Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Bidco ordered to pay family Sh1.1 million after staffer's body found in store

*Judge Joseph Sergon who has ordered BIdco Oil Refineries to pay a family Sh1.1 million in damages following the death of a staff member. Photo/FILE*

The 10 Richest NBA Players of All-Time

1. Michael Jordan

With a net worth of about $1 billion, Michael Jordan is easily the richest NBA player of all-time. After being drafted by the Chicago Bulls during his junior year of college, Michael Jordan went on to lead the Bulls to six national championships. He was named MVP five time and was also a three-time All-Star MVP. At 51 years old, Michael Jordan is still making millions each year in endorsements even though he has long since retired from the NBA.
2. Magic Johnson

source: huffingtonpost.com

Earvin “Magic” Johnson currently has a net worth of $500 million making him second only to Michael Jordan for richest NBA player of all-time. He earned his familiar nickname, Magic, during a high school game where he scored 36 points, had 16 assists and made 16 rebounds. Since retiring from the Los Angeles Lakers in 1991, Magic Johnson has continued to make millions off of his own business investments. He now owns several Starbucks franchises, several movie theaters and has other real estate holdings.
3. Shaquille O’Neal

source: therichest.com

“Shaq” has a net worth of $350 million even though he has been retired from the NBA for a while. Each year he brings in millions of dollars from various endorsements, TV commercials and movies. Shaq started his NBA career with the Orlando Magic, and then he signed what was the biggest NBA contract in history. He moved to the LA Lakers in a deal that paid $120 million for seven years with the Lakers. He retired from the NBA in 20114. LeBron James

source: streetz945.com

Arguably the most famous NBA who has yet to retire, LeBron James is worth $270 million. Because he still has many years left in the NBA, it is expected that he could move up on the list of richest NBA of all-time in the future. He is already making nearly $53 million every year stickily from his endorsements. He has received four MVP awards, and he took the Miami Heat to two national championships that earned him back-to-back Finals MVP awards.
5. Kobe Bryant

source: omgtoplists.com

The 36-year-old Kobe Bryant is in league with LeBron James with a net worth of $270 million. He is currently one of the NBA’s highest paid players. He has spent his entire NBA career with the LA Lakers and has won five national championships with the team.
6. Hakeem Olajuwon

source: zimbio.com

Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon has net worth of about $200 million. Hakeem emigrated to the US from his home country of Nigeria to play basketball for the University of Houston. He drafted to the Houston Rockets in 1984 as the number one draft pick. He retired from the NBA in 2002 after playing for the Toronto Raptors.
7. Grant Hill

source: modernmom.com

Grant Hill makes it into the top 10 richest NBA players of all-time with a net worth of $180 million. He played basketball at Duke for four years before being drafted onto the Detroit Pistons in 1994. He also played for the Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns and the LA Clippers during his NBA career. After the 2012-2013 season, Hill retired from the NBA at age 408. Kevin Garnett

source: weel.com

Kevin Garnett is also worth $180 million. He currently plays for the Brooklyn Nets, but he previously played for the Boston Celtics and the Minnesota Timberwolves. He is still the all-time leading scorer for the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he gained the nickname, “The Franchise”.
9. Tim Duncan

source: formalathletes.com

Although he did not pick up basketball until he got to high school, Tim Duncan has had a successful career so far with a total net worth of $150 million. He began his NBA career in 1997 as the number one draft pick. He was drafted onto the San Antonio Spurs where he still plays today.
10. Gary Payton

source:twitter.com

Coming in at number 10 on the list of the NBA’s all-time richest players is Gary Payton with a net worth of $130 million. Payton is well-known for his rivalry with Michael Jordan and was considered to be one of Jordan’s best defensive opponents. He has been named one of the best all-time point guards and is the only point guard to have received the NBA defensive player of the year award.

Baby girl born in the bathroom of a moving Indian train slips down the toilet but SURVIVES after she is recovered from the tracks

Newborn baby girl fell into a train toilet and landed on the railway tracks
Miracle child survived bumpy arrival and was taken to a local hospital
The mother said she had been left by her husband and is from Nepal

A newborn baby girl fell into a train toilet and landed on the railway tracks after her mother gave birth on a moving train in India.

The baby survived its bumpy arrival and was recovered on the tracks by passengers at Bhojipura railway station in Uttar Pradesh. The mother and her baby have been taken to hospital.

The woman has been identified as Pushpa Devi, who lives in Mohan Nagar Bhagatpur of Kanchanpur district in Nepal.

The baby survived its bumpy arrival and was recovered on the tracks by passengers at Bhojipura railway station in Uttar Pradesh. The mother and her baby have been taken to hospital

The lady was on board the 52204 Tankapur Izzat Nagar train travelling for an eye-check up when she started to feel the start of painful contractions.

Passengers heard screams from the bathroom and found the woman bleeding and in great pain.

She pleaded with the passengers to stop the train and help her, with the passengers immediately pulling the emergency cord to bring the train to a halt.

The infant has been dubbed the 'miracle baby' after it survived falling through the lavatory system and clattering on to the track.

