system for identifying outbreaks relies too heavily on staff members’ interpretation of what seems unusual. “Why should anyone be reading this by hand, by eyeball and by gut check?” said Huang, who has developed a software program with Harvard University researchers to identify outbreaks. “People haven’t put real effort into this area.”

St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, first recognized it had a “problem” on Sept. 10, 2014, according to a state investigation report. It then waited three weeks to notify health officials of a C. difficile outbreak that infected as many as 15 of its patients, three of whom died. Nevada requires that suspected outbreaks be reported “immediately,” according to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services.

Kimisha Causey, the department’s hospital-acquired-infections coordinator, declined to discuss details of the case. She did say, however, that St. Mary’s was late in reporting the outbreak. “You’ll find that in every state,” she said. “Facilities don’t want the state involved.”

A St. Mary’s spokeswoman said the hospital “did not submit the data late, in fact it was submitted within the standard we have per our internal policies.”

When a state does get involved, punishment is rare to nonexistent. At least 36 states are able to impose civil or criminal penalties, ranging from fines of up to $1,000 to jail time, for failure to properly report outbreaks. Yet not one of those 36 states cited an instance in the past five years when penalties were used.

In the New Mexico outbreak, Casa Maria waited until 10 percent of its patients were infected before contacting officials. Still, the state Health Department did not fault the nursing home for the delay. “Casa Maria appropriately contacted the department as soon as they identified a cluster of C. difficile cases to ensure that they were taking all necessary precautions,” said Paul Rhien, the department’s communications director.

Rhien said state officials have the power to fine facilities, revoke their licenses or even refer individuals for criminal prosecution if they fail to respond properly to an outbreak. The department did not penalize Casa Maria because, despite the 24-hour rule, authorities concluded that the nursing home reported the cases on time.

State investigators also found that medical charts were available for just six of the eight Casa Maria patients who died during the outbreak, and that poor communication between Casa Maria and the five facilities that transferred infected patients to it probably contributed to the outbreak. Rhien said all the facilities involved acted properly.

In a statement emailed to Reuters, Casa Maria said it appropriately notified the state Health Department of the infections and provided effective treatment.

Secrecy enshrouds outbreak reporting. More than a third of states are barred by law from disclosing the location of an outbreak, or in some cases, even that one occurred.

ALARMING SPIKE: Berkeley Medical Center alerted West Virginia authorities after nine patients tested positive for Klebsiella pneumoniae (shown here being cultured in the hospital’s lab). Most of the 40 infections in the outbreak were traced to a local nursing home, Heartland of Martinsburg. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

“You want to say, ‘Don’t take your mom or dad here.’ ”

Angie Gray, Berkeley County Health Department

Many state health officials say disclosing information about outbreaks to the public or punishing facilities risks dissuading hospitals and nursing homes from reporting. They say they see themselves as collaborators with healthcare facilities.

“We do not behave like punishers, we behave like helpers,” said Dr Raoult Ratard, state epidemiologist for the Louisiana Office of Public Health. Louisiana law mandates that information about outbreaks not be released to the public.

NO PROBLEM HERE

Even so, the collaborative approach often fails the public. Reuters found instances in which, even without the risk of penalties, healthcare facilities didn’t report outbreaks.

Twenty-one patients were infected with drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii at St. Anthony’s Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri, from 2008 to 2011, according to a hospital spokesman. The microbe is a particular scourge of hospitals and nursing homes. St. Anthony’s took special steps to eradicate the bug, the spokesman said, but didn’t think the number of cases warranted reporting. Missouri defines an outbreak as illnesses “in excess of normal expectancy.”

Richard Armbruster, a 78-year-old former minor-league baseball pitcher, died two days after he tested positive for the infection while in St. Anthony’s for hip-replacement surgery in 2009.

“You know I’m so angry that they KNEW this bacteria was floating around their hospital in 2008!!!” his daughter, Amy Fix, wrote in an email after Reuters told her about the other cases. “Had that been reported to the authorities and the story picked up by the media, there is NO WAY we would’ve allowed my Dad to have his surgery there.”

