Federal authorities announced new charges against the operators of an illegal underground biolab found in a Central California community last fall.
Jia Bei Zhu, 62, a citizen of China, was previously indicted for distributing bogus and misbranded COVID-19 test kits in violation of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. He was also charged with making false statements to authorities about his identity and involvement with the biolabs.
Additional charges have now been filed against Zhaoyan Wang, 38, also a citizen of China, who officials described as a “romantic and business partner.”
According to court documents, from August 2020 through March 2023, Zhu and Wang conspired to defraud buyers of UMI and PBI’s COVID-19 test kits. They imported hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 test kits from Ai De Ltd., which was a company in China that they controlled, and falsely represented to the buyers that the test kits were made in the United States.
‘DISTURBING’ CALIFORNIA BIOLAB SHROUDED IN MYSTERY AS CHINA LINKS EMERGE
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Additional charges have been filed against Jia Bei Zhu, 62, the operator of the Reedley Bio-Lab and his partner according to the United States Department of Justice.(KMPH)
Authorities said they illegally imported the COVID-19 test kits, which they were not approved to import, by falsely declaring them as pregnancy test kits, which they were approved to import.
Joe Prado, assistant director for the Fresno County of Public Health, previously told FOX 26 that the lab was using mice “to see whether or not the COVID test kits were actually testing for COVID.”
Officials said Zhu and Wang also falsely represented to the buyers that UMI and PBI could make up to 100,000 COVID-19 test kits per week in the United States and that the test kits were made in connection with other labs that were certified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CLEANUP AT SUSPICIOUS CALIFORNIA BIOLAB WITH TIES TO CHINA CONTINUES
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Equipment with Mandarin writing in a biolab located in Fresno, California(City of Reedley)
Lastly, officials said they falsely represented to the buyers that the test kits were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Zhu and Wang made over $1.7 million through their fraud.
When buyers requested to inspect the facilities in Fresno and Reedley, Zhu and Wang allegedly denied them access and made up reasons for the denial, including that the facilities were undergoing construction and renovation.
Upon inspection, health inspectors found nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead, inside the lab, according to FOX 26. Inspectors also found thousands of vials, some of which contained human blood and other substances.
ILLEGAL CHINESE-LINKED BIOLAB FILLED WITH MICE, MEDICAL WASTE DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA
An EPA-contracted hazmat crew member goes inside the Reedley, Calif., warehouse to remove 800 containers of chemicals from the underground biolab.(Lee Ross)
The lab was shut down in early July.
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Zhu was not tied to or charged with the slew of biological agents that were found in a previously empty warehouse.
Zhu’s next court date is Sept. 11. Wang is currently not in custody, and it’s unknown if she is even still in the country.
If convicted, Zhu and Wang each face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the conspiracy and wire fraud charges and an additional three years in prison for the distribution of fake and misbranded medical device charges. Zhu also faces another five years in prison for the false statements charge.
Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
San Francisco has clearly become a tech town. But is there now a tech voting bloc in The City?
There are thousands of tech workers who live and work in San Francisco. Like other residents, many of them have become more politically active in recent years. Over that same period, tech moguls and political groups with tech-industry ties have flexed their muscles in local elections.
But the local elected officials, consultants and activists who spoke with The Examiner said they didn’t perceive tech workers as comprising a distinct bloc of voters. They don’t generally see tech employees as a constituency to which they specifically have to appeal. Instead, they see those in the industry as having a wide range of viewpoints reflecting the interests and concerns of city residents as a whole.
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The Examiner is monitoring these political power blocs before the November election.
Working in the tech industry can mean a lot of different things, said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents San Francisco. Some people are venture capitalists, some are startup founders. Some work at large tech companies, some at startups, and others work for themselves. And on many issues, you can find people in the tech industry on opposing sides, he said.
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“I don’t view tech as a monolith,” Wiener said. “And I think that would be disrespectful of folks who are in technology, because … they are a very, very diverse community who hold a lot of different perspectives.”
Twenty years ago, the very idea that San Francisco would have a tech voting bloc would be laughable. The center of the Bay Area’s tech industry was in the South Bay. To the extent that tech workers lived in The City, many of them commuted from there to Silicon Valley.