Passengers heard screams from the bathroom and found the woman bleeding and in great pain

Ms Devi later told police that her husband had left her and that she had been forced to support herself by doing odd jobs.

Chandra Mohan Jindal, divisional railway manager for Izzat Nagar division, described how the baby had landed on 'concrete boulders' and was lucky to be alive.

'It is a miracle that the newborn girl, after falling on concrete boulders of the track from such a height, survived,' he told the Times of India.

'The GRP and fellow passengers did a commendable job by immediately rushing both the mother and the child to hospital."

Trump’s effect on Muslim migrant debate reverberates in heartland

By Robert Samuels December 29 at 2:41 PM

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — After the fire, the patrons of Juba Coffee and Restaurant gathered behind yellow police tape and mourned the charred remains of a place they called their own. Dressed in hijabs and tunics and speaking their native language, the Somali refugees said they’d long been comfortable in this overwhelmingly white, Protestant city. But now they were upset and frightened.
“We cannot let them see us angry,” the owner, Abdulaziz Moallin, 36, told his fellow Somalis after the Dec. 8 fire. “We have to be sure they see us as good neighbors. Let’s not try to blame anyone.”
The advice was difficult to follow. The fire, which erupted when someone tossed a 40-ounce Bud Light bottle filled with gasoline into the restaurant, happened hours after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country. Although the motive for the crime was unclear, many of the customers could not help but wonder whether this was the latest attempt in the city to intimidate those who practice Islam.

The echoes of presidential politics and global tragedies are reverberating in the heartland.
Here in Grand Forks, population 60,000, friendliness is advertised with a giant smiley face on a water tower. Residents, descended mostly from Norwegian Lutherans, were accustomed to coexisting with the Muslim refugees who have settled in town over the past decade. But a compounding of events far beyond the city limits — recent terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist extremists, the global refugee crisis and a presidential campaign debate over whether “political correctness” has led the United States to be too welcoming to Muslims — has made both sides increasingly fearful of their neighbors.
After fleeing a decade-long war and remaking their lives in a peaceful, quiet community, Somalis feel they are being looked at with unfair suspicion.
Many locals, meanwhile, have questioned whether the government is spending too much money on a group they think shows little interest in assimilation. And they find themselves wondering whether the people wearing unusual garb and speaking a foreign language will produce a jihadist killer.
“Accepting people is what we do as Americans,” said Myrna Martinson, 65, a retired clerk who was debating the issue over dinner at the Northside Cafe one night this month. “But with the Muslims, we do not know for certain what they will do. ”
At a nearby table, Debra Nesland, 62, a factory inspector eating dinner before her night shift, said she was worried that the fire she had heard about at the local Somali restaurant was a sign that the rhetoric against Muslims had gone too far.
“Everyone is worried about Paris and San Bernardino,” she said. “But the truth is, we had an incident here, too.”
Three miles away, on that same night, nearly 20 Somalis sipped their special blend of strong, sweet tea and chatted at the city’s only other Somali-owned business.
Men complained that teenagers had driven past them shouting ethnic slurs. A week before the fire struck Juba, the words “Go Home, Somalis” had been scrawled on the store’s exterior. The graffiti came with a symbol that a stunned owner and his wife said they could not identify, until the police asked whether they knew what a Nazi was.
“They are telling us they don’t want us here anymore,” said Mohoud Yusuf, a 26-year-old engineering student at the University of North Dakota.
“I blame it on Donald Trump, to be honest,” said Saida Aden, 24, a first-year engineering student. “And the media. Anyone just thinks they can say anything or do anything they want. It’s like the country needs a bogeyman, and it has become us.”
Grand Forks had emerged as a popular destination for refugees. Some settled here with the help of Lutheran Social Services, but hundreds more who had been relocated to other places have moved here, lured by jobs at manufacturing plants and the nearby Air Force base. Young refugees have found opportunities to study at UND.
Most of the refugees here have come from the tiny Asian country of Bhutan.
But locals estimate that about 1,000 have settled in Grand Forks after fleeing Somalia, birthplace of the Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which has attacked targets in Africa and threatened to expand its reach.
Refugee advocates encouraged residents to welcome the newcomers, suggesting they be called “new Americans” to avoid a refugee stigma and sharing statistics showing that the immigrants’ labor participation rate was higher than the state’s residents as a whole.
But over the past few months, disdain has intensified.
As Europe’s migration crisis swelled over the summer, a Change.org petition asking Lutheran Social Services to stop bringing refugees to the state garnered more than 3,000 signatures. Some people in Grand Forks began to question why the Somalis were not doing more to try to fit in, speak English or prevent their children from dropping out of high school.
“People here are a little scared of them,” said Michael Brown, an obstetrician at the university who has served as the city’s mayor for the past 16 years.
“If you don’t fully integrate, what do you do?” Brown asked. “I don’t know. Maybe you deport them.”
Residents became concerned about the local mosque. Some wanted assurance from the city that it was not a breeding ground for terrorists. Others worried the anti-Muslim sentiment might lead to the mosque being attacked. So the city suggested that police officers doing paperwork park their cars in front of the mosque to have a presence and allay fears on both sides.
City officials said they wanted to find a productive way to discuss the refugee relations, but they were not fully sure how to do it. Never before had Grand Forks navigated such a sticky stew of global concerns and local problems.
“We know we’re the best in the nation when it comes to hockey,” said Pete Haga, the city’s community relations officer. “We know we’re the best in Grand Forks at making chocolate-covered potato chips. But we are not sure we can lead the nation on this.”