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services mandates that hospitals and long-term care facilities participating in the huge government insurance programs provide all necessary medical information when a patient is being transferred. However, the state outbreak reports Reuters reviewed showed that hospitals and nursing homes often do not alert each other when they transfer an infected patient, which can allow contagion to spread among multiple locations.

In Ohio, at least 22 patients were infected and seven died this year when an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii spread through a hospital and seven long-term care facilities. The facilities frequently failed to warn each other when transferring infected patients. The public was never notified. Nor were the infected patients or their families told of the outbreak.

Jeanette Corey, whose 79-year-old father was the seventh to die, said hospital staff told her only that he had a mysterious infection.

“They were going around two weeks saying they don’t know what it is,” Corey said. “And it doesn’t dawn on someone to tell me,” she said, that “there was an outbreak of this bacteria going on – and that people had died?”

IDEAL TARGETS

As Reuters reported in September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national public health monitor, lacks regulatory power to track superbug deaths. It also lacks the authority to enforce outbreak reporting. Instead, it sometimes assists states with their outbreak investigations, a spokesman said, but each state decides which diseases must be reported.

Long-term care facilities — nursing homes, rehab centers and the like — are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks. A Reuters analysis of death certificates found that from 2003 to 2014, annual superbug-related deaths at long-term care facilities increased 62 percent, from about 1,400 to almost 2,300.

Patients in these facilities are ideal superbug targets — the chronically ill, the very old, and anyone else with a compromised immune system. Collected under one roof, these people are easy prey. New Mexico’s investigation report on Casa Maria, for instance, noted that C. difficile was not the sole cause of death of anyone in the outbreak, but was one of often many contributing factors.

In its emailed statement, Casa Maria said: “All C. Diff infections were resolved within two weeks and there were no deaths as a result of the C. Diff infection.”

A MIXED BAG

State outbreak reports often lack basic information, such as how many people were affected, the source of the outbreak, or when it began or ended. In 16 states, the name of the facility must be removed from the report by law before it is released.

In West Virginia, a local hospital alerted the Berkeley County Health Department in January 2011 that nine patients had tested positive for carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae. A joint investigation by the county and state health departments uncovered more cases. The authorities tracked most of the infections to patients transferred from a single long-term care facility, identified only as “LTCF A” in outbreak reports.

Even as the outbreak spread, health officials were prohibited by state law from publicly identifying the facility.

“I can tell you it was very hard to me to not to shout it out,” said Angie Gray, a public health nurse at the Berkeley County Health Department, which monitored the outbreak. “You want to say, ‘Don’t take your mom or dad here.’ ”

Using other information in the report, Reuters identified “LTCF A” as Heartland of Martinsburg, one of the largest nursing homes in the rural northeast corner of the state. The hospital that reported the outbreak was Berkeley Medical Center

Among those infected was Harold P. Lewis of Arden, West Virginia. Lewis had a urinary tract infection when Heartland transferred him to Berkeley Medical Center, where he tested positive for the Klebsiella superbug in February 2011.

“I had never heard of that disease in my life,” said Marjorie Lewis, his widow. “They said it came from unsanitary conditions.” The hospital and nursing home bickered over which was responsible, she recalled: “They passed the buck back and forth.”

SOUNDS STRANGE: Marjorie Lewis says she had never heard of the Klebsiella superbug until her husband, Harold, contracted it during an outbreak at his nursing home in West Virginia. State law prohibits disclosure of the names of facilities where outbreaks occur. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

Heartland had no infection-prevention officer for 9 months. Hand-washing stations were scarce. Up to four patients shared a single bathroom.

Lewis was sickened but survived. Marjorie said she transferred him to another nursing home after he fell out of his wheelchair and broke a leg. His health continued to deteriorate, she said, and he died in 2013, age 80.

She sued Heartland over the fall and “numerous urinary tract infections” that the lawsuit alleged he contracted while living there. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

A state investigation found that Heartland had no infection-prevention officer for nine months. Though signs warned staff to take contact precautions with certain patients, there were no gloves, masks or gowns nearby, and hand-washing stations were few and far between, the report said. As many as four patients shared a single bathroom.

The state Bureau for Public Health did not penalize Heartland. The facilities involved in the outbreak “worked to stop the spread of disease,” said bureau spokesman Toby Wagoner.