But a lot has changed in those 20 years. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world are now located in San Francisco. The City itself draws in a greater share of venture-capital investment than nearly all states — and far more than the valley. San Francisco has quickly become the center of the tech industry’s latest focus, artificial intelligence. And the number of tech workers in the area has swelled.
In early 2010, around 46,000 people total worked in the tech industry in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, according to data from the state Employment Development Department. Today that number stands at more than 150,000 — even after the industry shed more than 30,000 jobs in those counties over the last two years.
At least in San Francisco, many of those jobs are filled by people who live in The City rather than commute in, according to Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, citing U.S. Census data. Only a smaller portion of tech workers who live in San Francisco now commute to jobs outside of The City.
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Current Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, pictured during the opening day of Web Summit 2018 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal, has emerged as a powerful influence in San Francisco politics.
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Wikimedia Commons
In recent years, many of the City’s tech moguls have become much more active in local politics. In 2018, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff helped lead the effort — financially and politically — to pass Proposition C, which raised taxes on businesses to provide housing for homeless people. Venture capitalists David Sacks and Garry Tan were among the leading donors to the 2022 campaigns to recall three school-board members as well as District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and Tan is a board member and backer of local political group GrowSF.
Meanwhile, fellow venture capitalist Michael Moritz founded TogetherSF, another political group that has pushed The City to focus on government dysfunction, homelessness and public-safety issues. And Chris Larsen, the executive chairman of cryptocurrency company Ripple, has become a big donor to various local campaigns.
But it’s unclear that any of those moguls represent anyone other than themselves, local political experts said.
“I don’t know that any of them have individual constituencies,” said one longtime San Francisco political consultant who asked not to be named.
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To be sure, some of the groups those moguls have founded or backed have built loyal followings. But the people affiliated with the groups aren’t exclusively in the tech industry. And the policies they’ve advocated have resonated beyond just techies.
Sachin Agarwal co-founded GrowSF after working for Lyft and Twitter. Initially the group focused on San Francisco’s tech community, which traditionally hadn’t been very engaged in local politics.
Although a lot of tech people — including Tan — have donated to the group, Agarwal said he doesn’t see GrowSF today as representing the tech industry or workers. It doesn’t advocate for policies that would benefit the tech industry, he said.
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Sachin Agarwal, one of the co-founders of Grow SF, pictured on Friday, July 30, 2021.
Examiner file
Instead, it focuses on issues such as public safety and public education that have broad appeal, he said.
The group mailed its voter guide for the March election to every household in The City, and its website in that period drew 100,000 unique visitors, which would represent a sizable chunk of San Francisco’s electorate, Agarwal said.
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“We’re not about any single industry,” he said. “We are about normal people … people with families who have kids, who are homeowners who want to stay in The City long term.”
Meanwhile, not all tech workers are politically aligned with groups such as GrowSF or TogetherSF.
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Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she has numerous friends who work in the tech industry, but they are independent thinkers. While organizations such as GrowSF recruit from the tech community, they don’t represent the values of her friends or other regular tech workers, Ronen said.
“I just don’t think [those groups] represent the community at large,” she said.
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Supervisor Hillary Ronen speaking about the San Francisco Reproductive Freedom Act at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco on Tuesday, June 18, 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Indeed, within San Francisco’s tech community are a lot of diverse viewpoints — even about industry–related policies, local political experts say.
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Wiener said there are people in the community on both sides of the debate over his bill that would attempt to prevent artificial-intelligence models from causing catastrophic harm. While many tech people are intensely in favor of housing construction, some aren’t on board with that movement, he said. They have a range of views on policing and public safety and even on who they favor for mayor in November, he said.
“In my experience, quote-unquote tech people are as diverse in their political views as anyone else,” Wiener said.
Matters such as quality of life, public safety and homelessness are important to many of those in the industry, said the political consultant. But those issues are the top priorities for many San Francisco residents, tech or not, the consultant said.