‘Our questions are legitimate’

At a public hearing in October, the city considered whether it should create a commission for “diversity and inclusion.” Half of the speakers said the city needed to learn how to recognize and appreciate its changing demographics, according to a video recording of the meeting. Others opposed it, vehemently.
“Too much government,” one speaker said on the video.
“We don’t need to learn about the cultures these refugees left behind,” another said.
“This town’s built by white people,” said a third, to some applause. “Not by blacks. Not by Mexicans. Not by Indians.”
Pent-up frustrations in the city were bubbling to the surface, said Terry Bjerke, a Grand Forks City Council member running to unseat Brown for mayor. Some were already upset that UND’s mascot, the Fighting Sioux, was being replaced with the more culturally sensitive Fighting Hawks — and had embraced the anger at the “P.C. police” expressed by presidential candidates Trump and Ben Carson. The campaign had finally given people a license to say how they feel.
“We are sick of it,” Bjerke said. “Our questions are legitimate.”
Bjerke said he was upset that there were no statistics to show whether refugees had been responsible for an increase in robberies and burglaries. With so many refugee students learning English in school, he wondered whether native speakers were losing valuable time from their teachers. Most upsetting, he said, was that the Somalis were not adopting “American customs,” such as playing hockey or eating hot dogs.
Although he condemned attacks on Muslims, Bjerke said they might have been “the cost of doing business” in a country that rightly values free speech.
The week after the public hearing on diversity, Bjerke invited a speaker named Usama Dakdok, an Egyptian Christian, to lecture about the city’s need to contain Islam’s influence. More than 450 attended, watching as Bjerke raised copies of the Constitution and the New Testament in the air and declared, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Asha Amare, 47, who said she came to Grand Forks about nine years ago and thinks she was the first Muslim woman to move to the city, always sensed more intrigue in her culture than anguish about her presence.
When she rode the bus, occasionally people would tug on her hijab and ask whether she was too hot. Conversations with them were always short; they had to be. After eight years, Amare, who grew up speaking Somali, still does not feel entirely comfortable with English.
In September, she and a friend opened the Safari Market. They shipped oils and basmati rice from Minneapolis, placed halal meat in an icebox and stocked up the refrigerators with Somali fruit juice.
Before the first customer could walk through the door, someone wrote “Somali Niggers” on the property, according to local news reports. Amare said they opened anyway because they refused to be scared.
After the fire at Juba, the Somali community was thankful to have the market, which became a new gathering spot. The owners made one adjustment: changing the closing time from 11 p.m. to 8:30, to ensure safety.
Sipping tea, Hamse Hussein, 30, talked with his friends about whether they will fully be accepted in Grand Forks.
“When you came to this country, did they ever tell you aboutAmerican Dream?” Hussein asked.
“Yeah, I heard all the rappers talking about it,” responded Mohammed, 32, who did not feel comfortable giving his last name, because he feared reprisal at his job.
“I’m still waiting for it,” Hussein said, laughing. He works at a local macaroni packaging factory and took auto mechanic classes at the community college. He serves as a translator for the city and has been trying to piece together the money to build a Somali community center.
They struggled to reconcile recent events with the city they thought they knew.
“Before the fire, I used to think 99 percent of Grand Forks people were good people. Now, maybe 96 percent,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s the way things always were. Or if people are just pissed. Or confused.”

‘Let’s talk about the good’

All those emotions went through the owners of Juba. One week after the fire, Moallin and his wife, Ihaam Hassan, walked their family through their wrecked business. Inside was cold and dark. It smelled of rotting meat and burned rubber. The security cameras had melted into the ceiling.
Moallin, Hassan and their four children had come only recently to Grand Forks, in September. They had moved from Minneapolis to build a family restaurant business — a mark of progress in the United States. Now Hassan was spending December searching the Internet and asking friends whether they knew of any jobs, as she did when her family first moved to the United States more than a decade ago.
“There is some fear here because we don’t know if someone will do it again,” said Hassan, 30.
“Let’s talk about the good,” Moallin said.
They recalled that an elderly white man had approached them the morning after the fire and assured them that Christians are peaceful and neighborly. Then there was the church that helped put plywood over the broken windows and the vigil in which 100 people showed up to support them.
As the family surveyed the damage on this afternoon, a relative handed Moallin an iPhone. A news article had stated that Grand Forks police had arrested a suspect named Matthew William Gust and charged him with arson. The 25-year-old had a minor criminal history and a fondness for Bud Light, according to court records.
Gust, who refused to talk to police, could not be reached for comment.
“I am happy they caught someone,” said Moallin, exuding little emotion. As Moallin made his way out of the restaurant, he turned around one last time. The family’s American Dream had turned into a dark cavern, surrounded outside by a blanket of white snow.
“I just want to know why he did this,” he said, his eyes beginning to glaze. “Why? This place was beautiful.”