MAPPING THE SPREAD

At the state’s behest, Heartland began collecting cultures on its patients during the outbreak and sent them for testing to Berkeley Medical. Berkeley Medical also began testing all patients transferred from Heartland on admission.

Berkeley Medical lab manager Tambry Harvey said she had a floor plan of Heartland that she used to track the superbug’s spread from room to room. “It started with three patients, it turned into 11, and by the time I was done, the list was this long,” she said, waving toward a printout taped to a nearby wall that was nearly two feet long.

As of 2013, Harvey said, the lab had identified 40 patients with the superbug, including one who died, and 61 carriers – people who had no symptoms but could infect others. Most had been patients at Heartland, she said.

That year – more than two years into the outbreak – a resurgence of infections prompted the county to stop new admissions to Heartland for several days. Public health staff worked with the facility to improve infection control procedures. “That was considered an extreme measure, and it certainly got their attention,” said Dr Diana Gaviria, Berkeley County health officer at the time.

During the outbreak, Heartland of Martinsburg was owned by HCR ManorCare, one of the largest nursing-home chains in the country. The company sold Heartland in 2015 to Stonerise Healthcare, which changed Heartland’s name to Clary Grove.

HCR ManorCare said: “We became aware of an issue in our center in 2011 and aggressively addressed it.” HCR’s owner, the giant private equity firm Carlyle Group, declined to comment.

PASSING IT AROUND

Reuters documented cases in which infected patients were transferred, sometimes multiple times, without any of the receiving facilities being notified. In some cases, the transferring facility knew of the infections. In others, it was unaware.

KEEPING MUM: Julie McCray, the infection prevention manager at Adena Regional Medical Center in Chillicothe, Ohio, battled a deadly superbug outbreak this year. The hospital did not alert patients or the public. REUTERS/Paul Vernon

Adena Regional Medical Center did not contact health officials until after the count had hit 9 infections and 5 deaths.

Bungled handoffs were the issue from January through September this year as a deadly Acinetobacter baumannii infection swept through healthcare facilities in three counties in south-central Ohio.

Staff at Adena Regional Medical Center in Chillicothe detected the superbug on an incoming transfer patient in January, said Julie McCray, the infection prevention manager there. Two more cases were detected on admission the next month. More appeared over the next couple of months.

McCray said nursing homes regularly failed to notify the hospital when sending patients with confirmed drug-resistant infections. By the time hospital staff discovered the information buried in the patient’s record or through lab tests, the bug might have spread.

She acknowledged, too, that while the hospital usually gave notice to the receiving facility when transferring an infected patient out, “sometimes it was missing.”

McCray didn’t contact local public health officials until late May, after the count had swelled to nine infections and five deaths. Ohio requires notice within one business day of an outbreak, which it defines as “above the expected” number of infections. McCray said she didn’t consider the case reportable until three patients died within two weeks in May.

Her move prompted an Ohio Department of Health investigation. It found that the same A. baumannii strain had spread through seven nursing homes, as well as Adena, and confirmed what McCray had suspected: That nursing homes were transferring infected patients without alerting the receiving facilities.

Jeanette Corey’s father, David Houser, had been in and out of the hospital and nursing homes for multiple ailments, when he was transferred to Adena in July with a suspected case of bacterial pneumonia. The nursing home he came from was Heartland of Chillicothe, owned by HCR ManorCare – the same company that owned Heartland of Martinsburg in West Virginia during that outbreak.

Corey said hospital staff told her they didn’t know what kind of infection her father had. And, she said, they never mentioned that the hospital was in the midst of an A. baumannii outbreak.

A. baumannii can cause pneumonia, but McCray said medical records show Houser wasn’t tested for the superbug until Aug. 4, the day he died. Three days later, lab results confirmed the infection. The hospital didn’t wait for those results to complete Houser’s death certificate. Cause of death: “Congestive heart failure.” Adena confirmed that Houser was the seventh patient to die in the outbreak.

McCray said she left the decision of whether to inform patients and the community about the outbreak to health officials because the hospital was not the only source of the infections. “Was it our role to tell them or the health department’s?” she said.

