Three children were injured – two critically – when an e-bike battery in their Manhattan apartment caught fire, trapping them in the flames, the FDNY said Sunday.
An adult also was critically injured in the blaze, which tore through the fifth-floor home at 165 Sherman Ave. in Inwood in Upper Manhattan around 1:30 a.m., officials said.
“The family in the apartment was sleeping,” FDNY Chief of Operations John Esposito said at an afternoon news conference. “The battery was charging overnight, and it was charging in the path of egress to get out of the apartment. So when the battery overheated and started the fire, it blocked the egress out of the apartment trapping the family.”
Two people escaped the blaze and were able to run past the battery, which was being charged, and out into a hallway. The bike was not attached to the battery at the time.
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Flames tore through a fifth-floor apartment at 165 Sherman Ave. in Inwood.Christopher Sadowski
Three children and one adult were injured.Christopher Sadowski
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A lithium ion battery is believed to have caused the fire.Christopher Sadowski
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Esposito said firefighters, who responded to the scene in under 3 minutes, had to break down the apartment door because it had locked behind two residents who escaped. The apartment also had no smoke detectors, he said.
The victims’ names, ages and genders were not released.
“We try to remind all New Yorkers about the dangers of these lithium ion batteries,” Esposito said. “We should not be charging them overnight. We should not be charging them in the path of egress from the apartment. A suggestion would be to charge them while you’re awake in a room that nobody is in with the door closed.”
The rate at which a battery fire spreads also poses a challenge.
“It doesn’t smolder,” Esposito said. “It goes from zero to 100 very, very quickly, in seconds.”
Migrants routinely tear up their American immigration documents while traveling from Plattsburgh to the Canadian border, with The Post seeing scraps of paper with references to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the floor of a shuttle van.
The van — which has the word “Frontera,” Spanish for “border,” painted on its sides — is one of three operated by “Chad’s Shuttle Services.”
Driver Tyler Tambini, whose girlfriend’s brother owns the company, said passengers arrive like clockwork on the five buses from New York City that stop in Plattsburgh each day.
“There’s gotta be 100 people a day,” said Tambini, 23. “I do this all day. They get dropped off and I take them the rest of the way.”
Tambini said his employer charged single migrants $40 to $50 each and families $90. Taxi drivers, who charge single migrants $70 each, compete for business by rushing to the buses to solicit passengers and help them with their luggage.
The Post accompanied several groups of migrants who rode Tambini’s van from the Mountain Mart gas station to a cul-de-sac at the end of rural Roxham Road, just steps from the Canadian border.
After trudging north along a snow-covered path and through a break in a concrete barrier, the migrants were stopped by Mounties stationed in an elaborate complex of metal sheds.
“You have entered into Canada. You are under arrest,” a Mountie said. “Take everything from your pockets and put it in your bags — only ‘dinero’ [Spanish for ‘money’] in your pockets.”
Mounties then escorted the migrants up an enclosed ramp and into a shed for processing.
Peruvian native Susy Sanchez Solzarno, 33, crossed from Roxham Road into Canada with her husband and two daughters early Friday after one of the girls, 15, saw a video of other migrants doing it on TikTok.
Solzarno said the family entered the US from Mexico in December and later spent about a month in a Marriott hotel in Queens that’s being used as an emergency shelter.
Bus passengers arrive like clockwork on the five buses from New York City that stop in Plattsburgh each day.Dennis A. ClarkSome migrants were stopped by Mounties stationed in a complex of metal sheds.Dennis A. Clark
“I wanted to live in New York because I thought it would be a better future for my daughters,” she said. “But as the days went by, I saw insecurity, many homeless people, many people who shout and are disrespectful, and many people on drugs.”
Solzarno said she sold candy in the subway system for almost two weeks to pay for their trip.
“I am going to Canada for the safety and future of my girls,” she said. “I only ask God that everything goes well and that Canada is not like the United States.”
Venezuelan native Manuel Rodon, 26, who arrived in Plattsburgh around 4 a.m. Saturday, said he decided to leave the city after getting “kicked out” of the Row NYC hotel near Times Square and relocated to a homeless shelter in Brooklyn.
Rodon described the shelter as “OK” except for the American residents.
“A lot of the Americans used drugs there,” he said. “I feel like Canada will be safer. It is a much quieter country than America.”