No matter what industry they work in or where they live, residents generally want the same things from The City — a safe place with good schools, affordable housing, frequent and reliable transit service, and activities they can enjoy with friends and family, said Maggie Muir, a political consultant who works with Wiener and Mayor London Breed.
“Whether you work in tech or any of those other places, you all want the same thing,” Muir said.
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Many of those items are the focus of The City’s so-called moderates. But just because tech workers prioritize such things doesn’t mean that they also ascribe to the pro-business policies favored by such centrists, the consultant said.
In fact, folks in the industry can’t be counted on to support policies that might benefit their own companies, such as local tax reform, even when those policies are popular, the political consultant said.
Instead, it’s not unusual “that tech employees will go out of their way to vote against the interests of their employer,” the consultant said.
The November ballot will offer an example that’s arguably along those lines. Proposition L would put a new tax on Uber, Lyft and Waymo to help address the huge budget deficit faced in coming years by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
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A Waymo autonomous vehicle on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco on Monday, June 10, 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Uber is one of The City’s leading tech companies and one of its biggest private employers. The ride-hailing services it and Lyft offer took off due in no small part to The City’s tech workers. And Waymo is the leading developer of a new iteration of technology — autonomous vehicles and robotaxi services.
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But those companies have also drawn plenty of criticism over the years, charged with helping undermine the traditional cab industry, treating human drivers as second-class workers, and — in the case of Waymo — offering a service that’s under-tested and potentially unsafe.
So one might think that the measure might come out of a backlash against tech, but no: The three authors of the proposition all work or have worked in the industry. Many of the people they’ve signed to support it are in the industry.
Although Uber opposes the measure, Prop. L’s backers say don’t see it as particularly antitech. Instead, they see it as a measure that would not only benefit Muni but the ride-hailing services also, said Lian Chang, one of its authors. By keeping the transit system healthy, the measure would encourage people to continue to use the system instead of driving, thus keeping the streets less congested for Uber and Lyft drivers, she said.
“If Muni craters, we’re looking at a lot more traffic,” Chang said. “That is not good for anyone.”
For her part, Chang said, she sees support for the measure among tech workers as indicative of what actually might be a unifying theme among the community: While many in tech do support transit, what they actually have more broadly in common is what she called a “problem-solving attitude.”
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Technically minded people love to solve problems; it’s what they do for a living, Chang said. Those who work in the industry have a lot of experience collaborating to find solutions, she said. And especially as the community has become more politically active in recent years, they’ve been looking for ways to address The City’s problems.
“There’s a lot of political diversity in tech, so it doesn’t all go in one way,” Chang said. “But there is that problem-solving vibe.”
It’s Friday, Aug. 2, and I’m writing this article with CNBC open on my browser. The headline shouts, “Dow Loses 750 Points, Nasdaq Enters Correction After Weak Jobs Report.” The week was rough, with markets retracting from what felt like a month of steady new highs. A scant few weeks ago, investors were piling cash into highly valued tech stocks. Now they can’t seem to exit fast enough. Fear and greed pervade.
For frequent readers of this column, a correction should come as no surprise. They happen every 12 to 18 months as a “normal” part of financial markets reacting to economic and market growth. Corporate earnings, the most recent jobs report, and the wait-and-see Federal Reserve seem to be contributing factors, but focusing on these each month is akin to analyzing the bugs on your windshield: watch too closely, and you’re likely to crash. For long-term investors, “corrections” (I still dislike that word) are a mere hiccup on the path to a bigger future.
Steve Booren (handout)
But news broadcasters, of course, have a different perspective. The week’s headlines touted “Investor Recession Fears,” “Sharpest Weekly Losses.” In the next breath we read “Earnings Flurry Boosts Indexes,” and “Dow Closes Higher Buoyed by Bullish Inflation Report.” Bull or bear, it’s been a dramatic couple of weeks. As Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The news is inherently reactive. Anchors have the unenviable task of filling 24 hours of on-air time daily, so besides reporting on the event, they also feel the need to attempt to explain why it happened (or add some drama). Sometimes this is straightforward; other times — especially around financial markets — it’s downright impossible.