Alarm Spreads in Brazil Over a Virus and a Surge in Malformed Infants

*Björn Höcke Credit Julian Stratenschulte/dpa, via Associated Press*

Berlin — GERMANY is not lacking in right-wing sentiment these days, but most people are careful about how they deploy their anti-immigrant rhetoric. And then there’s Björn Höcke.

Last month Mr. Höcke, a leading figure of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, gave an openly racist speech on the “differing reproductive strategies” of Africans and Europeans. It was not the first time he had drawn on National Socialist themes, but this time he caused uproar, even in his own party, which has asked him to resign his membership.

Whatever happens to Mr. Höcke, though, his willingness to use overtly racist language has revived an age-old fear in Germany. He is, by all accounts, a typical German, an upright middle-class citizen — what we call a “Biedermann.” They are the core of our national self-perception. If they turn to the dark side, what does that say about Germany?

For years, racism and hate in Germany mostly came with clear social markers. In the minds of most, racists wore their heads shaved, feet heavily booted and arms rune-tattooed. They lived on the fringes of society, often in public housing, and made their living illicitly.

Not so Mr. Höcke. As a young man, he was a member of “Junge Union,” the youth organization of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats. He’s a high school history teacher on leave and a married father of four. He lives in the countryside and is invariably well dressed, though never in a showy way.

Is this the new face of hate in Germany?

The word “Biedermann” is hard to translate; it has a long and arborescent cultural history. The word goes back to the literary figure Gottlieb Biedermaier, invented in the late 1840s by intellectuals as a parody of the docility and fatuity of that conservative era’s middle class.

The fictional Gottlieb Biedermaier, just like Björn Höcke, was a countryside teacher. There’s one critical difference, though: Biedermaier was no misanthrope. His inventors portrayed him as utterly apolitical; his self-expression was limited to publishing bad poetry passionately praising the growth of potatoes.

Still, from the beginning, Biedermaier — and the type he embodied, the “Biedermann” — was suspected of bigotry. In his tidiness and his conformity, there seemed to be the seed of compulsion, the sort of addiction to stability and continuity that transforms into aggression when threatened.

In postwar Germany, Biedermänner were (and still are) seen as an enabling factor of Hitler’s coming to power. At the same time, the postwar generations of middle-class Germans proved reliably centrist, slightly conservative but also committed to the social-market state and its pacifist constitution. They accepted the millions of Turks who arrived in the 1950s and ’60s, and even the Balkan refugees of the ’90s.

Now that may be changing, once again. Everyone is asking, Is Björn Höcke unique? Does he stand for something? Will he light us on fire? Or is he just a lone nut?

Online, there appear to be many like him, and worse. Among pictures of cats dozing on window sills looking onto neat gardens, German “Biedermänner” (and “Bieder-frauen”) are indulging in violent fantasies of “rebuilding” concentration camps, of killing immigrants with hand grenades, axes, flames.

Who the haters really are, however, we don’t know; there are no representative studies, just random hints. Since the summer, several Germans were fined or fired after hateful comments they posted online were reported by the news media or exposed by activists. Some of them certainly seem like “Biedermänner”: a nurse for the elderly from Thuringia, a trainee at Porsche in Austria. But on closer inspection, many already had clear extremist affinities: They had “liked” bands and shared videos associated with the far right long before the current mass migration movement started.

Accordingly, many sociologists tend to see the recent anti-immigrant demonstrations and the rise in hateful comments as merely an increase in the visibility of pre-existing racist thought, rather than as a sign of changing mentalities.

The same somewhat ambiguous impression is reflected in the polls. New surveys show support for the Alternative für Deutschland stagnating at around 8 to 10 percent. And many of its supporters are not racist per se, but merely fed up with the major parties.

None of this allays Germany’s fears. It is the lack of a clear diagnosis that is particularly disconcerting. It’s like an unlocatable ache, a pain without a name that makes you edgy.

In fact, there’s a hidden risk. If we allow people like Mr. Höcke to give “Biedermänner” a bad name, Germany could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing them to the far right and destabilizing German politics. As laughable as Biedermann might have been to his inventors, as dangerous as he might have appeared to postwar reformers, Germany can’t do without him.

Anna Sauerbrey is an editor on the opinion page of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and a contributing opinion writer.

Elison Wesley, 10, and his 2-month-old brother, José, in Poco Fundo, Brazil. José was born with microcephaly, a rare disorder in which an infant's head is unusually small. A mosquito-borne virus is suspected of causing a surge in microcephaly in Brazil. Credit Felipe Dana/Associated Press

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A little-known virus spread by mosquitoes is causing one of the most alarming health crises to hit Brazil in decades, officials here warn: thousands of cases of brain damage, in which babies are born with unusually small heads.

Many pregnant women across Brazil are in a panic. The government, under withering criticism for not acting sooner, is urging them to take every precaution to avoid mosquito bites. One official even suggested that women living in areas where mosquitoes are especially prevalent postpone having children.

“If she can wait, then she should,” said Claudio Maierovitch, director of the department of surveillance of communicable diseases at Brazil’s health ministry.