Rodon, who crossed the border about an hour after getting to Plattsburgh, said he knew eight other Venezuelans who’d made the same trip.
“They all got free tickets, too. It was the same process,” he said. “It took them three days through customs. They are all safe. They live in Montreal.”
Rodon, a painter and construction worker, said that “all the information is on social media” and that he hoped to quickly get a work permit in Canada.
“It is very difficult to get papers in America,” he said. “I need to work, so I am going to Canada.”
Under US rules, migrants can’t apply for work permits until 30 days after formally seeking asylum and aren’t eligible for permits for another 150 days after that.
Adams has called for the White House to speed up that process and to grant the city $1 billion in emergency aid to help provide migrants with housing and other services, which the mayor has said could cost double that amount.
“The military gave me and my family free bus tickets,” one migrant said.Dennis A. Clark
Last month, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to commit to fully granting Adams’ request, saying only that unspecified new funding would be “available to border cities and those cities receiving an influx of migrants.”
But Hizzoner pressed President Biden for a meeting on the subject after the president held a news conference in Manhattan last week, a source said at the time.
As of Wednesday, an estimated 43,900-plus migrants had flooded into the city since the spring, with more than 28,400 living in 83 hotels and five “Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers” established in larger hotels and the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
Asked for comment on the bus tickets, Adams’ press secretary, Fabien Levy, said: “As we have said since the beginning of this crisis, our goal is help connect asylum seekers who want to move to a different location with friends, family, and/or community and, if needed, re-ticket to help get people to their final destination, if not New York City.”
City Hall did not respond to questions about the cost of the “re-ticketing.”
A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said neither the state nor the National Guard was paying for bus tickets, and referred The Post to the city for additional information.
“At the request of the city, National Guard members have been deployed to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where they greet people upon arrival, answer questions and direct them to services, including transportation options that they seek,” said spokesperson Hazel Crampton-Hays.
Private companies have committed to invest $4.2 billion in northern Central America as part of an effort by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris to reduce migration, the White House said on Monday.
The latest figures, up from $3.2 billion announced in June 2022, stem from pledges by 47 companies and organizations, including the retailer Target and the Columbia Sportswear Company. In the new announcements on Monday, Target committed to increase its spending in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras by $300 million this year while Columbia said it would purchase $200 million in products in the region, creating more than 6,900 jobs over five years.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who will deliver the annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, tapped Harris in March 2021 to lead efforts to reduce migration at the U.S.-Mexico border as crossings began to spike at the beginning of his administration. Harris focused her efforts on addressing the factors that led migrants to leave the three countries, known as the northern triangle, including a lack of economic opportunity.
Corruption and governance concerns in the three nations have limited the effectiveness of the Harris push, leading to the cancellation or suspension of projects likely worth millions of dollars.
Harris, who will meet with U.S. government officials and corporate leaders at her office in Washington on Monday, plans to launch a new phase of the effort called Central America Forward, which will include more focus on broader economic development and labor rights, as well as a push to tackle corruption, an administration official said on a call with reporters.
Arrivals from northern Central America have steadily declined since mid-2021. During that time, hundreds of thousands of migrants from the region have been rapidly expelled back to Mexico without the chance to seek U.S. asylum under a COVID order known as Title 42.
POP!Go hopes for a US labour-market slowdown allowing a Fed pivot. Instead, Friday’s payrolls data made a stronger case for the risks of a Fed shift towards halting at 6%, not 5%. They were white hot at +517K, with large upwards revisions to back data, an increase in hours worked, and in the participation rate, and yet with a fall in unemployment rate to the lowest since the 1960s. If you think payrolls data are hot air, weekly initial jobless claims and JOLTS data say the same; and if you think labour markets lag, the US services ISM at 55.2, not 50.5 as expected, was hot too. POP! If the job and GDP data are real, then productivity is slumping, which is again inflationary; and if you thought supply chain issues were behind us, logistics experts warn ‘Shortages 2023: 4 goods facing tight supplies this year - before anything ‘exogenous’ happens. POP! Matt Stoller also tweets: “In December of 2021, I did a ballpark estimate that corporate profits drove 60% of inflation. Most elites dismissed that idea. This month the Kansas City Fed wrote "markups could account for more than half of 2021 inflation."” We need more than rate hikes if so.