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Daily market movements are random. Period. For fun, start each day by guessing whether your favorite index is going to finish the day up or down. Write down your guess. Do it for a month, and see how many days you get it right. The reality is that daily market movements are affected by so many variables that choosing up, down, or flat follows the same probability as a coin flip. What’s comical is financial media’s need to explain why the coin landed heads up.
Remember: volatility drives the narrative; the narrative does not drive volatility. When markets go down, “professionals” attempt to explain why. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but we can never measure their accuracy. So why do we listen to them?
As humans, we want answers. Cause and effect. The market went down 800 points; why? Markets are hugely amorphous, so we turn to “professionals” to explain the details. They give us a “reason,” and we wonder how we could be so silly to have missed the signs.
Taking a step back shows us how crazy it is to believe one person could flawlessly understand why markets moved on any given day. This is akin to someone explaining that the coin landed heads up because the wind blew. It’s insanity, yet we expect it, accept it, and worse yet, get on board with it. Human behavior craves certainty and stability, yet these are mere mental mirages crafted by those seeking to keep our attention.
This leads to an even bigger problem: predictions. Given an audience, reporters may feel empowered to start guessing the outcome of the coin flip before it even starts. Viewers might like to understand why something happened, but if they could know the outcome ahead of time? Well, that’s the promised land. And the media loves to give the viewer what they want, even if it’s completely wrong.
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This is nothing new. In the mid-1980s, as a fresh-faced adviser working for a large firm, I once picked up a renowned economist from Stapleton Airport. My job was to drive him to Breckenridge for a research conference where he’d present his future predictions. At the time, interest rates were climbing, inflation was high, and he believed emphatically that mortgage rates were going to keep rising and never come back down.
That guess was wrong. Very wrong. Later in his career, he said Y2K was going to cause a worldwide recession, comparing it to the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Wrong again. Today he (naturally) owns a huge market research firm. As our compliance department says, “Past performance is not indicative of future success.”
Though we may wish for accurate forecasting, the truth is we have no facts about the future. We don’t know what will happen or how markets will react. Humans tend to make decisions with emotion instead of common sense, and we ignore mistakes and the wisdom they bring. That’s why human nature is a poor investor.
Choosing to do the right thing — the hard thing — takes effort and discipline. It also takes a perspective that feels unnatural but makes sense when taken at face value. Invest for the long term. Remove the guesswork, and ignore those who try to convince you they have an edge. Fall back on humility as a key character trait, recognizing that your knowledge and assumptions have limits. Above all, ask why. Not why something happened; in markets that answer isn’t knowable. Instead ask why someone is trying to explain the unexplainable. You’ll find far more insight.
Steve Booren is the founder of Prosperion Financial Advisors in Greenwood Village. He is the author of “Blind Spots: The Mental Mistakes Investors Make” and “Intelligent Investing: Your Guide to a Growing Retirement Income.” He was named by Forbes as a 2021 Best-in-State Wealth Advisor, and a Barron’s 2021 Top Advisor by State. This column is not intended to provide specific investment advice or recommendations.
INDIANAPOLIS — An intriguing matchup on Sunday between two teams in different standing in the WNBA Playoff race, as Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever host the Seattle Storm.
Watch the WNBA on FuboTV (7-day free trial)
Both teams are coming off playing their first games since the Olympic Break on Friday.
The Fever hosted the Phoenix Mercury, as Caitlin Clark showed the time off did not cause any rust. Her 29 points led Indiana to pick up a 98-89 win, giving the Fever three wins in their last four games. Clark leads the team by averaging 17.1 points per game, with Kelsey Mitchell right behind her with 16.9 points a game.
The Fever come into Sunday seventh in the WNBA, three games up on the ninth-place Atlanta Dream.
The Storm stumbled in their first game following the Olympics. Against the Dream, Skylar Diggins-Smith’s 29 points was not enough, as Seattle fell, 83-81. The Storm were on a roll heading into the break, winning three straight games, and four of their previous five. They sit fifth in the WNBA, five games back of the first-place New York Liberty.
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This is the fourth and final meeting between the two teams this season. The Storm have won each of the three matchups, including a 103-88 victory the first time they visited Indianapolis in late May.