An Ohio Department of Health spokeswoman said the outbreak wasn’t made public because “there are no national public health guidelines suggesting public notices in such instances.”

Adena Regional Medical Center and the nursing homes involved in the outbreak agreed at a Dec. 16 meeting to use a new form to alert other facilities when transferring infected patients, McCray said.

It wasn’t the only recent A. baumannii outbreak Ohio kept under wraps.

In the summer of 2015, three patients fell ill and one died at Galion Community Hospital, two hours north of Adena. Last winter, an hour north of Adena, a dozen patients fell ill and three died at Mount Carmel West. Adena was in the dark.

“That would have been good to know,” McCray said.

PASSED AROUND: The superbug outbreak in south-central Ohio this year spread among seven nursing homes and Adena Regional Medical Center (left) as infected patients were transferred without the receiving facility being notified of the bug; Jeanette Corey (right) says no one told her that her father, David Houser, was a victim of the outbreak. REUTERS/Paul Vernon/Jay LaPrete

Meet the Startup Trying to Reinvent Food Delivery - TIME Business

Meet the Startup Trying to Reinvent Food Delivery Posted: 22 Dec 2016 08:29 AM PST For many New York City office workers, an honest lunch break is a phenomenon long near extinction. Taking a half-hour — or, the horror, a full hour away from work to chow down is a rare luxury. It’s natural, then, that New York is home to one of the best food delivery scenes in the world. With apps like Grubhub and Seamless, New Yorkers can order whatever cuisine their heart desires on a given day, only taking time away from their desks to meet the delivery worker in the downstairs lobby. Yet as incredible as it is to easily get anything from Crab Rangoon to a meatball sub with a few taps of an app, food delivery isn’t perfect. Meal and packaging quality can vary wildly. Timing can be a crapshoot. And as any seasoned New Yorker knows, there are some foods you just don’t order for delivery — like sushi on a hot summer day. After all, most restaurants view delivery as a secondary revenue stream to augment money made from sit-down eaters. It’s not their primary objective. The opposite is true at Maple, a New York restaurant startup that has spent nearly two years working to perfect food delivery. Unlike rivals like Seamless, which offers existing restaurants a platform for digital ordering, Maple runs the “full stack” restaurant experience — meaning it has its own apps, kitchens (five “neighborhood kitchens” in Manhattan, plus a commissary in Brooklyn), delivery staff and so on. The daily menu, which has some rotating options and some customer-favorite staples, is designed with portability at top of mind. The back-end software built in-house tracks orders, cooks and delivery workers, seeking to optimize the entire operation via artificial intelligence and cloud computing. And most strikingly, there is no sit-down location. This is The Internet Restaurant. “For us, the entire process is about doing delivery really well, and doing it with ingredients you can’t get anywhere else,” says Caleb Merkl, co-founder and CEO at Maple. His firm has raised $25 million from investors like David Chang, founder of the Momofuku group and an icon of the New York food scene. When Maple first launched, its delivery range was limited to Manhattan’s Financial District, a densely packed and mostly commercial neighborhood at the island’s southernmost tip. Marketing was largely through word-of-mouth, with the company’s logo proudly displayed on the bags that sit on workers’ desks as they eat, inviting inquires from curious officemates. (That’s a drawback compared to brick-and-mortar restaurants, whose locations serve as massive advertisements for themselves.) The firm’s delivery zone has since expanded to everywhere below 14th street, plus large swaths of midtown. I first heard of Maple through a co-worker several months ago. But I didn’t try it for myself until a particularly busy day this past November. The app is smooth and visually engaging, with food photography worthy of a glossy magazine. Seeking a flavorful vegetarian option, I went for the General Tso’s Tofu, which cost $11 plus about a dollar in tax. (Maple once charged a flat fee for meals and delivery and discouraged tips, but it has since added a surcharge to boost delivery worker pay and benefits.) I picked a delivery window of 12:20-12:40, threading the needle between two meetings. The meal arrived at the latter end of that range but still within the goal posts, along with several other Maple packages for delivery in my building, no doubt a result of the company’s efficiency-seeking software. Akshay Navle, Maple co-founder and chief operating officer, says the technology underpinning his company makes the whole operation possible. “The reason we’re so tech-enabled is that it allows us to do better food, and to get it to the most people possible,” says Navle. “If there was a way to do this without tech, we would certainly look at it. But we don’t believe that’s true.” To be sure, Maple, which is not currently profitable, has plenty of competition. There’s the aforementioned Seamless, but also similar services like UberEATS, the car-hailing service’s food-delivery platform, and Postmates, a delivery service that offers food and other products. While models differ — the other firms offer delivery from a range of restaurants, whereas Maple is a restaurant unto itself — hungry consumers might not know the difference. There’s also a cautionary tale in the form of Munchery, a California startup that, like Maple, also runs the “full stack,” but has reportedly suffered from food waste and other issues despite raising more than three times the amount in Maple’s coffers. And unlike “sharing economy” darlings like Uber, Maple is dependent on its own labor, meaning it has to consider minimum wage laws, benefits, overtime pay and other regulatory matters. Maple’s slow-and-steady approach to growth, a welcome reprieve from Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality, might help it deal with any problems before they grow out of hand. That said, Merkl and his team certainly have big long-term ambitions. He’s already thinking about how Maple’s model might move outside the city and into the suburbs, where success would require a different approach. Dinner options, a recent addition to Maple’s menu, may be part of the solution. “Forty-eight percent of dinner meals purchased from a restaurant today are eaten at home,” says David Portalatin, a food industry analyst at research firm NPD. So it’s easy to see some kind of pickup-only restaurant working well for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd picking up family dinner on their way home from the office. And as urbanites flock to the burbs in search of space and cheaper living, they might welcome food options beyond Applebee’s. My tip? Try the General Tso’s.