POP!As the US shoots down a Chinese spy balloon floating over it - to monitor sensitive sites, says the DoD. The US is furious. Yet China’s Foreign Ministry is outraged too and “strongly disapproves of and protests against the US attack on a civilian unmanned airship by force… The US use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice. China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the company concerned, and reserves the right to make further responses if necessary.” Secretary of State Blinken’s visit to Beijing to meet Xi is now postponed, and with the March National People’s Congress, then a trip to Taiwan by House Speaker McCarthy, it may not happen. POP! Is also the sound of those blaming US ‘Sputnik’ Cold Warmongering failing to differentiate between spy-planes in international airspace and balloon entry into national airspace; and the White House knowing about the balloon andcovering it up so Blinken could go to Beijing - until a journalist posted a picture of it over Montana.
POP!Goes the view China isn’t decoupling. ‘Xi Jinping says China must quicken pace of tech self-reliance to prevent being ‘strangled by foreign countries’ is one headline; and ’Sinification interviews Beijing Professor Lu Feng, who backs: further weaponizing Chinese demand; developing an “independent industrial base” for semiconductors; pursuing “fully independent manufacturing” by de-Americanising its chip supply chain and replacing almost all foreign made equipment and materials with domestic ones; focusing less on advanced chips and more on being the world #1 in mature chips – and using that as a weapon; imposing sanctions on any company that complies with US export controls, e.g., ASML; and, most of all, never backing down.
POP! Goes the view the US is incapable of real Cold Warmongering. Even the China-friendly Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan op-eds in the Journal (again!) in ‘Challenging the US Is a Historic Mistake’ that China risks repeating the errors of Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941. He says the US could again reindustrialise, rearm, and run 9% of GDP fiscal deficits, in concord with the UK, Japan, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. POP! Kagan’s critics burst his balloon by noting Germany and Japan knew they were going to be eclipsed by the US, and acted out of desperation to try to make the costs of US victory so high it would not want to pay it; and the US had to transform its political economy to do so, while today it’s China’s which pumps out navy vessels.
POP!Goes the neoliberal political-economy model of assets over production even before we think like Kagan. Martin Wolf op-eds in the Financial Times that ‘The case for a land value tax is overwhelming’, arguing a political-economy that heeds George, not mistranslations of Smith and Ricardo that lump land --and the asset-based economic rent-seeking we call financial capitalism-- in with physical value-added capital is the only way to extricate ourselves from our mess. He admits powerful lobby groups stop that happening: his solution is to get Georgist for land valuations above today’s, sealing in gains, but killing off the ‘buy land, get rich’ model. POP! In Australia if so, which has ‘emere terram et bene cito’ as their Latin motto. Indeed, the local press applauds hordes of Sydneysiders flocking to an auction Saturday to ensure the median price of a home there gets back above A$1m as soon as possible. The market was already coming round to the view that the RBA can’t just stop hiking at 3.35% this week.
POP!Goes an economic balloon we shoot down in a new report - ‘Balance of Payments -and Power- Crises’. It argues DSGE economic models don’t capture the real economy specifically in that they don’t understand realpolitik. Against headlines of the UK getting ready to roll back energy-price caps in April, seeing household bills soar 40%, and the EU agreeing on a $100 price cap for Russian diesel, we adapt a DSGE model for the UK and Eurozone to assume a geopolitical world of: no guarantee of input supply; or exported output; or quick labour rebalancing; or past monetary and fiscal policy laxity. In that case, the two economies are a shocking 7.2% and 7.4% smaller by 2027 than in our base case, with higher inflation, lower productivity, and Sterling well below parity and the Euro around 0.90 to the Dollar.
Listen carefully and hear the sound of all those balloons bursting.
Given theastonishing expectations for GLP-1 agonistsin diabetes and obesity it makes sense that one of the most successful biotech IPOs for some time is that of Structure Therapeutics, a developer of just these kinds of agents. The company raised $161m through an upsized Nasdaq listing on Friday, its shares closing up 73% after being priced at the top of the range. This demand signals support for developers working in trendy therapy areas; however, those deemed higher risk are still likely to struggle. Mineralys, which plans an offering of a similar size, will provide the next test of whether the IPO market is really recovering. A phase 2 study of MLS-101, Mineralys’s hypertension therapy, was toplined a success in November. Elsewhere, three infection-focused groups – Alopexx, 60 Degrees and Squarex – are queuing up. But the biggest in the offing is Kenvue, the spin-out of Johnson & Johnson’s consumer care business. This could be worth $5bn, though with J&J expected to keep at least 80% of the voting power, and the business being highly cash-generative, the deal is not really a test of the market’s risk appetite.