The alarm stems from a huge surge in babies with microcephaly (my-kroh-SEF-uh-lee), a rare, incurable condition in which their heads are abnormally small. Brazilian officials have registered at least 2,782 cases this year, compared with just 147 in 2014 and 167 the year before.

At least 40 of the infants have recently died, and some Brazilian researchers warn that cases could multiply in the months ahead. Those babies who survive may face impaired intellectual development for the rest of their lives.

Brazilian researchers say that an obscure mosquito-borne virus that made its way to the country only recently — Zika — is to blame for the sudden increase in brain damage among infants.

But other virologists caution that more testing is needed to prove the dangerous link between the virus and brain damage, leaving the full extent of the threat to the country, and the hemisphere, unclear.

“Why this may have happened in Brazil and not elsewhere is at this stage difficult to answer,” said Alain Kohl, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who studies Zika.

“Perhaps it was never properly registered in other areas, or the situation in Brazil is indeed different,” he added, citing the possibility that the link between Zika and microcephaly could be related to particular strains of the virus.

The Zika virus has already reached several countries in Latin America, including Mexico, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that it could spread in parts of the United States as well. There have already been cases diagnosed in the United States, in travelers who visited affected countries, and the C.D.C. expects these instances to increase.

“I cried for a month when I learned how God is testing us,” said Gleyse Kelly da Silva, 27, a toll road attendant in the city of Recife in northeast Brazil, describing how an ultrasound exam had detected microcephaly in the seventh month of her pregnancy with her daughter, Maria Giovanna, born in October.

Just a few months earlier, Ms. da Silva had sought medical attention after experiencing some of Zika’s symptoms: fever, joint pain and a red rash.

“I had never heard of Zika or microcephaly,” said Ms. da Silva, the mother of three other children. “Now I just pray that my daughter can endure life with this misfortune.”

No one knows precisely when the Zika virus made the leap to Brazil from its place of origin in Africa. Some researchers say it could have arrived during the 2014 World Cup, when Brazil welcomed travelers from around the globe. Others think the virus may have come during a canoe race weeks later, when paddlers from French Polynesia, the site of a recent Zika outbreak, arrived in Rio de Janeiro.

Researchers, alert to the rapid increase in cases, say that Zika’s spread to Brazil reflects how easily viruses are jumping from one part of the planet to another.

They are particularly worried that the disease is wreaking havoc in a region where the population has not encountered it before, and that climate change may be allowing viruses like Zika to thrive in new domains.

The Brazilian government has stopped short of officially advising women not to get pregnant, but confusion and fear are spreading along with the virus.

“The situation is incredibly frightening,” said Andreza Mireli Silva, 22, a worker in a shoe factory in Sergipe State in northeast Brazil who is seven months pregnant. She said she was trying to avoid mosquito bites by wearing long pants despite the heat of the Southern Hemisphere summer and applying insect repellent every three hours.

Zika, named for the forest in Uganda where scientists discovered it in the 1940s, often goes unnoticed in the people it infects and was not considered especially life-threatening before spreading to Brazil. But the advance of the virus here is focusing scrutiny on the resilience of a worrisome pest: Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries Zika and other diseases, among them yellow fever and chikungunya.

“Brazil offers the ideal conditions for Zika to spread so quickly,” said Ana Maria Bispo de Filippis, a leader of the research team that has linked Zika to microcephaly. The country, she added, has “a susceptible population in which the majority of people never had contact with the disease.”

Before Zika’s arrival, Brazil was already grappling with a much deadlier epidemic of dengue, another virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. Brazil had nearly 1.6 million cases of dengue in 2015, according to estimates from the health ministry, up from 569,000 in 2014. At least 839 people have died from dengue in Brazil this year, an 80 percent increase from the previous year. Some health officials say that changes in weather and rainfall may be behind the surge.

Brazil waged war on the Aedes aegypti mosquito for decades during the 20th century before a vaccine was developed for yellow fever. Health agents deployed across the country to destroy habitats like water barrels and other open water sources where the mosquitoes thrive. The authorities even declared victory against the pest in 1955.

But the mosquito re-emerged in Brazil in the late 1960s, outpacing eradication campaigns. Now, at a time when President Dilma Rousseff’s beleaguered government is under fire over corruption, an economic crisis and its handling of the surge in dengue cases, the spread of Zika is unleashing even more criticism.

After virologists identified a Zika outbreak in May in northeast Brazil, the health minister at the time, Arthur Chioro, played down the discovery.

“Zika virus doesn’t worry us,” he told reporters, calling it a “benign disease.”

After that dismissive response, public health experts say that the political upheaval in Brazil — in which Ms. Rousseff is fighting impeachment proceedings — weakened efforts to respond to Zika. Ms. Rousseff overhauled her cabinet in October, dismissing various ministers from her own Workers Party, including Mr. Chioro.

In doing so, she ceded more power to the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or P.M.D.B., which controls both houses of Congress. While Zika was raging, she named as her health minister Marcelo Castro, a psychiatrist from that party who stopped practicing medicine years ago to focus on his own business interests and politics.