Harvard professor says there are 'grave concerns' about Donald Trump's mental stability - Independent

'An apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality leads us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office'
Three leading professors of psychiatry have written to Barack Obama to express their “grave concern” over Donald Trump’s mental stability.

In the letter addressed to the US president, doctors from Harvard Medical School and the University of California have urged him to order a “full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation” before the President-elect takes office in January.

The group said it could not speculate on a diagnosis, but Mr Trump’s “grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to criticism” led them to believe he was unfit for office.

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“Professional standards do not permit us to venture a diagnosis for a public figure whom we have not evaluated personally,” the letter signed by Judith Herman, Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher, and published by the Huffington Post, reads.

“Nevertheless, his widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office.”

In August, President Obama questioned Mr Trump's judgement and temperament and called him “unfit to serve as president.”

Michael Moore calls for protests and civil disobedience to stop Donald Trump before Electoral College votes

“I said so last week and he keeps on proving it. The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job,” he said.

“There has to come a point at which you say somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn’t have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world because a lot of people depend on the White House getting stuff right.”

According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), there are nine criteria for “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” - with a diagnosis being offered if an individual has five or more of the listed qualities.

The APA summarise the condition as: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.”

This is not the first time mental health professionals have weighed in on Mr Trump’s suitability for office.

In June, Atlantic published a psychologist’s findings that Mr Trump suffered from "narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity".

Mr Trump's well-documented "no-holds-barred" approach to the US presidency has led many to question his diplomatic suitability.

Will Russia’s 'act of war' against US democracy bring Trump down?

The real-estate mogul regularly takes to Twitter to post provocative statements aimed at his rivals, often breaking with long-established foreign policy protocol.

On Saturday, he accused China of “stealing” in a tweet that caused an immediate backlash from Beijing.

Initially misspelling "unprecedented," Mr Trump tweeted: "China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act."

He later deleted and then reposted the tweet to correct the spelling.

China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2016

In response, China accused Washington of "hyping up" the issue.

APA protocol means medical professionals should not diagnose individuals they have not personally treated.

The so-called "Goldwater Rule" was brought in after Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate in the 1960’s sued Fact magazine for libel after it asked 12,000 psychiatrists whether he was “psychologically fit” to be president - 1,189 answered “no”.

