Month: December 2016

A New York art dealer has been arrested and charged with possessing and selling stolen artifacts from countries throughout Asia.

Nancy Wiener is accused of using her gallery in New York City, called Nancy Wiener Gallery, to “buy, smuggle, launder and sell millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities stolen from Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, India, Pakistan, and Thailand,” according to a complaint filed in Manhattan Criminal Court.

According to the gallery’s website, it has sold art to private collectors and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum, Art Institute of Chicago and National Gallery of Australia.

Jason Felch, an investigative reporter who writes about the trafficking of stolen art, described Wiener’s business as “one of the country’s most prestigious Asian art galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,” on his blog Chasing Aphrodite.

The 12-page complaint, which is signed by Special Agent Brenton Easter of the Department of Homeland Security, reads less like a court filing than an art heist thriller.

It tells of an elaborate scheme, carried out with co-conspirators around the world, to buy stolen artifacts and then cover up their origin in order to make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling them.

Take, for example, the story of an Indian sandstone sculpture from around the 2nd century, referred to as “Seated Buddha #1.”

In 1999, Wiener allegedly sold the sculpture to Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum. When, years later, the museum asked for documents about the sculpture’s origin, Wiener gave them three answers: first, she said it had belonged to “an unnamed European collector for at least 35 to 40 years,” then she said her own father had acquired it in India and finally gave the name of a man she said bought it when “he was posted in Vietnam between 1964 and 1966.”

The name she gave was Ian Donaldson, a fact that became relevant later to investigators.

None of the three claims about the statue’s origin appeared to be true. Investigators searching a storage locker rented by another art dealer found an “unlabeled computer disc.” On it were three pictures of Seated Buddha #1. In one of them, the statue appeared “still wet as it lay on a dirty floor.”

The date stamp on the picture appears to be November 8, 1992.

Meanwhile, Wiener acquired a second Buddha statue. She sold that one, referred to “Seated Buddha #2,” to the National Gallery of Australia in 2007 for more than $1 million, telling them that it had originally been purchased in Hong Kong by a man who “had been posted there between 1964 and 1966.”

The man’s name was also Ian Donaldson.

India’s patrimony laws, which spells out the right of the country to retain its artifacts, took effect in 1972, according to the complaint.

The complaint also describes methods Wiener appeared to have used to create the false air of legitimacy around possibly-stolen artifacts she and her family owned.

For example, the state alleges Wiener attempted to consign a collection of 380 artifacts owned by her mother, Doris Wiener, to the auction house Sotheby’s, but didn’t have adequate documentation about their origin. So, she consigned the collection to Christie’s New York instead.

According to the complaint, Doris Wiener had previously consigned some the artifacts and re-bought them at auction— so-called straw purchased meant to launder their purchase history by adding apparent owners.

Christie’s did not ask for extensive documentation about where the Wiener’s acquired the art, and sold the entire lot in 2012 for $12.7 million.

The New York Times reported some of the artifacts Wiener is accused of possessing “were said to have been smuggled into the United States by Subhash Kapoor, a well-known Manhattan art dealer who is now on trial in India.”

The paper also quote Wiener’s lawyer, Georges Lederman, as saying, “We are examining the charges and will respond at the appropriate time.”

When Ebola struck West Africa a few years ago, the world was defenseless. There was no cure. No vaccine. And the result was catastrophic: More than 11,000 people died. Nearly 30,000 were infected.

Now it looks like such a large outbreak is unlikely to ever happen again. Ever.

The world now has a potent weapon against Ebola: A vaccine that brings outbreaks to a screeching halt, scientists report Thursday in The Lancet.

“We were able to estimate the efficacy of the vaccine as being 100 percent in a trial with more than 5,000 people,” says Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, who helped test the vaccine. “It’s very unusual to have a vaccine that protects people perfectly.”

Now, no vaccine — or drug for that matter — is perfect. And efficacy of the vaccine is clearly high but not “100 percent.” That value reflects the fact that they just haven’t tested the vaccine on enough people yet. So it will likely decrease as the vaccine is used over time. In then end, the efficacy will likely sit somewhere between about 70 percent and 100 percent, Longini says.