“The health minister, a politician dedicated to the business of ranching, has a profile that’s the opposite of what’s required to lead the effort to deal with microcephaly,” Ligia Bahia, a specialist on Brazil’s public health system at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said in a column in the newspaper O Globo.

Researchers warn that they are only just starting to understand Zika’s impact on Brazil and the potential for it to spread t other countries in the Americas. The federal authorities do not yet have a precise estimate on the number of Zika cases because reporting such figures is not compulsory.

Some researchers emphasize the role that climate change may play in Zika’s spread. As temperatures increase in some areas, they argue, mosquitoes can multiply more quickly, potentially enhancing their collective ability to transmit diseases.

Additionally, increased precipitation in some areas creates places where mosquitoes can breed. And droughts, like those that recently afflicted parts of Brazil, can cause people to hoard water in containers, providing additional mosquito habitats.

“The mosquito is exquisitely adapted to human hosts, living in close proximity to humans and feeding repeatedly,” said Maria Diuk-Wasser, a scholar at Columbia University.

Neither the Zika outbreak in Latin America nor its possible link to microcephaly in infants has led to changes in travel advice from the C.D.C. or the Pan-American Health Organization, the regional office of the World Health Organization.

Because Zika is spread by the same mosquito species linked to dengue and chikungunya, both agencies are sticking with the advice they gave for those outbreaks: that all travelers, including pregnant women, do everything they can to avoid mosquito bites, like using insect repellent day and night, wearing long pants and long sleeves, and staying in places that are screened and air-conditioned.

For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions

The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.

Daniel S. Loeb, shown with his wife, Margaret, runs the $17 billion Third Point hedge fund. Mr. Loeb, who has owned a home in East Hampton, has contributed to Jeb Bush’s super PAC and given $1 million to the American Unity Super PAC, which supports gay rights. Credit Left: Patrick McMullan Company; Right: Doug Kuntz

WASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates.

Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.

With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.

All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups.

The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.”

Some of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.

Mr. Yass’s firm is litigating what the agency deemed to be tens of millions of dollars in underpaid taxes. Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Simons founded and which Mr. Mercer helps run, is currently under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade, according to a Senate investigation. Some of these same families have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative groups that have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy.

For the Richest, Lower Taxes

The average tax rate for the ultra-wealthy has fallen dramatically.

In the heat of the presidential race, the influence of wealthy donors is being tested. At stake is the Obama administration’s 2013 tax increase on high earners — the first substantial increase in two decades — and an I.R.S. initiative to ensure that, in effect, the higher rates stick by cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy.

While Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pledged to raise taxes on these voters, virtually every Republican has advanced policies that would vastly reduce their tax bills, sometimes to as little as 10 percent of their income.

At the same time, most Republican candidates favor eliminating the inheritance tax, a move that would allow the new rich, and the old, to bequeath their fortunes intact, solidifying the wealth gap far into the future. And several have proposed a substantial reduction — or even elimination — in the already deeply discounted tax rates on investment gains, a foundation of the most lucrative tax strategies.

“There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy, and specifically, tax policy,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “That’s why these egregious loopholes exist, and why it’s so hard to close them.”

The Family Office

Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about $336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than doubled.

Instead, much of their income came from convoluted partnerships and high-end investment funds. Other earnings accrued in opaque family trusts and foreign shell corporations, beyond the reach of the tax authorities.

The well-paid technicians who devise these arrangements toil away at white-shoe law firms and elite investment banks, as well as a variety of obscure boutiques. But at the fulcrum of the strategizing over how to minimize taxes are so-called family offices, the customized wealth management departments of Americans with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets.

Family offices have existed since the late 19th century, when the Rockefellers pioneered the institution, and gained popularity in the 1980s. But they have proliferated rapidly over the last decade, as the ranks of the super-rich, and the size of their fortunes, swelled to record proportions.

“We have so much wealth being created, significant wealth, that it creates a need for the family office structure now,” said Sree Arimilli, an industry recruiting consultant.

Family offices, many of which are dedicated to managing and protecting the wealth of a single family, oversee everything from investment strategy to philanthropy. But tax planning is a core function. While the specific techniques these advisers employ to minimize taxes can be mind-numbingly complex, they generally follow a few simple principles, like converting one type of income into another type that’s taxed at a lower rate.

Mr. Loeb, for example, has invested in a Bermuda-based reinsurer — an insurer to insurance companies — that turns around and invests the money in his hedge fund. That maneuver transforms his profits from short-term bets in the market, which the government taxes at roughly 40 percent, into long-term profits, known as capital gains, which are taxed at roughly half that rate. It has had the added advantage of letting Mr. Loeb defer taxes on this income indefinitely, allowing his wealth to compound and grow more quickly.

The Bermuda insurer Mr. Loeb helped set up went public in 2013 and is active in the insurance business, not merely a tax dodge. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bacon abandoned similar insurance-based strategies in recent years. “Our investment in Max Re was not a tax-driven scheme, but rather a sound investment response to investor interest in a more dynamically managed portfolio akin to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway,” said Mr. Bacon, who leads Moore Capital Management. “Hedge funds were a minority of the investment portfolio, and Moore Capital’s products a much smaller subset of this alternative portfolio.” Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen declined to comment.