Why Millennials Need to Save Twice as Much as Boomers Did - TIME

Why Millennials Need to Save Twice as Much as Boomers Did Posted: 21 Dec 2016 07:47 AM PST Don’t be fooled by the stock market’s recent gains—or even its long impressive recovery from the financial crisis. We have been in a low-return environment since the Internet bubble popped at the turn of the century, and there is little reason to believe that will change anytime soon. Retirement savers cannot count on the markets to do the heavy lifting for them. They must save more—a lot more, according to a report from BlackRock, an asset manager. The old rule was saving 10% to 15% of pay. But Millennials will need to save 25% of pay for 40 years to get the same result that was available to boomers saving half that much, BlackRock concludes. “Our hope is that people take action now to get the benefit of compounding over time,” says Anne Ackerley, head of BlackRock’s U.S. and Canada defined contribution group. The BlackRock estimate echoes an analysis from Nerdwallet that found Millennials must save 22% of pay to afford a comfortable retirement. These are big numbers. Young workers currently save about 6% of pay. Taking that up to 22% to 25%, including an employer match, is probably out of the question in the near future. Young people tend to have outsized housing costs and many student loans. That’s okay, Ackerley says. The 25% isn’t set in stone; it’s just a math result that came from looking at past results and estimating future returns. These lofty required savings rates also spring from an assumption that there will be no Social Security, which probably is not the case. Still, the point is a good one: boomers lived through an unusually robust period for market gains that likely will not recur during Millennials’ saving years. Young adults need to save twice as much to get a similar result. If you have a short memory you may wonder what the heck Blackrock is taking about. The Standard & Poor’s 500 is up 6% since the election and has more than tripled from the financial crisis low. But since the end of a long bull market in 2000 the S&P 500 including dividends is up just an average annual 4.3%, or 2.2% after inflation. BlackRock foresees those kinds of average returns as far as the eye can see. Why? The working-age population is slowing in the developed world, which leads to less demand for things, BlackRock found. Economies around the world are slowing, which weighs on corporate profits. And technology is disrupting established industries, slowing expenditures on equipment, labor, real estate and tangible assets. Since 1978, when boomers first started investing in 401(k) plans, a mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds has risen 6.3% a year—a favorable period that allowed boomers who bothered to start saving (many did not) a golden opportunity to prepare for retirement. The 90-year average annual return has been just 5.1%, pointing up the favorable environment boomers enjoyed. Here’s what young adults are up against: BlackRock estimates average annual portfolio growth of just 2.9% going forward. Inflation will also be lower, but not nearly low enough to offset the difficulty of building a nest egg in such an environment. One percentage point of additional returns each year would translate into 25% more total savings over 40 years for a typical Millennial, the firm found. A nest egg would be 58% larger at age 65 with an additional 2 percentage points of yearly return. The projections underscore the need for young people to start saving early, take some risk with stocks, and escalate contributions every year until they are saving at least 15% of pay. Planning to work longer is also a good idea but isn’t always possible. The findings also put pressure on plan administrators to make saving simpler to understand and more difficult for workers to avoid. Among plan changes BlackRock suggests: higher default rates for employee contributions, requiring employees to contribute more to get the full match, auto enrolling older workers in “catch-up” programs that allow them to save more tax deferred, and making loans and early withdrawals more difficult.

Where will the disaffected voters go once they become convinced that the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin have betrayed them? - Independent

If you thought 2016 was a good year for the right, wait until you see 2017

Where will the disaffected voters go once they become convinced that the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin have betrayed them?

Sean O’Grady An awful lot of economics boils down to demographics – the affordability of a modern welfare state being a prominent example – but a surprising amount of politics can also be linked to well-observed demographic trends. An ageing population, of the kind typically found in the West, and especially in Western Europe, is more likely to shift to the right and be more susceptible to the charms of nationalism than one that is young and, often as not, more ethnically mixed and recently arrived on the shores of the “host” nation. Thus it was that the middle aged and older voters – also invariably more prosperous and inclined to vote than their children and grandchildren – won it for Brexit, Trump and a whole car boot sale of radical rightists in elections throughout the Free world this year. With important elections scheduled next year in Italy, the Netherlands, France and Germany, 2016 should be remembered as the year the radical right, tinged sometimes with red or green strains of populism, started to mobilise in earnest.