By comparison, the flu vaccine last year was about 50 percent effective.

And the Ebola vaccine works lightning fast, within four or five days, he says. So it could even be given after a person is exposed to Ebola but hasn’t yet developed the disease.

Longini and his colleagues tested the vaccine on about 4,000 people in Guinea back in 2015, when Ebola was still spreading there. These people were at high risk of getting Ebola because they had had contact with someone who was infected.

When they got the vaccine right away, they were completely protected. No one got sick.

The vaccine — called rVSV-ZEBOV — hasn’t been approved yet by either the World Health Organization or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. That’s predicted to happen sometime in 2018.

And there are still a few open questions about the vaccine, says Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the National Institutes of Health.

“For example, we don’t know how durable the vaccine is,” he says. “If you give health care workers the vaccine, for example, how long would they be protected? That’s very important to learn.”

What is clear is that the vaccine offers short-term protection during outbreaks. And that’s exactly what’s needed to stop the virus from spreading and keep small outbreaks from getting out of control.

For this reason, GAVI — the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization — has already spent $5 million to stockpile the vaccine.

“So we have made 300,000 doses available, as of earlier this year, if there was to be sort of any resurgence or any kind of emergency,” says Swati Gupta at Merck, which is manufacturing the shot.

Vaccines typically take years, even a decade to test. But the field trials for this one took less than two years.

“It’s been a pretty tremendous experience,” she says. “There’s been a lot of international partners that have come together in a real unprecedented effort.”

The magnitude of the outbreak in West Africa, she says, made companies, governments and academics push aside their own research agendas to come together and finish a vaccine.

In the midst of multiple fundraising attempts that raised questions about whether the Trump family is selling the promise of personal access to the highest bidder, Eric Trump says he will stop directly raising money for his personal charity.

“As unfortunate as it is, I understand the quagmire,” Trump told the New York Times.

“It’s an extremely sad day when doing the right thing isn’t the right thing,” Trump told the Associated Press in a separate interview.

The Eric Trump Foundation raises money for childhood cancer research and treatment. According to its website, it has “donated and pledged nearly $30 million” to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Trump’s decision follows two separate fundraising attempts that were scuttled after they became public.

Trump’s foundation recently offered donors a chance to have coffee with his sister Ivanka Trump, who is expected to play a formal or informal role in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. The foundation eventually canceled that auction.

But days later, a separate group, the Opening Day Foundation, offered donors a chance to go hunting or fishing with Eric and Donald Trump Jr. The cost: contributions of $500,000 or $1 million. The Trump transition team distanced itself from these offers. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Trump’s sons “are not involved in any capacity,” despite the fact they are both listed as directors in the nonprofit group’s filings.

The fundraising attempts raised ethical questions because they appeared to offer direct access to members of the president-elect’s inner circle in exchange for donations.

Trump regularly criticized the Clinton Foundation for offering that sort of quid pro quo access to people seeking to influence Hillary Clinton while she ran the State Department. “It’s impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” Trump said in August. “It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and to them for money.”

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway seemed to share Eric Trump’s frustration with the wave of ethical criticism the fundraising has generated. “The idea that these folks are trying to help people in need and those people are going to suffer now because folks are pointing out what they think to be improprieties, I didn’t say I necessarily agree,” Conway told CNN Thursday morning. “I just think that they will always do the right thing. I know them well.”

While Eric Trump’s decision may remove one ethical “quagmire,” as he put it, another remains: the question of who will run the Trump Organization and how Donald Trump will, or won’t, separate himself from his personal businesses while serving as president.

Trump promised to hold a news conference on Dec. 15 to detail his promise to turn over control of his businesses to his children. But the news conference has been delayed, and the Trump transition has not provided any details about what sort of arrangement the president-elect will seek to address conflict-of-interest questions.

The U.S. Office of Government Ethics is recommending that Trump completely divest himself from his companies.

“Transferring operational control of a company to one’s children would not constitute the establishment of a qualified blind trust, nor would it eliminate conflicts of interest,” the office’s director wrote in a letter to the president-elect.