Louis Moore Bacon, shown with his wife, Gabrielle, is the founder of a highly successful hedge fund and a leading contributor to Jeb Bush’s super PAC. Among his homes is one on Robins Island, off Long Island. Credit Left: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg News, via Getty Images

Organizing one’s business as a partnership can be lucrative in its own right. Some of the partnerships from which the wealthy derive their income are allowed to sell shares to the public, making it easy to cash out a chunk of the business while retaining control. But unlike publicly traded corporations, they pay no corporate income tax; the partners pay taxes as individuals. And the income taxes are often reduced by large deductions, such as for depreciation.

For large private partnerships, meanwhile, the I.R.S. often struggles “to determine whether a tax shelter exists, an abusive tax transaction is being used,” according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. The agency is not allowed to collect underpaid taxes directly from these partnerships, even those with several hundred partners. Instead, it must collect from each individual partner, requiring the agency to commit significant time and manpower.

The wealthy can also avail themselves of a range of esoteric and customized tax deductions that go far beyond writing off a home office or dinner with a client. One aggressive strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust, generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds. The person’s heirs can inherit, also tax-free, whatever money is left after the trust pays out a percentage each year to charity, often a considerable sum.

Many of these maneuvers are well established, and wealthy taxpayers say they are well within their rights to exploit them. Others exist in a legal gray area, its boundaries defined by the willingness of taxpayers to defend their strategies against the I.R.S. Almost all are outside the price range of the average taxpayer.

Among tax lawyers and accountants, “the best and brightest get a high from figuring out how to do tricky little deals,” said Karen L. Hawkins, who until recently headed the I.R.S. office that oversees tax practitioners. “Frankly, it is almost beyond the intellectual and resource capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to catch.”

The combination of cost and complexity has had a profound effect, tax experts said. Whatever tax rates Congress sets, the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit their numerous advantages.

From Mr. Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change (excluding payroll taxes). But the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans went from paying an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the top 1 percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24 percent on average to just over that level.

“We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,” said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.”

A Very Quiet Defense

Having helped foster an alternative tax system, wealthy Americans have been aggressive in defending it.

Trade groups representing the Bermuda-based insurance company Mr. Loeb helped set up, for example, have spent the last several months pleading with the I.R.S. that its proposed rules tightening the hedge fund insurance loophole are too onerous.

The major industry group representing private equity funds spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year lobbying on such issues as “carried interest,” the granddaddy of Wall Street tax loopholes, which makes it possible for fund managers to pay the capital gains rate rather than the higher standard tax rate on a substantial share of their income for running the fund.

The budget deal that Congress approved in October allows the I.R.S. to collect underpaid taxes from large partnerships at the firm level for the first time — which is far easier for the agency — thanks to a provision that lawmakers slipped into the deal at the last minute, before many lobbyists could mobilize. But the new rules are relatively weak — firms can still choose to have partners pay the taxes — and don’t take effect until 2018, giving the wealthy plenty of time to weaken them further.

Shortly after the provision passed, the Managed Funds Association, an industry group that represents prominent hedge funds like D. E. Shaw, Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Management and Third Point, began meeting with members of Congress to discuss a wish list of adjustments. The founders of these funds have all donated at least $500,000 to 2016 presidential candidates. During the Obama presidency, the association itself has risen to become one of the most powerful trade groups in Washington, spending over $4 million a year on lobbying.

Buying Power

Articles in this series examine America’s growing concentration of wealth and its consequences for government and politics.

The Elite Donors

The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential ElectionOct. 10, 2015
The Agenda

A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking IllinoisNov. 29, 2015
The Big Bet

Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle for Puerto Rico’s FutureDec. 19, 2015

And while the lobbying clout of the wealthy is most often deployed through industry trade associations and lawyers, some rich families have locked arms to advance their interests more directly.

The inheritance tax has been a primary target. In the early 1990s, a California family office executive named Patricia Soldano began lobbying on behalf of wealthy families to repeal the tax, which would not only save them money, but also make it easier to preserve their business empires from one generation to the next. The idea struck many hardened operatives as unrealistic at the time, given that the tax affected only the wealthiest Americans. But Ms. Soldano’s efforts — funded in part by the Mars and Koch families — laid the groundwork for a one-year elimination in 2010.

The tax has been restored, but currently applies only to couples leaving roughly $11 million or more to their heirs, up from those leaving more than $1.2 million when Ms. Soldano started her campaign. It affected fewer than 5,200 families last year.

“If anyone would have told me we’d be where we are today, I would never have guessed it,” Ms. Soldano said in an interview.

Some of the most profound victories are barely known outside the insular world of the wealthy and their financial managers.

In 2009, Congress set out to require that investment partnerships like hedge funds register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, partly so that regulators would have a better grasp on the risks they posed to the financial system.

The early legislative language would have required single-family offices to register as well, exposing the highly secretive institutions to scrutiny that their clients were eager to avoid. Some of the I.R.S.’s cases against the wealthy originate with tips from the S.E.C., which is often better positioned to spot tax evasion.