If anything, it is the young, with smaller savings, renting their flats and looking forward to a tougher economic world of casualised employment, stagnating wages and living standards who have far more to lose from globalisation, leastways in the short term, than their grey-haired fellow citizens. And yet, voting for Remain in Britain, for Hillary in the US and for mainstream social democratic or conservative parties in Europe, they have supported an internationalism the old have grown weary of.

The generation of baby-boomers who enjoyed the best of economic growth after the Second World War, free higher education, rising property values and a generous welfare state and final-salary company pensions are the gloomiest about the state of their nations and the direction they are taking. The French are exceptionally glum, with hardly any rating their country as the best in the world in opinion polls, and overwhelmingly believing that it is going in the wrong direction.

Something, clearly, has gone wrong with the dynamics of democratic politics. It is for another essay another time to survey the wreckage of the social democratic left, especially in Europe, virtually irrelevant in so many places where it was, not so long ago, the natural party of government. Jeremy Corbyn, Francois Hollande and Peer Steinbrueck have led the march out of relevance.

At first glance, the prospects for the right in 2017 – a varied bag at the best of times – are not as rosy as they might be. In Austria the far-right Freedom Party candidate was prevented from becoming the nation’s ceremonial figurehead president, beaten by an avuncular environmentalist. In France all the signs are that Marine Le Pen and the Front National will be stopped by a grand alliance between the mainstream Socialists and Republicans uniting behind a single candidate for the presidency, most probably Francois Fillon or the centrist Emmanuel Macron. In the Netherlands,

Geert Wilders was recently convicted of a race hate crime and leads the most popular party in the country, though it has no chance of governing on its own in the Dutch splintered party system. Alternative fur Deutschland will no doubt make much political capital out of the terror attack in Berlin, but Angela Merkel is most likely to end the year where she began it, leading Germany, Europe and the West towards a safer, more liberal future.

So there will be many sighs of relief in Europe in 2017 as the right is, apparently, beaten back. Yet, hydra-like, the radical right is unlikely to give up and is capable of evolving to capitalise on popular worries about globalisation, economic change, de-industrialisation, sudden waves of migration and the fear of terror – always exaggerated in the minds of worried citizens. In fact, the astonishingly striking thing is how much progress the radical right has made in political life. Groups that a few years ago would be dismissed, as David Cameron once derided Ukip, as a motley crew of fruitcakes and closet racists have become mainstream. They seem authentic. They reflect back voters’ bar-room prejudices and simplicities. They are happy to blame others, especially outsiders and foreign powers, for their nations’ problems.

There is a pattern among so many leaders in democratic or semi-democratic states who have already come to power, or close to it, on a nationalistic agenda to “make their country great again”. The list is long, and in its way impressive: Donald Trump, soon, in the US; Narendra Modi in India; Vladimir Putin in Russia; Viktor Orban in Hungary; Recep Erdogan in Turkey; even Beata Szydło and her Law and Justice Party in Poland. One might even add Nicola Sturgeon and her own soft brand of nationalism in Scotland, as well as all the other separatist movements across the world gradually breaking up old nation states and federations. Even Theresa May had a wobbly moment in her conference speech when she patronised foreigners in Britain as “citizens of nowhere” (angering especially the governor of the Bank of England, an urbane Canadian). All have some degree of nationalism at their core, through it is fair to say that ethnic and religious identity is not always a strong feature of their platforms.

Elsewhere in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and across much of the rest of the world, leaders are happy to make the most of the patriotism, religious fervour and pride of people for their own agendas. ‘Twas always thus, but not so often in the past in such an unpromising economic environment as today.

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The worry for the longer term must be – where will the disaffected voters go once they become convinced that the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin have betrayed them? Will they then reject democracy as a system? When so much ordure is poured over “corrupt” democratic politicians making unsavoury deals in the “swamp”, one should not be so surprised when the voters give up on the whole game. In the UK the resentments over the MPs’ expenses scandals – “duck houses” and the like – are still raw, and eroding faith in politics, almost a decade on from the revelations.