Scheduled biotech IPOs
Company
Focus
Most advanced phase
Expected trading date
Expected deal size ($m)
Intensity Therapeutics
Cancer
Phase 1
Feb 6
8
Mineralys Therapeutics
Heart disease
Phase 2
Feb 10
150
Alopexx
Infectious disease
Phase 2
Feb 15
15
Source: IPOscoop & Renaissance Capital.
The biotech IPO queue
Company
Focus
Most advanced phase
Filing date
Expected deal size ($m)
60 Degrees Pharmaceuticals
Infectious disease
Marketed
Jan 31
Not specified
Squarex Pharmaceutical
Infectious disease
Phase 2
Jan 17
17.8
Chromocell Therapeutics
Pain
Phase 1
Jan 11
11.5
Kenvue
Consumer health
Marketed
Jan 4
100*
Note: only companies that filed in 2023. *J&J's consumer health spinout; figure is a placeholder. Source: IPOscoop & Renaissance Capital.
Hedge funds betting against stocks globally abandoned those trades last week at the fastest pace since 2015, surpassing the speed of their exodus from the meme stock frenzy two years ago, according to a Goldman Sachs research note.
The latest short squeeze, implying that stock prices rose so much that bearish bets become too expensive to hold, saw hedge funds caught out by a sharp rally in equities on Feb. 2 after the U.S. Federal Reserve slowed the pace of interest rate hikes and markets anticipated that rates would peak soon.
According to the Goldman note, seen by Reuters, the speed at which hedge funds exited bearish positions surpassed that seen in January 2021 when retail traders worked in concert to push shortsellers out of stocks such as videogame retailer Gamestop and movie theatre operator AMC Entertainment Holdings.
The 2021 buying frenzy started on social media site Reddit, and at-home traders used retail trading platforms such as Robinhood to lift the price of heavily shorted stocks such as Gamestop. This forced many shortsellers out of positions and in some cases, funds restructured and returned money to their investors.
Last week's short-squeeze followed a post-Fed rally. The tech-heavy Nasdaq surged 3.25% on Thursday - its biggest one-day jump in over two months - led by over 20% surges in orthodontic company Align Technology and Facebook parent company Meta Platforms.
That came just a day before a sharp selloff on Friday when stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs data sparked a selloff in world stocks.
World stocks were last down 0.7% with Friday's strong U.S. jobs report renewing concerns that the Fed may have to remain aggressive in its monetary tightening to tame inflation.
The largest short positions held by hedge funds were in industrials and information technology companies, the Goldman note said. It added that hedge funds also exited many long positions in Asian developing markets and Chinese equities.
Meanwhile, after stuttering recoveries during a volatile two years, AMC and GME are now trading above their price levels of Jan. 15, 2021 just before the meme stock frenzy began.
Resurgent risk appetite among some investors has also fuelled rallies in the shares of so-called meme stocks since the start of this year, though many analysts are sceptical the recent moves will last.
Omeros Corporation (Nasdaq: OMER) today announced that Rayner Surgical, Inc. ("Rayner") has paid the $200 million milestone payment due to Omeros under the Asset Purchase Agreement, dated December 1, 2021 (the "Agreement"), pursuant to which Omeros sold its ophthalmology product OMIDRIA®to Rayner in December of 2021.
The Milestone Event, as defined in the Agreement, occurred in late December 2022, entitling Omeros to receive the milestone payment of $200 million within 30 days thereafter. Full payment owed by Rayner – the milestone payment and accrued interest – was received on February 3, 2023.
Rayner will continue to pay Omeros royalties on both U.S. and ex-U.S. net sales of OMIDRIA. Per the terms of the Agreement, the royalty rate applicable to U.S. net sales of OMIDRIA decreased from 50 percent to 30 percent of U.S. net sales following achievement of the Milestone Event. Rayner is also obligated to pay a royalty of 15 percent on ex-U.S. sales of OMIDRIA on a country-by-country basis.
U.S. net sales of OMIDRIA in 2022 totaled $131 million. OMIDRIA sales are forecast to continue growing, in part as a result of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) of 2023, which expressly provides for separate payment of non-opioid pain management drugs, like OMIDRIA, in the outpatient surgery setting until January 1, 2028.