By the summer of 2009, several family office executives had formed a lobbying group called the Private Investor Coalition to push back against the proposal. The coalition won an exemption in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, then spent much of the next year persuading the S.E.C. to largely adopt its preferred definition of “family office.”

So expansive was the resulting loophole that Mr. Soros’s $24.5 billion hedge fund took advantage of it, converting to a family office after returning capital to its remaining outside investors. The hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, a former business partner of Mr. Soros, took the same step.

The Soros family, which generally supports Democrats, has committed at least $1 million to the 2016 presidential campaign; Mr. Druckenmiller, who favors Republicans, has put slightly more than $300,000 behind three different G.O.P. presidential candidates.

A slide presentation from the Private Investor Coalition’s 2013 annual meeting credited the success to multiple meetings with members of the Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, congressional staff and S.E.C. staff. “All with a low profile,” the document noted. “We got most of what we wanted AND a few extras we didn’t request.”

A Hobbled Monitor

After all the loopholes and all the lobbying, what remains of the government’s ability to collect taxes from the wealthy runs up against one final hurdle: the crisis facing the I.R.S.

President Obama has made fighting tax evasion by the rich a priority. In 2010, he signed legislation making it easier to identify Americans who squirreled away assets in Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands shelters.

His I.R.S. convened a Global High Wealth Industry Group, known colloquially as “the wealth squad,” to scrutinize the returns of Americans with incomes of at least $10 million a year.

But while these measures have helped the government retrieve billions, the agency’s efforts have flagged in the face of scandal, political pressure and budget cuts. Between 2010, the year before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. That has forced it to shed about 5,000 high-level enforcement positions out of about 23,000, according to the agency.

Audit rates for the $10 million-plus club spiked in the first few years of the Global High Wealth program, but have plummeted since then.

Steven A. Cohen, shown with his wife, Alexandra, is the founder of SAC Capital and owns a home in East Hampton. He is a prominent art collector and has focused his political contributions on a super PAC for Gov. Chris Christie. Credit Left: Carly Erickson/BFA; Right: Doug Kuntz for The New York Times

The political challenge for the agency became especially acute in 2013, after the agency acknowledged singling out conservative nonprofits in a review of political activity by tax-exempt groups. (Senior officials left the agency as a result of the controversy.)

Several former I.R.S. officials, including Marcus Owens, who once headed the agency’s Exempt Organizations division, said the controversy badly damaged the agency’s willingness to investigate other taxpayers, even outside the exempt division.

“I.R.S. enforcement is either absent or diminished” in certain areas, he said. Mr. Owens added that his former department — which provides some oversight of money used by charities and nonprofits — has been decimated.

Groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, which are financed partly by the foundations of wealthy families and large businesses, have called for impeaching the I.R.S. commissioner. They are bolstered by deep-pocketed advocacy groups like the Club for Growth, which has aided primary challenges against Republicans who have voted in favor of higher taxes.

In 2014, the Club for Growth Action fund raised more than $9 million and spent much of it helping candidates critical of the I.R.S. Roughly 60 percent of the money raised by the fund came from just 12 donors, including Mr. Mercer, who has given the group $2 million in the last five years. Mr. Mercer and his immediate family have also donated more than $11 million to several super PACs supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, an outspoken I.R.S. critic and a presidential candidate.

Another prominent donor is Mr. Yass, who helps run a trading firm called the Susquehanna International Group. He donated $100,000 to the Club for Growth Action fund in September. Mr. Yass serves on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute and, like Mr. Mercer, appears to subscribe to limited-government views that partly motivate his political spending.

But he may also have more than a passing interest in creating a political environment that undermines the I.R.S. Susquehanna is currently challenging a proposed I.R.S. determination that an affiliate of the firm effectively repatriated more than $375 million in income from subsidiaries located in Ireland and the Cayman Islands in 2007, creating a large tax liability. (The affiliate brought the money back to the United States in later years and paid dividend taxes on it; the I.R.S. asserts that it should have paid the ordinary income tax rate, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars more.)

In June, Mr. Yass donated more than $2 million to three super PACs aligned with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has called for taxing all income at a flat rate of 14.5 percent. That change in itself would save wealthy supporters like Mr. Yass millions of dollars.

Mr. Paul, also a presidential candididate, has suggested going even further, calling the I.R.S. a “rogue agency” and circulating a petition in 2013 calling for the tax equivalent of regime change. “Be it now therefore resolved,” the petition reads, “that we, the undersigned, demand the immediate abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service.”

But even if that campaign is a long shot, the richest taxpayers will continue to enjoy advantages over everyone else.

For the ultra-wealthy, “our tax code is like a leaky barrel,” said J. Todd Metcalf, the Democrats’ chief tax counsel on the Senate Finance Committee. ”Unless you plug every hole or get a new barrel, it’s going to leak out.”

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

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For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions

For the Richest, Lower Taxes

The Family Office

A Very Quiet Defense

Buying Power

The Elite Donors

The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential ElectionOct. 10, 2015

The Agenda

A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking IllinoisNov. 29, 2015

The Big Bet

Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle for Puerto Rico’s FutureDec. 19, 2015

A Hobbled Monitor