The pattern, then, is of mainstream parties in democracies giving ground, appeasing or losing power to parties of a populist, usually rightist and nationalistic stripe. In undemocratic states, from little Cuba and North Korea to mighty China and Iran, the same impetus is there, the panto villains usually being the Yankees (who may soon once again live up to the neo-imperialist stereotype). Even if the Five Star Movement in Italy (led by a former comedian), Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders don’t win their elections outright, their voices will be loud enough to distort and reshape conventional politics, and in particular attitudes to the EU, immigration and free trade. None can be counted as forces for good in the world; none can be counted out just because they didn’t win power outright in 2016 or 2017; none should be underestimated.

A world where it can be considered a mercy if a neo-fascistic party “only” wins 30 per cent or 48 per cent of the vote is not a world safe for peace and prosperity. If 2016 proved anything it is that the voters are getting tired and weary of old parties and old solutions. Dangerous stuff.

Volkswagen’s Latest Settlement With the EPA Gives Some Diesel Car Owners a Buyback Option - TIME Business

Volkswagen’s Latest Settlement With the EPA Gives Some Diesel Car Owners a Buyback Option

Posted: 20 Dec 2016 09:35 PM PST

(SAN FRANCISCO) — Volkswagen reached a deal that will give at least some owners of the remaining 80,000 diesel vehicles caught in the company’s emissions cheating scandal the option of a buyback and provide compensation to all of them on top of any repurchase or repairs, U.S. regulators and a federal judge said Tuesday.

The $1 billion settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will give owners of 20,000 3-liter diesel cars the choice of a buyback. The figure does not include additional payments to owners.

Volkswagen believes it can bring the other 60,000 vehicles into compliance with pollution regulations and will not offer a buyback if that’s the case, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said in San Francisco.

The deal includes $225 million the German automaker will contribute to an environmental fund to offset the cars’ excess pollution, Cynthia Giles of the EPA said in a conference call with reporters.

Additional compensation for car owners will be substantial, according to the judge, but he did not provide a figure and said the sides still had more work to do.

“I am optimistic the parties will resolve the remaining issues,” Breyer said, without elaborating on what was left to be done.

Read More: Consumer Reports Says Volkswagen Should Pay Diesel Owners More

The settlement was a major step toward rectifying lawsuits stemming from the global scandal that erupted last year, damaging Volkswagen’s reputation and hurting its sales. The company previously reached a nearly $15 billion deal for 475,000 2-liter diesel cars also programmed to cheat on emissions tests.

Hinrich J. Woebcken, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America Inc., said the agreement announced Tuesday was part of Volkswagen’s “efforts to make things right” for its customers.

“We are committed to earning back the trust of all our stakeholders and thank our customers and dealers in the United States for their patience as the process moves forward,” he said in a statement.

The deal protects the environment “by removing the cars from road and by offsetting harmful emissions that resulted from their cheating,” said Giles with the EPA.

It requires the company to buy back or terminate leases on 2009-2012 Volkswagen Touareg and Audi Q7 diesels. The EPA says it’s unlikely those can be fixed to meet clean-air standards.

For newer 3-liter vehicles — such as the 2013-2016 Volkswagen Touareg, 2013-2015 Audi Q7, 2013-2016 Porsche Cayenne, and 2014-2016 Audi A6 quattro, A7 quattro, A8, A8L and Q5 — a fix is possible, so buybacks won’t be offered.

Giles said the fix should be submitted soon.

The new settlement appears to mirror the terms for the cars with smaller engines. The previous deal gives 2-liter owners the option to have the automaker buy back their vehicle or pay for repairs.

Volkswagen also will pay those owners $5,100 to $10,000 each.

The company has agreed to spend up to $10 billion compensating those consumers. That settlement also includes $2.7 billion for unspecified environmental mitigation and $2 billion to promote zero-emissions vehicles.

Read More: Volkswagen’s Former CEO “Knew About Defeat Device in Early 2014”

The settlements emerged out of lawsuits from car owners and the U.S. Department of Justice after the EPA said Volkswagen had fitted many of its cars with software to fool emissions tests.

The software recognized when the cars were being tested on a treadmill and turned on pollution controls. The controls were turned off when the cars returned to the road. The EPA alleged the scheme let the cars spew up to 40 times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxide, which can cause respiratory problems in humans.

The company has reached a separate $1.2 billion deal with its U.S. dealers and is still facing potentially billions more in fines and penalties and possible criminal charges.

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AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher contributed from Detroit.